I was born in the village of Zalivayshchino in Ukraine’s Vinnitsa region. My father was a village store manager and was sent there to organize Soviet trade in the area. My parents were from Novokonstantinov, in Ukraine’s Proskurovsky region.

In 1940 we moved to Kiev, since that’s where all of my relatives lived: my grandfather on my mother’s side and my mother’s sisters. We were in Kiev when the war began, in June 1941. I was eight years old at the time.

On August 20, 1941, with battles occurring at the outskirts of Kiev, our family – my mother, sister, brother and me – evacuated Kiev on one of the last trains leaving the city. My father had been called into the army. We were put on open-air, half-rail cars normally used for transporting coal. Some members of my family were not able to evacuate. The Germans hung one of my aunts and threw my grandparents down a well, where they died.

Our train was bombed many times during the evacuation. The train was hit near the city of Konotop, and part of a shell shattered my mother’s leg. At night, as the train burned, peasants from a nearby local village helped us, and took us to their village. On August 30, 1941, German soldiers parachuted into the area, capturing the village. Still, the peasants hid us. These were difficult days for my family. We lived with a real fear that they would find us and kill us.  

In October 1941, a Soviet Army unit came to the village trying to evade German capture. My mother asked their commander to take us with them. He looked after us and placed us on wagons carrying wounded soldiers. Thanks to the Soviet soldiers, we made it to the train station at Bakhmach.

From there we went to Ostrogorsk, in the Voronezh region, where one of my grandfathers was located. After we arrived, everyone was sent on to Ural. My uncle worked in a military plant that was transferred to Izhevsk. We remained in Ostrogorsk, because we had no clothes and nothing with us.

The Germans approached Voronezh in 1942, so we decided to evacuate to central Asia, to Uzbekistan. We rode in boxcars, and I became sick with Scarlet Fever. I was sick for a long time from the conditions in the boxcars.

We made it to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, and were told to go to Syrdarya, an area infected with malaria. The disease tortured us. We drank ditch water and fell sick with dysentery, and suffered with hunger for two years. For the first year and a half, sick and exhausted, I didn’t go to school. My health remained poor even when I finally did. Our mother was bedridden from wounds that hadn’t properly healed because of a lack of available medical care. She couldn’t work. My sister made rope for the war and went to school, and my brother worked and attended technical school. I was too small to work.

After the war my father was demobilized. He found out where we’d gone and came there for us. He found work as an overseer at the Central Growing Station in Tashkent, where they grew cotton. He took me with him when he left for Tashkent, while my mother and sister remained in Syrdarya because my sister was finishing high school.

In Tashkent, my father would go to work while I waited all day for him to return. I went to school there, where they gave us 125 grams of bread. In 1945, while still at the cotton station, it was announced that the war had ended. We chose to stay in central Asia, where I graduated from high school.

I attended the Tashkent Polytechnical Institute, where I studied electrical power systems. I graduated in 1957, and worked with diesel locomotives in Novosibirsk after that. My wife and I have three daughters. Our family arrived in the in the United States in 1993.