My name is Vilyam Bukhman, born in 1926 in the town of Chechelnik in the Vinnitsa region of Ukraine. My mother, Dyshel Leybovna Sherstyanaya, was born in 1897 in Torgovets, several kilometers from the city of Uman. She was the eleventh child in the poor family of a miller, and the first Jewish girl to attend a Russian school. She also passed the exams to enter gymnasium in the seventh grade. Her family was very poor, and some of the children moved to Brazil as adults. She taught at a Jewish School after the revolution, and after that she worked in an orphanage. She met my father in 1921.

My father, Aron Peysakh Leybovich Bukhman, was born in 1896 in Chechelnik. He had an older brother, Srul, and a younger sister, Sheyva. My father was shot by bandits during the civil war but survived. He spent the rest of his life as an invalid paralyzed on his right side. We moved to Odessa in 1937, where he completed training courses to learn how to write with his left hand. He became a bookkeeper, which allowed him to provide for his family for the rest of his life.

My older brother Lev died in 1930. I had two other brothers: Israil, my middle brother, was born in 1932, and my younger brother Ilya was born in 1937. We lived in two small towns, Savran and Krivoye Ozero, until 1937 when we moved to Odessa. I finished the fourth grade in Krivoye Ozero, and in Odessa I was able to complete the eighth grade prior to the start of the war.

The Great Patriotic War began on June 22, 1941. That day my friends and I heard aircraft and ran up a hill to see what was happening towards Odessa’s military harbor. A Russian Navy destroyer was shooting at German aircraft, but the Germans bypassed the port and turned towards the city. Bombs fell very close to our house, and one of the neighboring buildings collapsed when it was hit. That’s when we ran home.

Up to that time I’d read a lot about German atrocities during the war, and had heard radio broadcasts about how the fascists behaved as they occupied territories. Knowing this, I began asking my parents to leave Odessa. People were already evacuating by train, and many were leaving on ships. At one point we even loaded our things on a ship, but at the last minute my parents decided to go by train. This turned out to be the right choice, since we later found out that the ship had been sunk.

My mother’s nephew, Fima Sherstyanoy, served in the Red Army and learned that trains were being organized to evacuate citizens. He came to us and other relatives and put us on the last train leaving the city.

The evacuation was extremely difficult. We traveled an entire week from Odessa to Nikolaev (a two-hour trip in normal conditions), and on the way we were repeatedly bombed.

The Germans bombed our train two days after we left Odessa. People on the train jumped from the boxcars and ran into nearby woods, which was also a complete swamp. The small children cried and hung onto the adults. I had to search for my family because everyone had scattered. Eventually the locomotive driver signaled us and everyone ran back to their boxcars.

The train continued on, and after a week we arrived at Varvarovka, the last stop before Nikolaev. This particular day is burned into my memory, as German airplanes flew out of the clouds and began bombing the station while we were there. Once again, everyone jumped out of the boxcars, this time running to a sandy embankment. My little brother, just four years old, ran with me. I was afraid for him and lay him down on the embankment, then covered his body with mine. We lie there motionless as the enemy fired. But apparently G-d wanted us to stay alive. When the attack ended, people who survived (including my brother Ilya and I) ran back to the boxcars and our train continued on. We left the dead on that sandy embankment, now red with their blood.

At Kherson we were bombed again, and again we ran and hid, though my brother cried and repeated: “Vilya, my legs hurt.” I put him on my shoulders and ran.

They bombed us at Melitopol as well, and again we all scattered. It was nighttime, and I ended up with my Aunt Sheyba in a different car, one used for refrigeration. They locked us inside, where people were crying and children were screaming. There were more than 60 people in the refrigeration car, knocking and begging to be let out, going to the bathroom in the wagon. It was terrible. There was no way to breathe and many could have died. Passers-by heard strange sounds and couldn’t understand where they were coming from. Luckily someone figured it out and opened the doors, and people began falling from the car. Aunt Sheyba and I spotted my mother, father, and brothers in the crowd that had gathered nearby, and we cried with joy that we were alive. My family thought they would never see us again.

My parents told us we would not be going any farther. After Melitopol the Germans stopped bombing the train, so we reached the relative calm of Mariupol, where my mother’s sister and older brother Sender lived. He had five sons, all of them away in the war.

I was only fifteen years old, but I’d read in the papers and heard on the radio that German forces were on the move in the west and we needed to keep going. I understood that the Germans were advancing to the north, and in all probability would cut off Mariupol, which wasn’t far from the Sea of Azov to the south. We would find ourselves in their trap. I told my father and mother that we would perish if we remained, insisting that we leave immediately. My parents listened to me, got the tickets, and we traveled to Gorky, to the north. My mother asked her sister and brother-in-law to come with us, but her sister’s husband refused. He said the Germans were a cultured and civil people and wouldn’t kill anyone, not even the Jews; he also said it was all propaganda designed to scare us. They decided to remain behind, and they perished.

We traveled for about eight days to the north and reached the transfer station at Kinel, from which the trains went south to Tashkent. We boarded a train going to Uzbekistan. We’d heard that the Germans had cut the rail lines leading to Mariupol, which they’d entered without resistance.

We reached Tashkent, stopped briefly at Andijan, and then arrived at the regional center of Grunch-Mazar, where we stayed. My Uncle Srul and his wife Anya (Khana) and their son Isya went on to the city of Osh.

We were given a room in Grunch-Mazar (about 14-square meters) across from the local newspaper office, where my father worked as a bookkeeper.

There wasn’t a school in the village so I had to go to school on a Sovkhoz seven kilometers away. I stayed there in the school dormitory made up of two large rooms. At the beginning of the year both rooms were full, but after a month or so only several children remained. The boys played ochko, bura, and kostyashki, all for money, and I lost the 30 rubles my mother had given me to buy food in the cafeteria. Once I learned how to play I was able to win back the 30 rubles, which I hid in order to have enough for food. This is how I lived that winter and spring.

During the holidays I worked in a silk winding factory, drying cocoons in a four-floor building. There were racks covered with tarps every meter-and-a-half. The racks were 50- to 60-meters long, and we moved across them by climbing on the racks. We turned the cocoons with both hands, then climbed to the next rack to do the same. We did this all day.

My father was transferred to the newspaper Ferganskaya Pravda, so he had to leave for Fergana. I went with him and attended the tenth grade in Fergana. We lived at the newspaper office and slept on the floor or in chairs. Not great conditions for studying, but I did okay.

I remember the first time I went to school in Fergana a girl invited me to sit at her table, where three other students were sitting. During a break one of the local boys grabbed me by the collar and wanted to hit me just because I was a Jew, though no one helped me. So I had to defend myself. Prior to this he’d beaten up another boy at my table who was also a Jew. Besides us, there were no other Jews in our class.

I eventually became friends with the children and helped them study, and they defended me from anti-Semitism. At the end of the school year, as I was going down the stairs, that same boy came up behind me with a knife. But the military instructor grabbed him and twisted the knife away. I never saw the boy again.

The girl who sat beside me, Faya, could see that I was hungry and brought me lunch every day. She’d put it on the desk for me. Faya was doing better than us because her older sister had married a Red Army officer who supplied her family with food.

I went to Tashkent to enroll in the Voronezh Aviation Institute in 1943, but when I learned that the food ration card at Tashkent Railway Institute was better I went there. I tutored a student at the institute who helped me by giving me food. When I became sick from hunger, a doctor in Tashkent said that if I made it to spring I’d live. After three years in Tashkent I decided to return to Odessa in 1946. I enrolled at the Odessa Naval Institute to study ship mechanics.

I met my wife Luisa in Odessa in March 1951, and at the end of July I left for Baku, Azerbaijan, where I worked as a design engineer. Luisa and my mother came to Baku, where we registered our marriage. Four months later we celebrated our wedding when I went to Odessa for Luisa. I worked seven years in Baku, returning to Odessa with Luisa in 1957. Our daughter Galina was born in 1953, and nine years later our son Rudolf was born.

I worked at the Marine Sciences Engineering Institute as a designer and team lead for 35 years, and received 35 patents. Some of my designs were shown at the Exhibition of Achievements for National Economy, where I received five silver and four bronze medals over the years.

We immigrated to America soon after I retired in 1992. My daughter’s family had immigrated in 1989. My two younger brothers immigrated to Israel, Ilya in 1977 and Israil in 1989.