Before the war began, my mother, Anna Faktorovich, was working as a secretary and attending university to become a teacher. She graduated in June 1941, the month the war began. My father, Vladimir Faktorovich, worked in a pipe-making factory near Kiev, in a small town called Vasilkovo. He rode there on the electric tram to work each morning.

      Every summer my grandmother and I vacationed in Mironovka, about 100 kilometers from Kiev. My uncle Yevgeniy and his family lived in Mironovka, which is the regional center there. He was the First Secretary of the local Communist Party.^[1] My uncle had taken part in the war against Finland, where he was wounded.^[2] He had difficulty walking and didn’t have to take part in World War II. He was an ardent communist, which in those years was quite a big deal, so he volunteered to go to the front once the war began.

      At first my uncle worked in a hospital, but he was transferred directly to the front. He was killed near Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), in the 1942 Sinyavinskaya Offensive.^[3] It was said that he really motivated his troops to fight the Germans, saying things like “Onward!” and “For Stalin!”

      My father was killed near Kiev in 1941. He had four brothers. Of the five boys, three were killed and the other two were wounded during the war. We didn’t find out that my father had been killed until after war, when we found military records that said he was missing in action. My mother’s friends knew what had happened and told her he was killed near Kiev.

      My grandmother and I couldn’t get back to my mother in Kiev from Mironovka because the Germans had bombed the Belo-Tserkovskiy train station. Because my uncle Yevgeniy was well-known, he was able to get his family (together with my grandmother and me) out of Mironovka on a cargo train. The double-decker train cars were filled with other families. They took us to the south, since the Germans were already in the north.

      Along the way we were bombed many times. We could see the aircraft and hear the bombs and explosions. Everyone would jump from the cars to hide wherever they could. My family was lucky to survive. The bombings occurred many times, but we made it to Kuybyshev, Russia. We didn’t have the energy to go any further. There was no food, and we were hungry.

      From Kuybyshev we were taken to the Krotovskiy region, to a village called Markovo. It was a tiny village with just one actual street and numerous small homes along the street. There was a kolkhoz on the small hill there, and we lived with a family who provided us our own room.^[4]      My uncle’s wife, my aunt, had three children. The oldest was a boy, then a girl who was a little younger than me, and a nine-month-old baby girl. The baby died in our hut there because it was very cold that first winter.

      I had no winter clothes because my grandmother and I had evacuated during the summer wearing summer clothing. All the children sat on the pechka and ate makukha.^[5] That first year we were always hungry and cold. My grandmother couldn’t work. My aunt and her oldest son were the only ones in our family who worked at the Kolkhoz.

      I entered the second grade the next year. My mother spent all her time searching for me and wrote to all the evacuation points. She was always told that no one knew of us, that we weren’t listed anywhere. She ran to the south, away from the Germans, sometimes on foot and sometimes on trains. She worked on Kolkhoz farms along the way. The Germans continued toward her and she continued running from them.

      My mother finally wound up in Buguruslan, Russia, where she worked at the evacuation center.^[6] She’d written to Buguruslan previously to find out about us, but was told they had nothing. Luckily, she met a friend from Kiev who worked there. Her friend was able to get all of the lists and they finally found my last name and the last name of my aunt and her children.

      At the end of winter in 1942, my mother arrived in our village. My cousin saw something through the window and yelled, “Aunt Anya’s coming! Aunt Anya’s coming!” I was sitting on the pechka and got so excited that I fell. I was lucky not to have killed myself. When one of the girls brought my mother into the house I didn’t recognize her. She was tired and withered, but she had a purse with her. It was a large purse. Everything she’d taken with her had been stolen along the way, but as it turned out that purse was actually my winter coat. It was the one thing she’d been able to bring for me.

      After some time passed, mother got better and started working on the kolkhoz. After harvest, the children would go into the fields to gather ears of corn. My mother received food for her daily labors, so life for us became better. That’s how we survived in that village. We were there from 1941 to 1944. We returned to Kiev after the city was liberated.

      Kiev was destroyed. Unfortunately, our apartment was occupied. A certain military leader was living there. My mother, a woman without a man to help her, wasn’t able to fight to get it back. We returned to Mironovka, where we lived for several years.

      After graduating from school in Mironovka I entered the Kiev Polytechnic Institute, where I studied film engineering. I got married in my fourth year there. My husband worked as a construction supervisor in a factory. We were given a small room in an apartment we shared with one other family. After a few years, I brought my mother to Kiev to live with us. I worked as a Film Engineer in Kiev. My husband died in 1990, after the Chernobyl accident.

       My mother, my daughter (with her family) and I arrived in Tucson in 1992.

^[1] Secretary of the local Communist Party was highest authority in the area.

^[2] The “Winter War” against Finland took place in 1939-1940.

^[3] The Sinyavinskaya offensive was an attempt by Soviet forces to break the Leningrad blockade.

^[4] Kolkhoz was a collective farm established in the Soviet Union.

^[5] A pechka was an oven that doubled as a furnace. In many cases people could sleep on them to keep warm in winter. Makukha are the remains of sunflower seeds after they’ve been processed for sunflower oil.

^[6] During World War II the Soviets established the Central Information Office in Buguruslan as a means of tracking evacuees during the war.