I am Sofa Bograd (maiden name Sarra Pilnik), and on June 22, 1941, when I was almost four years old, war broke out in my country. My parents were Azril and Tsypa Pilnik, and at that time we lived in Nikolayev, a shipbuilding city in southern Ukraine that’s about 40 miles from the Black Sea. At that time my father was 37, my mother was 35, and my older brother Izya (Isaak) was 14.

As the German invaders were getting closer to Nikolayev, the Red Army retreated farther back into the country. My father’s cousin, Moisey Ptashniy, was in the military and retreated with the Red Army. As his unit passed through Nikolayev he stopped by our house and warned my parents that the Germans were murdering Jews in the captured cities. Both of my parents’ familes had lived through the pogroms in tsarist Russia. When my mother was about five years old, she witnessed the murder of her brothers in one such pogrom. She stayed alive by hiding under a hay wagon. Because my parents had survived those pogroms, they knew they had to take my father’s cousin’s warning seriously. They had to act on very short notice.

My father worked on horse carriages as there were not many cars back then, and horses were the means of transportation. They called it horse-powered transport. My father was given an assignment to evacuate some industrial equipment and machinery further east, away from the front lines to the Ukrainian city of Zaporozhye[1]. The machinery was loaded onto open platforms driven by horses. People who worked the equipment had to have proper documentation to verify that their jobs were critical to the war effort and thus they were evacuated along with the equipment away from the front lines. This special exemption status  from being called to the front lines was called bronya.[2] Although room was made on the platforms for the workers’ families and their belongings, many were on foot.

The Germans were strafing and bombing the roads in and out of cities. In addition, prior to seizing a town the Germans would land their paratroopers who would shoot refugees fleeing the fighting to force them to return back to the town. This was a frequent occurrence and many refugees lost their lives fleeing their native towns.

My father decided that we had to avoid the unsafe roads by walking across the steppe.[3] Since he knew how to navigate the steppe well, he managed to deliver the entire transport to Zaporozhye, both the machinery and the people. My father was a quiet, reserved man who spoke little but was one who could deliver.

The Germans were already bombing Zaporozhye where the Dnepr River banks were very steep. The open platforms with the equipment and people had to cross the river on a pontoon bridge. We were scared and feared for our lives because the bombing could cause the pontoon bridge with all the platforms of equipment, horses and people to turn upside down and then go underwater. The pontoon bridge was a metal structure filled with air that would then resurface with loss of equipment and people. Miraculously, we survived and walked all the way to Zaporozhye.

From Zaporozhye we went by rail to Stalingrad, where we spent the entire year of 1942.[4]  In Stalingrad my father and Izya worked as machine operators. Since Izya was only 14, he stood on a stool to operate the machine. When the Germans reached the outskirts of Stalingrad, the bombing was very heavy and the evacuation of equipment and workers servicing it had to begin promptly.My father was assigned to load the same machinery and equipment on the train carriages and take them to Barnaul, Siberia, far away from the front.[5]

While my parents were busy with paperwork and departure arrangements from Stalingrad, I wandered off and got lost. My mother was desperately looking for me when some woman told her that when the bombing started, she saw some kindergarten children and their teachers run into a movie theater. My mother ran into the theater and found out that the kindergarten teachers saw a child running around and took the child in with the other children for shelter and safety. If my mother had not run into the woman who saw the children enter the theater, I would never have seen my family again.

Just before we departed Stalingrad, Izya went swimming in the cold Volga River and got very sick with inflammation of the middle ear. The inflammation was so bad that he required an urgent operation to remove part of his skull behind the ear to relieve the pressure (trepanation of the skull). As Izya needed medical care and supplies, my mother had to give away her valuables in exchange for some dressing material for the wound. My mother walked from carriage to carriage along the train asking for any kind of dressing material and doctors available to change the dressing.

To avoid contracting typhus, people rode on open-air train cars. Because Izya had skull surgery and was bedridden, our family was given permission to ride in a closed train carriage. That was how we reached Barnaul, Russia (Siberia).

When we arrived in Barnaul, my father worked on horse transportation. He was an extremely hardworking man and a good provider for the family. Izya was put to work on some machinery just like he did in Stalingrad. During the war, many young boys wanted to fight for their country and ran to the front lines. Izya tried to run to the front with another boy. However, at that time to desert your workplace was a crime and Izya was about to get charged for desertion. With whatever resources he had left, my father was able to bribe my brother’s way out of being charged for desertion. My father never told this story to anyone. My mother knew only some of it, but never found out the details. It was a miracle that it all ended well for our family.

We lived in Barnaul until March of 1948. My mother often told stories about our family’s survival in the harsh conditions of Siberia during the war. We lived in barracks. The name of the village was Barachnyy. The local soil was well-suited for growing potatoes. One potato plant yielded an entire big bucket of potatoes. The whole family, including me, worked hard planting, growing, and selling potatoes to get potato crops two or three times per year. We survived on potatoes. During the winter we had to eat potato skins. We grew enough for ourselves and still had some left over to sell. We used the money we made from the sale of the excess potatoes to buy other goods and survive the harsh Siberian winters.

I was still a small child and became ill with scrofula, a skin disease caused by vitamin deficiency. As a result, I was covered with scabs and had to stay home from school. During the day I was alone in the barracks and spent a lot of my time singing patriotic songs along with the radio wearing my mother’s shoes and makeup.

My mother was literate. Many people who lived in the barracks would come to her for help writing letters to Buguruslan, the only town where you could make an inquiry about your loved ones missing in action.[6] She was often successful in finding missing people. That’s how she found her own brother, who was a prisoner of war in Romania. He later lived in Kharkov, Ukraine. It was only due to my father’s care that we escaped to Siberia and survived there through the war.

In 1948, my father took the family back to our hometown of Nikolayev. He also brought along a carriage of potatoes. He sold some of the potatoes on the way and used the money he made to buy a house for us. At that time there was a terrible famine in the country and the city was in ruins. We stayed alive and made it through the years of famine back home due to my father’s perseverance and G-d’s help.

In the postwar years my family lived in Nikolayev. My dream was to become a doctor. However, in those days it was very difficult for a Jewish child to be accepted to medical school. There were unofficial quotas limiting Jewish access to medical school. I spent six years repeatedly trying without success to get into a medical school in Odessa. I settled on a local medical college in Nikolayev and studied to be a nurse practitioner. I first worked as a delivery nurse at a hospital, then at a local pharmacy. I worked for over thirty years after that as a nurse practitioner at a hospital which was part of a big shipbuilding plant in Nikolayev.

In 1961, I married Semyon (Izrail) Bograd, a child Holocaust survivor himself. His family’s survival is a remarkable story. His mother, Raisa Bograd, along with nine-year-old Semyon and two other women with children escaped by walking out of the Jewish shtetl of Dobroye, in the Nikolayev region, just a few days ahead of the Nazis. They fled to Bukhara, Uzbekistan. My husband’s father and older brother were in the army at the front with many other Jewish men from the shtetl. The family returned to Dobroye in 1948. The Jewish community of Dobroye had been annihilated. Over 600 Jews were murdered in Dobroye in September 1941. After the war my husband’s family settled in Nikolayev.

My husband went to technical school where he studied to be an accountant. He worked his way up to the senior accounting position for the large heavy equipment distributor for the city. He was passionate about reading, music, and studying history and Judaism. He collected a large library. He had a beautiful baritone voice, and enjoyed singing in Yiddish, Russian, and Ukrainian. My husband and I raised two daughters. In 1993 my husband passed away and in 1996 I immigrated to Tucson with my younger daughter. I have been happy to find a thriving Jewish community here.

[1] Zaporozhye  is a Ukrainian city approximately 80 miles northeast of Nikolayev.

[2] Literal translation: “armor.”

[3] The steppe is a vast region of grassland and savannas much like the American Midwest.

[4] Stalingrad is about 500 miles east of Zaporozhye.

[5] Barnaul is about 1,700 miles east of Stalingrad. The total distance from Ms. Bograd’s hometown, Nikolayev, to Barnaul is about the same as the distance from New York City to Los Angeles.

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