The war began in Moldavia on June 22, 1941, and the very next day we were told we’d have to evacuate. Our family included my grandparents on my father’s side, Pinkus Tselnik and Chaya Malamand, my parents, Elik Tselnik and Feiga Malamand, myself and my two brothers, Lev and Semyon (Solomon). My father worked for a farming cooperative that gave us two horses and a cart, and on June 26 we left our village, Avdarma, in Moldavia’s Komratsky Region.[1]

      At the time I was 12 years old, and my brothers were eight and 15. We were constantly bombed by German airplanes as we traveled. The bombing was at its worst in the city of Voznesensk, Ukraine, where the city was enveloped in flames and all the buildings and various structures were burning. It became horrible as well just prior to crossing the Dnepr River, where our cart was torn to pieces in one attack. In that attack, people ran wherever they could in a panic, and many were killed and wounded. We fixed our cart as well as we could and crossed the Dnepr.

      We kept moving east, getting closer to the front. Near Krivoy Rog, in Ukraine, the Red Army confiscated our horses and cart. We were loaded onto open rail cars with other refugees in a train that was headed east, and we traveled like that for a very long time. We’d move for a couple of hours and then have to stop for a long time. Sometimes we would even stop for an entire day, because the rail lines were being bombed constantly. My grandmother was killed during one of these attacks. Her body was taken from the train, and after a little time passed we climbed back into the boxcars because of the cold and continued on.

      In September 1941, we were taken off the train near the Stalingrad Region in Russia and sent to live in the village of Kireyevka, which is in the Frunze area. We worked on a Kolkhoz there, where our grandfather died after enduring the travels we’d taken.[2] My father and older brother went into the army, while my little brother, our mother and I remained on the Kolkhoz.

      In mid-1942, as the front moved towards Stalingrad, we were evacuated again. We were on our way to Kazakhstan, but stopped in the Kaysatsky area in Stalingrad Region after crossing the Volga River. This is on the steppe.[3]

      We lived in a Russian zemlyanka for several months there.[4] It was terribly cold and we had almost nothing. We tried out horse and gopher meat (to catch the gophers we would pour water into their holes and catch them when they came out). We didn’t see bread for six months, and we were constantly sick and swollen from hunger.

      At the end of 1943, when the Red Army defeated the Germans at Stalingrad, we traveled to the village of Mosty, which is in the Stalingrad Region. For food we pulled up stalks and gathered frozen potatoes from beneath the snow. At the beginning of 1944, when various areas in Ukraine were being liberated, my mother, little brother and I decided to go there, thinking there might be food to eat. We were running away from starvation.

      It took us a long time to get to Ukraine, as we had to get on and off several trains along the way. We finally arrived at Kobylinsk, in the Poltava Region, and worked there on a Sovkhoz called Peredovik.[5] I helped the tractor drivers, and later became a tractor driver myself. My little brother cared for the sheep and our mother worked in the fields.

      In the army, my father had taken part in clearing mines from the Shterovskaya hydroelectric dam. After that he was released from the army, and in 1946 we went to live with him. I went into the army in 1948 and served until 1954, when I began my education at a technical college to work as an electrician.

      I was a welder at several electrical stations before I entered the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. After graduating there, I began work as a specialist in automated processes in power plants. In 1966, I was hired to work at the Moldavia hydroelectric dam, and moved to Kishinev in 1967 to help fine tune the automated systems in nuclear power plants. I met my future wife there. We married on October 20, 1967.

      We came to Tucson in 1997 with our daughter, her husband, and their daughter.

[1] Moldavia is now known as Moldova. Mr. Tselnik’s village, Avdarma, is located close to Ukraine’s western border.

[2] A kolkhoz was a collective farm in the Soviet Union.

[3] The steppe is a geographical region of Russia characterized by grasslands and very few trees. It is similar to the American plains and prairies.

[4] A zemlyanka was a home dug into the earth with a roof made from sod or branches. The zemlyanka is one of the most ancient types of housing known.

[5] A sovkhoz, usually translated as state farm, was another type of Soviet collective farm.