I was born on June 16, 1939, in Mogilev, Belarus. As I was too young to remember the war, so most of these memories have been recorded by my brother, Sender. Our parents were Mordukh Aronovich Yankelevich and Gelya Issakovna, maiden name Drukman. My father was a tailor in a clothing factory, and my mother was a housewife. There were 10 children in our family: six boys and four girls. Khaim and Aron died of starvation within days of one another in 1933, when they were only a few months old. Tsilya died in 1942 during the evacuation at the age of one-and-a-half. My oldest brother, Nema (Venyamin) went to war in 1941. At first we received letters from him, but then they stopped, though we never received any news as to whether he had died. We still don’t know what happened to him; there are rumors he was taken prisoner. 

My grandmother (on my mother’s side) had 12 children. The family was very religious and lived on the property of a synagogue. They all wound up in a ghetto where only two survived: Dodik and Basya. Basya was once pushed from a car just before someone was about to shoot her. A Russian woman took her in. After the war, Basya lived for awhile in an orphanage, and then came to live with us. She eventually married a pilot and moved to Kazakhstan. Dodik attended vocational school and returned to Mogilev after the war.

When my father found out the war had started, he decided we should hide in the woods. We stayed 10 or 15 kilometers from the city and stayed there two nights. After two days, we returned to the city, and my father returned to his job at the clothing factory. He was told at work that we needed to leave immediately, so we found a carriage for hire and went to the station, which had been bombed the night before. In the morning our neighbor Fyodor (a carriage driver) found us and asked my father to give the rest of our belongings to him. My father left with him and returned later.

We boarded a freight train. Someone had built places to sit down, and opposite the door was a gutter used as a toilet. There were men and women in one car. Soldiers in Mogilev tried to take my father from the train to send him to the war, but because he stuttered so terribly they let him go. We traded our things along the way for food at each stop. Food was available at several of the stops, which had covered areas where people could eat. When we came across trainloads of soldiers, we asked them for food, and they gave it to us. So we traveled for two weeks towards the Ural Mountains, to the city of Katav-Ivanovsk, and settled into houses there.

We wound up in a house where an old grandmother lived with her grandson. After two or three days, we went to the village of Orlovka, where we lived until December 1941. All of the children worked on a collective farm, cleaning storehouses and preparing the barns for winter. They would water, weed, and clean. There was a dining hall on the collective farm where we were fed weak soup and bread. Evacuees worked in the dining hall also.

My father’s sister, Riva, lived with us as well. Her husband was forced to go to war, and her son died at Orlovka. She also had a daughter, Raya. My Aunt Riva worked in a weapons factory and watched after the children.

We moved back to Katav-Ivanovsk, where my father found work as a tailor near Zaprudovka station, and my brother Misha finished vocational school. My brother, Sender, applied to attend vocational school, and finally finished once we returned to Mogilev. My sister Sterra and I went to kindergarten.

My mother died in 1942, and my father was left alone with the children. I have absolutely no memory of my mother, as she died when I was three years old. Yet I remember my father carrying her casket on his shoulders, to where, I don’t know. After my mother died, my oldest sister Yeva took care of the children and the house. I loved Yeva very much; she became a mother to me.

We heard that the war had ended on the radio. We had been living near Chelyabinsk, Russia, for four years, but following the war we returned to Belarus. By then our home was gone, and everything was destroyed. When we first arrived we had nowhere to live, so we all moved in with my mother’s sister. She had a large family and so did we, so it was difficult living together.

To find a place to live, my father remarried, though I didn’t like living with my stepmother because she treated us poorly. She had her children and my father had his, and in a place where the children aren’t your own you can’t do much. My father loved us and didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. Eventually he left his new wife and remarried again, and again he didn’t stay with his new wife long because of the children. A stepmother’s a stepmother. She wanted my father’s money but not his children, so I ran away from her to live with my oldest sister, Yeva.

When I was nine I became very sick and had to have an operation on my head and legs. My sister nursed me and worried about me. By the time I was nine-and-a-half, I had just started school, so it was hard for me to catch up. At sixteen, having completed only part of the seventh grade, I left school and began working in a clothes and arts factory. I worked there for 36 years as a machine embroiderer. I married, and my husband and I had one daughter and one son.

My daughter and her husband left for America with his family in 1996. My daughter immediately prepared the needed documents for my husband and me and our son’s family to join them. After 14 months apart we moved to America as well, and live now in Tucson, Arizona.