I was born on September 19, 1938, so I was just two years old when the war began. My memories of the start of the war, the evacuation from Belarus, and the first few years during the evacuation are therefore hazy and broken. Individual moments are separate and have stayed in my mind ever since. They’re very clear. I’m writing these memories from discussions with my mother, Fira Yakovlevna Tamarkina.

When the war began my mother, father, younger sister and I lived in Mozyr, in the Gomel region (then known as Polesia) of Belarus. My sister Lyudmila was born on April 7, 1941, and was only two months old at the time. The Germans bombed Mozyr in the first days of the war, and there were already refugees from Brest all over the city. It was terrible. My father and others from the military committee captured German paratroopers. Several days after the war began, my father was sent to the front.

On July 1, 1941, my mother, little sister and me were evacuated from Mozyr. Despite my age at the time, I remember the day we evacuated. A large number of people were crying and screaming near a three-ton truck in which a man with a light-blue shirt (I remember the shirt color and how the man waved his arms) spoke loudly through a megaphone, gesturing.  

My mother was able to take a suitcase with cloth diapers and baby things, and another suitcase with some clothing. All of our property was left behind. We were evacuated in freight cars filled with people, taking our places in upper-level seats. My mother dried cloth diapers on the seats, though there was nowhere to wash them. The Germans bombed the train as we traveled, and one bomb hit a car that burned. When they bombed us everyone would scatter from the cars and fall to the ground.

Although my mother had a baby, my sister, her breast milk had dried up, so when military trains stopped at the stations she’d ask the soldiers for any sort of produce: sugar, bread, and the foot wrappings they wore for socks to use for diapers. No one ever turned her down. The train didn’t pass through Moscow, but went instead to a small town in the Stalingrad region called Chernyshka. My mother got a job teaching math at Basakino School there.

When the Germans began their offensive at Stalingrad we evacuated again. We lived with a Cossack woman in the village of Basakino. She tried to persuade my mother to leave my little sister, Mila, there with her. She said it would save Mila, but my mother refused and our journey continued.

A large tractor-pulled wagon stopped for us, but we went just a few dozen kilometers before the tractor ran out of gas. My mother stood on the side of the road with us while cattle from a nearby collective farm passed by, and finally persuaded the man driving the cattle to take us with him. They hitched an ox to the wagon and my mother drove the cart. The sun beat down on us mercilessly while we moved behind the herd. It was very dry. The clouds of dust were so thick that it seemed almost dark. Our eyes began to fester, and we ended up with boils and lice.

We made it to the Volga River, where all-day bombings had turned the place into sheer hell. Very many people were killed or drowned on boats or ferries heading for the opposite shore, but by some miracle we escaped injury and crossed. Refugees gathered at the train station there, and were taken away from the constant bombing to be put on freight trains. When our train stopped at stations for water, my mother would leave the car and run to the nearest house to ask for small amounts of bread, milk, and food for the children. She absolutely looked Jewish, but no one ever told her no. We were filthy, covered with lice, and constantly sick from malnutrition.  

The train made it to the city of Zlatoust, in the Chelyabinsk region of the Urals, a transfer center for the evacuation. Dozens of trains arrived with evacuees who were then sent through cities in the Urals and further on to Siberia. In Zlatoust my mother joined up with her mother, my grandmother Lyubov Isakovna Tamarkin.  

Zlatoust was a terrible city with awful, angry people. No one would help us. Residents would send out their dogs when a refugee knocked on their house gates. My mother and grandmother were robbed at the Zlatoust train station when they went to receive our scheduled train date. We were to go to the village of Chesna, in the Chelyabinsk region, where my mother was going to teach school. All we had left was a suitcase full of cloth diapers.

We made it to Chesna hungry, dirty, sick and out of clothes. But we did receive an apartment there. Many people were evacuees from Leningrad and from a Leningrad orphanage. The attitude toward evacuees was better in Chesna, but there was little help for us. We were very, very hungry. They fed us at preschool, but it wasn’t enough. We were always hungry.

My personal recollections of that time were such: in the evening, when our landlord came home from work, she would prepare some food on the pechka, often boiled potatoes. I would take my sister Mila to sit at the table, and we’d stare at our landlord with hungry eyes, waiting and wondering whether she’d give us food. My mother would yell at us to go to our room, but nothing helped. We would sit and wait, as if we were glued to our chairs.

But we always got something. I even remember the woman’s name: Klava. She was very compassionate and felt sorry for us. There was no salt, and we got very little bread as there was almost none available. I think my sister and I picked up illnesses that we have had our whole lives from those terrible years of evacuation.  

Something else occurred that I must say here: the leader of Chesna’s communist party invited my mother to a party once. My mother went, and saw the party leader throw a piece of chocolate to his dog. My mother nearly fainted!

My father was killed on August 15, 1944, on the second Ukrainian front. There were many children like us in Chesna, kids whose fathers had been killed in the war. But there were two girls whose fathers sent them packages from the front. They were such well-dressed girls! And the rest of us village children didn’t like them.

It was very cold in the school where my mother worked. The teachers, mainly women, would stock up on wood for heating. We were all constantly sick. Though my mother received notification that my father had been killed, the joy we all felt on Victory Day was immeasurable. Almost everyone was crying from happiness, though many of the women were widows with small children to care for.

In 1945 we returned to Belarus after my mother was assigned to teach at Radoshkovichy School in Molodechno region. In Radoshkovichy, after the war, we also went hungry and were poorly housed. I attended school in Radoshkovichy up to the seventh grade.

My mother never spoke to us about anti-Semitism during those years, but I recall conversations from that time, so I know she constantly worried whether she would get the complete teacher’s rate of pay with a few extra hours. She had two daughters and her mother on her hands. She alone had to feed the family. She was a widow at 30, and was beautiful and smart. But she didn’t want to marry a second time. She was afraid that a husband would somehow reproach her children. I very well recall the conversations between my mother and grandmother about the fact that she was being stifled at the school, that the school director and the director of studies treated her unfairly. My mother taught physics and mathematics to seniors. She was a mathematician “from G-d.”

We moved to Postava in 1952, where my mother also taught school. My sister and I finished our schooling there. My mother lived in Postava until 2009 – it became her home.

I graduated from Belarus State Institute of National Economics in 1955 in industrial economics. Because I graduated with a Red Diploma, I was assigned to work in a semi-closed optics factory in Minsk. This was where I personally encountered anti-Semitism. In the human resources department, I had to provide my last name, first name, patronymic, and my mother’s nationality. My mother, Fira Yakovlevna Tamarkina, was Jewish. I used my father’s last name, Zelenkovskaya, and although the position was reserved for me as a junior specialist, the section supervisor would not let me work. For two months I went regularly to human resources, and each time they told me there wasn’t a position for me in the factory. I finally went to city hall and explained my ordeal to the human resources department head, who helped me get the job at the factory.

The same thing happened to my son, Volodya, and his wife Ella. After graduating from the Belarus Polytechnic Institute and receiving her diploma, Ella couldn’t find work. As soon as she showed her passport to one particular place they told her, “Sorry, we have no openings.” Her passport listed her nationality as “Jewish.” Up to then they’d been prepared to give her a job.

Volodya and Ella Yakorevsky left the Soviet Union with their son on December 1, 1989, first to Vienna and then on to Tucson, Arizona. My husband, Solomon Isakovich Yakorevsky, and I left our home in the Soviet Union to reside permanently in America on March 8, 1993. Our children invited us to come.

We owe thanks to our children that we have now lived in the United States for 17 years. We bless this country and are thankful for it. America has become our homeland. We are American citizens and proud of that.