I was born on November 6, 1923, in Odessa, Ukraine. My mother, Dvoyra Moiseyevna, was a housewife and sewed very well. She was born in Odessa and had two sisters and two brothers. Her older brother, Gersh, was mobilized in World War I and went to the front, where he was captured. After the war he lived in Brussels, Belgium. He was found dead in his home in 1932, though there are few details about how he died. My mother’s sister, Yevgeniya, was a doctor and was mobilized in the Great Patriotic War. She was killed in Borisov. My mother’s brother, Boris, went to Palestine in the 1920s and her sister Khaya evacuated to Tashkent during the war.

My father, Sanya Abramovich Iakover, was a clothing salesman. During Lenin’s New Economic Policy he opened a small clothing shop, but after two years he went bankrupt. Nevertheless, the Soviet government considered him unemployed, and because of that our family was evicted from our apartment in 1930. After some time, my father found work in a store, but they fired him. Our family lived with friends, and then settled in the village of Chubayevka, Ukraine. My father had three brothers: one was killed in the civil war, another was killed in World War II, and the third went to Palestine in the 1920s.

My eldest sister Fira went to school, but after the seventh grade she had to go to FZU, because my father was unemployed. She later took courses to get into an institute, and graduated from the Pharmaceutical Institute and post-graduate school. When the war began she was mobilized to work in a laboratory that made mortar shells. Although she was a pharmacist, the authorities directed her to work where she was needed. She was evacuated along with the rest of the institute to Tashkent, where she worked as a pharmacist, and received notification there that her husband had been killed in the war. Fira remarried after the war and had two children.

I started school in 1931. In all of Odessa, there were just two schools that taught in Russian and two that taught in Yiddish. The rest taught in the Ukrainian language. I went to a Ukrainian school, because it was closer to our house. Three years later, Skripnik committed suicide and the schools began translating their courses into Russian. However, I stayed in the Ukrainian school. I went from class-to-class with certificates of excellence, and graduated with an honors diploma. On June 19, 1941, we had our graduation ceremony and party, and we made plans for our futures. I was prepared to apply to a technical institute, but on June 22 the war began.

That day I heard my sister Fira cry out after hearing over the radio that the war had begun. She was frightened because her husband was in the Army and was stationed on the Romanian border (he was killed in 1943 at Kerch). A month later, the Germans began bombing Odessa. I went to Proletarsky Boulevard Station in September 1941, to dig foxholes, and on September 9, 1941, the Germans bombed Odessa all night long. The next morning my father came to see if I was alive or not.

Why didn’t we evacuate like so many others did? Because my father believed that the Germans wouldn’t do anything bad to us. He said that the Germans were a very cultured people. Later, when we were in the ghetto, I asked my father the same question many times: “How is it that you’re such a wise man, and many people come to you for advice, but you believe the Germans?”

On October 16, 1941, the Germans and Romanians entered Odessa, and on October 22 partisans blew up the Romanian headquarters building. The next day, all down Shevchenko Avenue, there were dead bodies piled up, and people hanging. Within days, a declaration was hung on each of our gates announcing that all Jewish people had to appear for registration at Dalnik, an area in Odessa. Along the way we were taken to a prison, where we stayed for 10 days. They released us after the anniversary of the October Revolution celebrations in Moscow. Just outside the prison we came across a pile of dead bodies.

The order came in January 1942 for all Jewish people to be transferred to Slobodka (an area in Odessa) and live with residents there. The winter of 1941-1942 was very cold, and there were many frozen bodies in the streets. People were freezing to death or dying of hunger.

In February the Nazis began removing the Jews from Odessa. On February 9, 1942, they loaded us on a freight train so full that I couldn’t breathe: I had one foot on the floor and the other up in the air. They took us to Mostovaya station, and from there we walked to Domanevka. Along the way we came across frozen bodies and others who’d been executed. There was a man walking with us blinded with his own tears because he’d been forced to kill his friends. We walked for about two weeks.

My mother, father, younger sister Rakhil, and I were housed in barracks at Domanevka. All of Domanevka’s previous prisoners had been sent to Bogdanovka, where almost 60,000 Jews were burned to death. We were the first to stay in Domanevka after that. The leader there was Leleka, who treated Jews with respect and allowed those with a trade to live with peasants there. Because my mother could sew we were allowed to live in a peasant’s house. She sewed various items so she could work for a little money.

A typhoid epidemic began in the spring, though now it’s said that we were purposefully infected. My mother, my sister Rakhil, and I all fell ill. My father had typhoid earlier, in 1921. After Leleka died from typhoid, the police chased all of the Jewish people from the peasant homes back into the Domanevka barracks.

My mother died from typhoid on May 1, 1942. Her body was put on the pechka, and the police came five times that day to take us to the barracks. My father wasn’t with us in the hut, as he had gone to a friend’s house, so the police told the peasant we were staying with: “We’ll come back tonight to execute everyone, and we demand that you get rid of the bodies.” That night we removed my mother’s body (during the day a special brigade went through the village gathering up bodies for a common gravesite), and hid it in the woodshed between the cows. In the morning, we were taken to the barracks. A policeman on horseback pushed my father and me along.

After several days they took us to Akhmechetka concentration camp, on the banks of the Bug River. People could see dirt moving in common graves, because the people buried there were still alive. At Akhmechetka they put us in the pig pens on an old pig farm.

The police would escort people from Akhmechetka to the village for water. On one of these trips, a young policeman exchanged pleasantries with a girl, saying: “I’m going to shoot a bird now.” He shot one person in the leg, and another in the arm. Another time, a policeman beat my father because he’d swapped my winter coat with a peasant instead of him.

They eventually started assigning Jews to collective farms. All of the men had been mobilized, so there was no one left to work the fields. Women had to leave their small children behind to go to these farms. Around 25 people, including my father, sister, and me, were sent to the Koshtov collective farm to work. We lived in rat-infested sheds there, and slept on beds made of wormwood to keep away the fleas. A peasant woman baked bread for us, complaining that she couldn’t knead the dough enough to bake it because it contained flour from oats, millet, and barley. She added potatoes and pumpkin to make the flour sticky.

We worked the vegetable gardens in the fields, and in the fall we harvested reeds in the marshes, which we used to make blankets and to cover our roofs. We walked barefoot in the swampy areas, and leaches attached to our legs. We sat down to rest in a field one day, but a Romanian guard ordered us to get up and work. We told him we were tired and would rest a bit, then work. The next day he brought soldiers who beat us up because the Romanian had told them we were talking about Stalin.

We soaked and dried hemp in the winter, which we used to make thread and cloth, then sacks from the cloth. We harvested corn, which chaffed the skin on our fingers. There was no way to heal the chaffing wounds.

My father took care of the horses. Two horses ran off one day, and a policeman beat my father even though he knew the horses would return. My father got frostbite on his legs that winter, which turned into gangrene. He died on December 16, 1943. The ground was frozen, so the men could only dig a shallow grave next to the road. In the spring, water washed my father’s body up, and we had to rebury him. 

A year later they transferred us back to Akhmechetka to dig anti-tank ditches near the Bug River. We lived in a little hut and dried hemp in that same area. One day a man drying hemp fell asleep and a spark from the stove started a fire. We ran out in the snow while our hut burned. I wound up with painful blisters and couldn’t sit or lie down. We had no medications,  so I treated myself with a hot brick. I was ready to cut my wrists from the pain, but I decided I wanted to live to see victory.

In the spring of 1944 we began hearing battles nearby and decided to return to the farm at Koshtov. The peasants there knew us, so we were confident they would hide us. On March 28, 1944, several men showed up at the farm to liberate us. Odessa was liberated on April 10, 1944, and on April 16 we returned to the city. We got there by walking, though part of the way we rode on a tank. Our apartment was now occupied, but because our parents perished we didn’t want to live there anyways. One of our neighbors took us in and gave us a small room, which was fine with us: we were happy to be back in Odessa. 

A communist youth organization helped me find a job in the library at the Nautical School, where I worked seven years. I enrolled in the university at the same time, taking chemistry classes through correspondence. After a year the university director decided not to allow correspondence courses in the chemistry department. When I went to him for permission to enroll in day classes, he called his secretary and snapped at her, telling her not to send students in to see him. “I want only Ukrainian students,” he said.

I transferred to take correspondence courses in commercial refrigeration in the technology department at the Food Institute. Working and going to school was not easy. I graduated in 1952 and was sent to Leningrad to work in a bread factory as a technologist (it was the first time I’d ever seen a bread factory). I worked at the factory for 33 years (three years as a shift technologist, seven as a shift supervisor, seven as a senior technologist, 16-and-a-half years as the laboratory director).

There were many tests and several incidents at the factory, such as when the department director told me one day, “Go to your Israel!”  When the factory director found out about the incident, he told me to make a complaint with the party committee, but I decided I wouldn’t do that. Only three of us in the factory were Jewish, and most of the workers treated me well. I worked there until 1986, when my grandson was born, though I was eligible to retire in 1978.

I didn’t want to leave the Soviet Union, because when I did I was already old. My daughter and son-in-law insisted I go with them. We departed in 1993. Immigration was a difficult period in my life because of the different languages, cultures, lifestyles, and customs. It’s easier for the young than it is the old. I know four languages (Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Yiddish), but that’s not enough.