Tag #155732 - Interview #103724 (Faina Saushkina Biography)

I, Feiga Glezer, was born on 20 July 1917. When I was two or three months old we moved to the town of Slavuta that belonged to Kamenets-Podolsk region [Khmelnitsk region now] 500 km to the west from Kiev. I don’t know why my parents moved. There were numerous gangs in the south of Ukraine [1] and my parents were probably looking for a quieter place to live. In 1919 my sister Sarah was born. Our family didn't stay there long. It happened so that my parents that wished to escape from the war in Poland found themselves in the very epicenter of the Civil War [2] in Russia. Starvation, hardships, pogroms and fear forced them back to Poland that wasn’t a part of Russia after 1917. I have dim memories of our trip to Warsaw. I only know that we cross the border illegally having no permits or visas. I remember that the 4 of us got to a town by train and from there we walked to avoid passport control at the border. We went in groups: my mother that was pregnant, Sarah and I and my father carrying a suitcase and a bag went separately. Our mother and we had no problems on the way, but our father was stopped by the frontier guard. Fortunately he wasn’t arrested – they just didn’t let him cross the border. He had to go back to Slavuta. We didn’t have any information in a while until we began to receive letters from him in few months.