I was born in 1930 in Romny, Ukraine. Our city wasn’t large, but it was very green with so many trees you couldn’t tell the city from the woods. We lived just outside Romny in a small apartment over a bakery, so we were hot in the summer and warm in the winter. Our living conditions were poor and all of our amenities were outside, behind the barn. To bathe, we poured water from a spout can over each other.

We had just cleaned ourselves up before going for a walk on Sunday, June 22, 1941, when we heard a horrible noise. We didn’t understand what was happening when the bombs exploded, but we soon heard the report over the radio that war had begun. German aircraft bombed our city several times a day, so we dug trenches and covered them with branches and other things to hide inside when the bombers came.

On September 10, 1941, after a typical bombing, a woman told us that a German tank division had entered the city. After dark, my mother, older sister and I crossed the bridge over the Sula River and hurried to a friend’s house on the other side of the city to stay overnight.

My father hadn’t returned from work, so our mother told us to hide in the woods while she went to search for him. They returned together and found me and my sister, who was crying hysterically. She was ten years older than me and emotionally unstable. Once they found us we all left for Sumy, walking three days and three nights. When we turned back to look, our city was in flames.

We decided to go to Voronezh on foot, about 400 kilometers away. We moved at night and hid during the day, staying with peasants along the way. The villagers thought of us in varying ways; in general, Ukrainians didn’t like Jews, but there were some who invited us into their homes and fed us what they could. Along the way we ate carrots, beets, and potatoes from Kolkhoz fields that hadn’t yet been harvested. We asked the villagers to cook for us and shared the vegetables with them. All we had were the clothes on our backs, which we wore out on the way to Voronezh.

Trains with cattle cars were being readied to evacuate refugees from the Voronezh area, so we boarded one without knowing where it was going. We assumed it was headed for northern Kazakhstan. Our final stop was a village there, Ashkanat, where a woman let us live in one of her rooms. We worked on a Kolkhoz during the war, in poor conditions, and I also worked as a cleaning woman in the village.

Romny was liberated before the war ended, so my father said that we should return to our city. As our train arrived in Romny we were shocked to see the devastation. Our old neighbors told us my mother’s brother and his wife were shot by the Germans on the eve of the war as they walked to a hospital. My uncle didn’t even get to say goodbye to his son, who’d gone into the army as a tank driver. His training was cut short so the army could send him to the border before the war began. Two of my uncle’s other sons were sent to the front as well. Our neighbors also told us what happened to the Jews who’d remained in the city. Many were shot or killed in other ways, and a group of young Jews was taken to Germany.

As I said, my sister Betya was not well. My mother took her out of school many times instead of finding treatment for her, and pleaded with teachers to advance her to the next grade. When they refused to advance Betya into the tenth grade, my mother decided to teach her a profession. She found someone to teach Betya accounting skills, and she could also type, so my sister was able to find work in a Zagotzerno laboratory before the war.

There was someone living in our old home in Romny, but we were given a one-room apartment that had a kitchen and a toilet. Eventually my cousin, Sima, invited me to go to Rostov-on-Don, Russia, to live with her and her daughter and to attend the Railway Transportation Institute there. She told me the institute had dormitories for students and provided scholarships, so I moved. Sima’s husband, a Red Army colonel, had been killed in the war.

I moved to Rostov-on-Don and enrolled for my first year at the Railway Institute. The allotment of bread was 200 grams a day, but I also made some money as a porter at the train station.

I worked three years for the Perm Railroad in Russia’s Ural region. Since I had free travel for vacations, I could visit my parents in Romny fairly often. During one visit I met Mikhail Rabinovich, a cadet at the Romny Military Automobile School. He later became my husband.

I couldn’t find work in Romny, but my husband and I moved to Konotop, Ukraine, where he was stationed after he finished his schooling. We rented an apartment there and had our two sons, Aleksander and Pavel. Life wasn’t easy in Konotop: I had to take Aleksander with me when I pumped water at five in the morning and when I chopped wood to heat our room. And still I worked, because my husband didn’t make much and sent money to his family in Chernigov.

Aleksander completed the institute through correspondence courses  and had to find work. He was told it was okay that he was Jewish but should change his name. We decided to change our last name to Chausovsky.

In 1990 there were rumors of possible pogroms in Kiev, so my husband’s boss put their unit at the highest readiness condition. We left for America in 1991 after Pavel and his family moved from New York to Tucson, Arizona. By the time we got here our grandson Valeriy was twelve years old. Natali, his little sister, was born in 1995. Life goes on, and you have to survive.