I was born on November 14, 1926, in the city of Pervomaysk, Ukraine. I was the only child of Bentzion and Etya Timen. I was fifteen years old when the Nazis attacked the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. My father was immediately drafted into the Soviet Army, while I remained with my mother.

On June 27, 1941, the Germans began bombing Pervomaysk. My mother and I were very frightened and defenseless, so we decided to leave as soon as possible. We could not take anything with us except our documents and the coats on our backs. My mother and I walked for many long hours, looking for somewhere to hide in the countryside. It was early July 1941. We hid in village cellars for several days. The Nazis came to the area desperately searching for Jews to eliminate. They wanted to find as many of us as possible. By some miracle, my mother and I escaped, but my mother’s sister, her husband, and their two little daughters were killed by the fascists.

We were stuck in that region for two months, as it was occupied by the Nazis and we couldn’t get out. We walked from one village to another in the dark of night (it was too dangerous to travel during the day) begging local people for small amounts of food and shelter in which we could hide. Finally, sometime in September 1941, partisans found us. They gave us something to eat and put us with other refugees on a horse-drawn wagon that was secretly headed for Kharkov.

We had to stay in Kharkov for a few weeks because all the trains to the Asian and Siberian regions of the country were overcrowded. Soon the Germans started bombing Kharkov as well. We finally managed to get on a train from Ukraine to Uzbekistan in early October 1941. By then Ukraine was almost completely under Nazi control.

We reached Uzbekistan in November 1941, and stayed a few weeks in Tashkent. We then went to Yangiyul, Uzbekistan. It wasn’t until December or early January 1942, that we managed to reach Novosibirsk, in Siberia, where we stayed with relatives until 1943. I was sixteen years old and worked in a factory there, taking some classes in evening high school. We didn’t hear from my father for two years, and didn’t know that he’d been severely wounded and was in a hospital. And he didn’t know whether or not we were alive or had escaped the Nazi invasion. It was only at the end of 1943 that he found us, and in 1944 we reunited with him and moved to Kuybyshev, where my father worked as editor of an Army newspaper.

We never managed to return to our home in Pervomaysk. It had been burned to the ground, and all of our belongings were stolen or lost. Most of our relatives and friends there were killed by the Nazis. So we went to Odessa after it was liberated from the Germans and Romanians. That was where we celebrated the war’s end in May 1945.