I am Adelya Isaakovna Plotnikova, maiden name Zhvanetskaya, born June 12, 1935 in Odessa, Ukraine. My father, Isaac Zhvanetsky, was a locksmith.

My mother, Ida Zhvanetskaya (maiden name Maidenberg) was a sort of petty bourgeois who’d owned a dye shop and a building with 30 apartments in Moldavanka (an area of Odessa where poor and middle class people lived) prior to Soviet rule. Once the Soviets took over, her shop and the apartment building were nationalized, and she lived in a one-room, 30-square meter apartment (340-square feet). This was the same home we lived in just before the war began in 1941.

At the end of 1917 my father’s parents and his younger brother, Yakov, secretly crossed the border and immigrated to America, leaving my father behind with his grandmother. In 1918, after his grandmother died, my father made several attempts to cross the border, but was returned. He ran off to the front and became a “regimental son,” though he fell ill with typhus and was sent to the rear, where he was sent to an orphanage. In 1922, when he turned eighteen, my father was selected to go to technical school to specialize in metal repair and manufacturing for keys and locks.

There were five people in my family prior to the war: my father, mother, grandmother, my older sister (born in 1930), and me. On my father’s side, I had an uncle with whom my father did not have a relationship, while on my mother’s side I had my Aunt AsyaGorina (my mother’s sister), her husband Mikhail Gorin, their son (my cousin) Gedeon Gorin, and my mother’s brother, Mikhail Aronovich Maidenberg. On June 12, 1941, I turned six years old. The war began 10 days later.

We first heard reports of the war from the Soviet Information Bureau. In the first days of the war my father, brother, and my aunt’s husband were all mobilized and sent to the front. My father went to defend Sevastopol. My mother, like other able-bodiedresidents in Odessa, was sent to dig anti-tank trenches at the outskirts of the city. She was rarely home, so my sister and I stayed withour grandmother. During the bombings (which occurred several times a day), we hid in an entranceway with a concrete ceiling or in the catacombs beneath our house. We experienced indescribable fear from the wail of sirens and the sounds of approaching enemy aircraft.

In early August 1941, my father’s regiment moved from Sevastopol to defend Odessa, where he was wounded on August 19. He was sent to an evacuation hospital, since they knew Odessa had surrendered to the enemy. When the Germans were close to Odessa – 40 kilometers away in the village of Dalnik – the order came to evacuate the hospital by ship to Novorossiysk. My mother, who worked in a hospital, hurriedly gathered the children and the most necessary items. The family – my wounded father, Aunt Asya, and her son Gedeon – and others from the hospital sailed on the ship under the cover of night in the early days of September 1941.

At dawn we were attacked by German fighter aircraft. Several miles ahead of us, the steamship Lenin was sunk right before our eyes, though we were unable to help those who were drowning.[1] Thanks to the guns mounted on our ship, we avoided the Lenin’s fate, but during one bombing I received shrapnel wounds to my left foot.

Once we arrived in Novorossiysk, my father was sent to Voroshilovsk, where a commission found him unfit for military action and certified him as being disabled. He was sent for treatment to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he remained until the end of 1943.

We reached Tashkent via Stavropol on freight trains. To avoid attacks the trains often switched tracks, and during one such maneuver we lost my mother and Aunt Asya, who’d run off to the station for hot water. Thanks to the train maneuvering, my mother and aunt hopped on its step as it moved and miraculously survived. It was –25 degrees Celsius (–13 Fahrenheit), and they had to warm their hands with their own breath because their hands were stuck to the metal. They prayed to G-d they didn’t fall.

Along the way, my cousin Gedeon and I became ill with typhoid fever, and Gedeon died. He was buried somewhere on the Orenburg steppe, wrapped in a towel in a hastily dug pit.

Toward the end of December 1941, after four months, we arrived in Tashkent, where we met my father in the hospital. My mother worked again as a nursing aid in a hospital. My sister and I went to school, though in our spare time we cared for the wounded. My father was discharged from the hospital in 1943, but still couldn’t physically work. He completed a quick course in tax finance and went to work as an agent at the Regional Finance Department.

The long-awaited news of victory came in May 1945, and at the beginning of 1946 we returned to Odessa, where our ransacked apartment was occupied by other tenants, though they returned it to us. In Tashkent we had heard about the horrors that had befallen Ukrainian Jews at the hands of the Germans and the Ukrainians, though we couldn’t imagine how. In Tashkent a friend of my father’s, an Uzbeki national, had proposed that my father change his nationality and stay. He predicted that nothing good awaited the Jews in their liberated nation after the city’s occupation. But my father refused, saying his nation would not betray him.

My younger sister, Ira Zhvanetskaya, was born in Tashkent in 1944. In Ilichevsky region my father worked in a finance department and at the same time studied through the credit and financial correspondence technical college. My older sister and I continued going to school, while my mother, our grandmother, and my little sister stayed home. We lived very poorly; my mother did all the housework and sewed our clothes for everyone from oldest to youngest.

My sister graduated from the Credit-Economic Institute and was sent to work in Pyshma, in Sverdlovsk region. She had a nervous breakdown several months later from all the persecution she received for being Jewish. After taking her away from there, my father put her in a neurological clinic for treatment.

I studied refrigeration at a technical college in Odessa starting in 1949. I passed the entrance exams, and because there was ashortage of students I was enrolled. Before that I’d taken the entrance exams for the Machine Tool Technical College, but I was intentionally disqualified in the last test. From then on, I was aware of what it meant to be Jewish in the Soviet Union.

I graduated from technical college in 1954 with honors and was sent to the Odessa Technological Institute for Refrigeration with the right to enter without having to take the entrance examination. Of the five students who graduated with honors, two were Jewish: myself and Alexander Sagalevich. When Alexander was refused entry, I wrote a complaint to the Ministry of Education, but to no avail.

After working nearly eight years at the Lvov mechanical-repair factory, I returned to Odessa to work as foreman in a plant that constructed and repaired equipment for the food industry. I worked 36 years there, right up until I departed for America. I was often awarded for good work, and received the “Highest-Level Master” medal and a free trip to tour Bulgaria in 1980. But the award was rejected by the committee chairman of the regional food union industry because I was Jewish.

I explained the whole thing to the committee chairman of the regional trade union, telling him just what I thought about suchanti-Semites like he and his ilk. I also wrote a letter of complaint to the Ministry of Food, in which I explained that my father was a disabled veteran who hadn’t fought for his country just so his children could suffer in their homeland for being an objectionable nationality in that country.[2]

My relatives were, of course, terrified by my actions, and expected some sort of repressive measures, but they didn’t happen. Ireceived a letter from the ministry, an invitation to the regional committee of trade unions, and a free trip to the GDR.[3] But I didn’t go, as my parents were seriously ill.

After my parents died my older sister went to America to reunite with her son, and after that I became fixed with the idea that I would say goodbye to my country. The final push was an incident with a neighbor who threw a stray puppy from a fifth-floor apartment as I watched. When I said that was how the fascists acted, he called me a dirty Jew and said I should go to Israel. I slapped him. I never gave in to anti-Semites, and I never let those who humiliated my dignity go unnoticed.

My dream came true in 1998 when I received permission from America to enter the U.S. as a refugee. I am eternally grateful toAmerica for its warm welcome, for the fact that I am surrounded with care in my old age, for the fact that my grandchildren can go to university here, and because they won’t experience humiliation like I did. What happened to me – and those like me – can never be forgiven or forgotten.

[1] According to one historian, the Lenin was likely sunk by a Romanian submarine. As many as 4,600 passengers died.

[2] The Russian Empire, and the Soviet Union, considered Judaism a nationality.

[3] GDR was the German Democratic Republic, or East Germany