I was born on April 20, 1933, in Chernigov, Ukraine. My father Mikhail and mother Rosa had four children: my brother Matvey, my sisters Irina and Zinaida,  and me. My father had four brothers. As the war started, all the men in our family were immediately sent to the front. When the Germans came close to Chernigov, my grandfather gathered all of his daughters-in-law and their children, harnessed the horses, and put booths on top of the carts (like gypsies) to flee. Before the war our fathers worked in a workers’ cooperative, so the horses were ours. We crossed over the Desna River, watching our city go up in flames.

      We left in August but traveled until December. The Germans moved east and we kept running away from them. We were surrounded. German aircraft would fly close to the ground, strafing children and the elderly. Even now I have nightmares of this, and I can still see the faces of the German pilots as they flew in so close to the ground.

      In December, our troops stopped the German offensive and we stopped at the village Vysokoe, in Voronezh region.^[1] The whole village was Jewish. They had been forced to be baptized, and they didn’t speak any Yiddish, but they followed all the Jewish rules and traditions. We were warmly welcomed there, and all fourteen of us lived in the same room. Our mothers and a grandfather worked on a pig farm, and a grandmother stayed with us. We survived only because of our grandparents.

      In the spring, the Germans came close to Voronezh, so the pig farm was loaded on a freight car with bunk beds on top. We traveled like this for a couple of months as we traveled to the Saratov region. We ate the same food as the pigs and slept on bunk beds above the pigs. We arrived in the town called Engels, Saratov region, and lived there until 1944.

      In August 1944, we returned to Chernigov, Ukraine. The city was ruined but our house survived the bombing. There were only two houses on our street that were not destroyed: ours and the house the nuns lived in. The city had neither water nor electricity until 1947. We fetched water from the river and melted snow in winter. For light we used kagantsy, pouring fat on a plate and putting a metal tube with a piece of fabric in it. It gave off a little light. We rarely used lamps as kerosene was really hard to get. In order to burn the stove we used everything we could get in the forrest and everything we could carry in our hands. We planted crops, since the soil in Ukraine was rich and there was a lot of it. We did everything by hand.

      My mother worked a lot because she had to. We children did everything all by ourselves because we knew that we had no choice and we needed to survive. My father returned in December 1947. After he was wounded, he worked in a mine in Kuzbass, and couldn’t leave.^[2] All my family survived the war.

      I lived in Chernigov until 1952. I graduated ten grades and then went to college in Novosibirsk, because the Jews couldn’t get into any academic institutions in Ukraine.^[3] I graduated from Radio Technology College and worked at first in a military facility in Baryn, Belarus, and then at the Automatic Telephonic Station in Chernigov. My son Alexander graduated from Gomel State University and worked as a geologist in Taymyr, in the village of Khatanga. He died in 1991 while rafting down the river Rybno in the Krasnoyarsk region.

      My brother’s family and I immigrated to the United States in March of 2002 and came to Tucson. The Jewish Community of Tucson accepted us immediately. We didn’t get a chance to choose but we liked Tucson very much.

      War is the most terrible thing, as is hatred for nationality and skin color. If wars don’t stop, the planet will die. We have to be kinder and more patient with one another

^[1] Southeast of Moscow on the border of Ukraine.

^[2] Kuzbass is short for Kuznetsk Basin. Located in southwest Siberia, it is one of the largest coal mining areas in the world.

^[3] Before 1990 the course of school training in the Soviet Union was 10 years.