I was born in 1929 in Rostov-on-Don, Russia. My father was a therapist and my mother was a housewife. On my father’s side I had three uncles and four aunts, while on my mother’s side I had three uncles and two aunts. I was twelve years old when the war began, and had just finished the fifth grade. We were at Pioneer camp on the Sea of Azov when we heard the news about the war, and returned immediately to Rostov-on-Don after that.

 My father was drafted into the Army three days later and was sent to the front with four of my uncles. Four months later, as the Germans approached Rostov, we evacuated in railroad freight cars. The Germans bombed our train repeatedly as we traveled, but we finally made it to Makhachkala, where I finished the sixth grade. I would go to the hospital there to care for the wounded, along with other students. We fed them and wrote letters home for them. We helped in any way we could.

 The German offensive in the north Caucuses continued into the summer of 1942. Once they were close to Makhachkala we evacuated again. This time we went to Alma-Ata, in central Asia. I finished the seventh grade there, in 1943. We were constantly hungry, even though my mother worked at home sewing belts made of leftover leather strips. I helped her make these belts.

Other than one letter, sent in July 1941, we hadn’t heard from my father for two years. Then later that summer a relative in Moscow read an article in Ogonyok about German brutalities that had occurred in the prison camp at Khorol, Ukraine. My father was mentioned in the article, which included his picture. This is how we learned he was alive. The Germans had taken him prisoner during the battle for Kiev and sent him to Khorol, where he was routinely tortured. He escaped the camp with the help of locals, who hid him in a potato pit for nearly three months until they could get him to a partisan unit.

When Khorol was liberated, in 1943, my father helped restore the city before leaving with the army. By the time the war ended, he’d gone as far as Prague, Czechoslovakia. Besides Ogonyok, his time in Khorol prison camp was detailed in a Red Army magazine. He was demobilized from the Army in 1946.

My father was haunted for the rest of his life with memories of the camp. He worked as a family doctor, but was arrested in January 1953 when the purge of Jewish doctors began. Several months after Stalin died he was rehabilitated and freed from prison.

The Germans also imprisoned my father’s brother, Semyon Veksler, in Kiev. He was a nearby village doctor. We only learned in 2002 that the Germans executed him along with the seriously wounded.

We returned to Rostov-on-Don following its liberation in 1944, and the war ended on May 9, 1945. Two years later I started at the medical institute, where I completed my studies in 1953. I worked five years in pediatrics, then 30 years with tuberculosis patients, first children and then adults.

I was reminded I was Jewish my whole life. Children in school teased me, and after I graduated from the medical institute I couldn’t find work right away for the same reason. I’d been promised a position in a children’s hospital after the hospital I worked in was converted for adults in 1975, but the senior doctor at the children’s clinic personally told me he wouldn’t give the job to a Jew. I had to stay at the adult tuberculosis clinic.