My name is Mikhail Kogan, and I was born in Poltava, Ukraine, on November 28, 1930. My mother was Taisiya Budnytskaya, a saleswoman in a store, and my father was Boris Kogan, a mechanic at a railroad depot. He invented a battery-powered electric car to replace the two-man handcars for rail workers. This was big news, and my father was invited to Kharkov (the capital of Ukraine at that time), where he and his partner were presented with monetary awards. He didn’t come home with money, buying instead some furniture and two bicycles (one for himself and one for me). 

On the night of January 6, 1938, my father was arrested. They killed him that same night. They didn’t shoot or hang him; they beat him to death. Three days later, when my mother took food to him, she was told that my father would no longer have an appetite. I know nothing else about my father. 

In those days, there was an extremely important law, 58-10. It stated that the sentence for treason was ten years incommunicado, but in truth, the person was shot. Pity those whose fate fell to this law, but also to those near that person – they had bigger problems. No one wanted to sit next to me in school. My mother would find work, but two days later, documents would arrive from the authorities to fire her. She was seen as a wife of an enemy of the State.

We had nothing to eat and went hungry. My mother was the last of 12 children in her family, and among her siblings was my Aunt Tanya. She wasn’t married and lived with her parents, and she always looked after me, telling my mother that if something happened to her (to my mother) that she’d take me in. Aunt Tanya cooked for my grandparents and would always bring a little food to us. That’s all we had. 

We had a very large apartment in Poltava. We even had a tub and a bathroom, and apples hung from a tree onto our balcony. Eventually, the authorities came to evict us, but my mother told them we weren’t leaving the apartment. When they said they were evicting her, she told them she would scream across the whole courtyard. They left and never returned. We continued living in the building. 

In June 1941, when the war began, the Germans arrived in Kiev very quickly. The factories had all been evacuated, but nobody took us. My mother cried day and night. One of our relatives worked in a Poltava factory that was being evacuated. He told my mother he would take us with him. He arrived on horseback, and my mother left everything we had behind. We got out of Poltava. 

Our train made it to some station in Ukraine, where we were suddenly told that we had to turn back. German tanks had seized the next station along the line. Our train left, and I remember the German Messerschmitt aircraft flying above us. I don’t remember where the bombs hit, but I remember their horrible sounds. 

We went first to Varvarovka, in the Saratov Region, where we lived in a windowless storeroom (we couldn’t get an apartment at that time, we didn’t have money for anything). We had a bed and two nails on the wall, and nothing else. I remember when the store had flour for evacuees, and my mother gave me money to go and buy some. Near the store, a bunch of boys my age were playing ochko and winning.2 I sat down to play, thinking that I’d give my mother a present of flour and money. But of course, I lost. When I got home, my mother was very harsh with me. She put my head between her knees, took my pants off, and spanked me until it hurt. After that, I never played ochko again. 

Something else happened when they brought vegetable oil for evacuees. Smiling, my mother gave me a bottle and money, and I left. I bought the oil and brought the bottle home. The woman who owned our home was sitting in the courtyard when I arrived and asked me what I had. I said that it was vegetable oil. She said she’d make me a small piece of fish with a potato with  the vegetable oil, and took the bottle of oil from me. I stood around, but she didn’t come back. I left. My mother asked me where the oil was, and I told her what had happened. We cried together, though she didn’t punish me. When it grew dark, the woman who owned our home invited us to her home and sat us at her table. There was a large bowl and several spoons on the table, and we all ate borscht and porridge from that bowl. The woman told my mother that I was a good boy and gave her the vegetable oil. She’d poured a glass of it for herself and given my mother the rest. 

We lived like this until February 1942, when the Germans crossed the Volga River. My mother and I had to evacuate further, this time to a village called Uzunkul in the Uralsk Region. We lived in a dormitory there with 40 other families. By then, I was 12 years old and working on a Kolkhoz, where my job was to drive the Kolkhoz director in a wagon pulled by horses.3 My mother babysat the smaller children in the dormitory. 

In 1945, I took a train to Kiev while my mother stayed on the Kolkhoz for another year. I lived with relatives in Kiev and attended the eighth grade there at night. During the day, I worked for a mechanic in his garage. After the eighth grade, I went to a technical school to learn automobile repairs. I went to that school for four years before I went into the Army in 1949 and served in Russia’s Far East. 

I returned to Kiev in 1951 and finished at the technical school, then entered Kiev’s Automobile Institute, where I studied at night for six years and worked as a mechanic during the day. I graduated in 1962 and worked for several years in a taxi yard. A friend of mine recommended me for the position of director of a truck center, which I accepted. 

I immigrated to the United States from Ukraine in October 1979. At first, my wife, son, and I lived in New York. We moved to Tucson in September 1981, where I worked for a heating and cooling company for 30 years, until 2007, when the company moved to Mexico.