I was born on September 14, 1927, in Rostov-on-Don, a city in the former Soviet Union. My father, Moisey Beskin, was a building engineer and specialized in bridge design. He worked at different design firms, then taught at Novocherkassk Polytechnic Institute. My mother, Maria Beskin, was a piano teacher. I don’t have any siblings. My mother’s oldest sister Polina and her sons, Igor and Evgeniy, lived with us (my grandparents were already deceased by then).

My aunt Polina was a dentist and worked at various resorts. In the summer of 1941, she was working as a dentist in a resort in Kabardinka, Russia, in the Krasnodarsk region right on the Black Sea. My cousins and I went there on vacation at the beginning of June, 1941. We swam in the Black Sea and had a great time.

On June 22, which was a Sunday, I went swimming by myself. On my way back, I saw people running to the clubhouse looking very concerned. I started to run as well. I saw worried men discussing something, but I couldn’t understand what was going on and went home. When I arrived, my aunt told me that the war had started.

Back in Rostov, my parents found a man – he was a doctor – who was going to pick up his children from a summer camp close to the place I was staying. He promised my parents he would bring me home too. Early in the  morning, my aunt put me on a horse-drawn wagon and sent me to Gelendzhik, where I’d never been before. I arrived at Gelendzhik and found the man who was going to take me back home. He helped me and six other boys get some breakfast, and then put us on the bus to Novorossiysk. We arrived at the train station in Novorossiysk and waited for the train. As we waited, we laid on our bags resting and staring at the sky, and we suddenly spotted a German airplane. We could also hear anti-aircraft artillery shooting at the German . . . this was June 26 or 27, and was the first time I’d ever seen a German airplane. It circled the area, but our artillery scared it away.

We arrived safely in Rostov. It was summer break from school, and when my parents left for work we would go to the Don River to take a swim. We weren’t supposed to swim in the river in 1941 because it was an open area and German airplanes could easily spot us and kill us. Luckily, everything was fine and nobody saw us. There were two airplanes flying around our town, but these were Soviet fighters.

My father was not drafted in the army because he was over 50 and was nearsighted. One day in October or November 1941, he was called to the military recruiting center and ordered to go to the Don River to check transport activities on the bridges crossing it. My father used to design those bridges. He left, but he didn’t come back for a long time. The atmosphere in our town was very unstable and worrisome. My father finally returned, and a few days later the fighting had reached the outskirts of the city.

We could see that Russian forces were getting routed, but we delayed our evacuation in hope that the Germans wouldn’t get into the city. However, German forces entered Rostov-on-Don on November 21, 1941. At first, people were on the streets of the city, but after a few days there was no one to be seen.

Several brutal massacres took place there. For example, when someone ran out into a courtyard of a three-story apartment building, the Germans ordered all the residents of the building to go outside. Once they did, the Germans lined them up and killed them, then burned the building down. After that incident, nobody went outside. Everyone kept their doors and windows locked, and people were scared. Luckily, nobody entered the apartment building where my family lived, and no one got killed. In Rostov, the massacres happened in several places.

The men would gather in groups each morning and go to the Don River to fetch water. My father joined them on November 27, when the battle was very close to the river. That day our neighbor got injured at the river and my father carried him all the way back from the river to our house.

The Germans began shelling the city with artillery, but our building was never hit. The rounds flew overhead and were loud and intense. On November 29, I decided to go outside to see what was going on. At first, I saw one of our soldiers running, and then I saw two or three others. They were carrying rifles and jumped into an armored car that started moving toward the center of the city. I went back to the house and told everyone what I’d seen. People started coming out of their apartments onto the streets. The Germans had established a machine gun on the roof of the cathedral, which was right on our street, and started shooting at the crowd. We saw the bullets flying, hitting the ground, but luckily nobody got killed.

The first time the Russian Army repelled the Germans from Rostov, we started thinking about evacuating. The Germans were not far away, about 40 kilometers, and could return any time. When they were still in the city, the Germans issued an order to gather all of the city’s Jewish people and send them off to be killed. There is a place in Rostov called Zmievskaya Balka where, as I learned later, 27,000 Jews and Soviet civilians were killed by the Nazis on August 11 and 12, 1942. The Jewish men of Rostov were marched to Zmiyovskaya Balka, a ravine outside the city, and shot.

My father worked in the agency which was in charge of all railroads of Northern Kavkaz and knew all the railroads in the area very well. When the evacuation started, many people from our town moved to Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk. When my father and I discussed where to evacuate, he said that we absolutely should not move to these cities. When I questioned why, my father explained that it was a dead end; if Germans moved in that direction there would be no way to escape. He thought it was best to move to Vladikavkaz. There is a Georgian Military Road, which starts right in Vladikavkaz.[1] If we weren’t able to escape by railroad, we could flee by autobahn (the Georgian Military Road). We evacuated to Vladikavkaz. My family, along with my aunt and her son Igor, lived there until the end of July, 1942. My cousin Evgeniy joined the army. I attended school and my father taught at a local technical college. The Germans had closed on Vladikavkaz by July 1942, so toward the beginning of August we made our way to the railroad station and left by train.

We were traveling through Makhachkala with just our necessities in small packs. We hadn’t had time to pack. There were five of us: my mother and father, my aunt, cousin Igor, and me. Makhachkala was in pure chaos. It was filled with people who were storming ships to get in. All of the  ships’ decks, every surface, were covered with people. We sailed on a ship for almost two days with so little space that I spent half a night standing on one foot; there was no space at all to put my other foot down. People and their belongings were everywhere.

We arrived to Krasnovodsk, Russia, where the heat was unbearable. My father met some people that he knew from Cherkassy Polytechnic Institute, where he used to teach. They told us that their institute was traveling on the same train we are supposed to take, but in a different train car. They invited us to join them, so we moved to their car. It was a boxcar with just 30 people, all students. There were no benches to sit on, so we all sat on the floor. There was a toilet as well, and because of that and the fact that there was more room, travel became a little easier.

We passed through various cities, such as Ashkhabad and Samarkand, but nobody knew where we were going. The conductor finally said that we had arrived at our final destination, and we learned that we were in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. We went straight to the station square. There were a lot of people there, and out of nowhere we saw a good friend from Rostov who suggested we go to a shoe factory where we could spend the night. We took her advice and went to the shoe factory. There were a lot of people there like us who were looking for a place to spend the night. We slept on the floor in the hall of the shoe factory, then started looking for an apartment the following day. On the second day, I went to explore the city. While walking and looking around, I came across the Tashkent Institute of Railway Transport Engineers. Later that day I returned and told my father that I found him a job. At that time, finding a job was not a problem since most of the men went to war.

My cousin Igor and I also started working. We found jobs as lathe operators at the local factory and had three ration cards for the family in order to get food.

I was accepted into the Tashkent Institute of Transportation. Later, my father got a job there as a professor. We stayed in Tashkent until the war ended. I still remember how we sang songs as we walked the streets on May 9, 1945, the day the war ended.

I transferred to the Moscow Institute of Transport Engineers that year and lived in Moscow until 1950. My cousin went to the Leningrad Institute of Transportation. He moved to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) and has lived there ever since.

My future wife Liliya and I met before the war.[2] Our parents belonged to the same circle of friends, so we became friends too. In 1947, I came to Rostov from Moscow for a visit, and Liliya and I met again; she was graduating from school. We met several times; walked together, and talked. I spent a week in Rostov and then went back to Moscow. Liliya and I had the same group of friends so when I came back to Rostov, we started dating. In 1950, in Rostov, I got a job as an engineer at the Russian Road Design agency. Liliya and I got married in 1951. My wife was a doctor. Our daughter Olga was born in 1954. Olga has two children, Mikhail and Alla. My grandson Mikhail immigrated to the United States, to Tucson, Arizona, in 1998. My wife and I came to Tucson at the end of 2000.

[1] The Georgian Military Road runs between Tbilisi (Georgia) and Vladikavkaz (Russia) and follows the traditional route that traders and invaders used throughout history.

[2] Liliya Beskin’s own account of her Holocaust experience can be found in Volume I of To Tell Our Stories.