I was born on June 15, 1937, in Odessa, Ukraine. I had one older brother. I truly don’t remember much prior to the terrible day that changed our family’s life so dramatically, though the story is one that I learned from a neighbor who lived in the same communal apartments in which we lived.

      Just before I was born, in 1936, my father was sent to Spain to take part in the Spanish Revolution. When he returned in 1940, he brought a Spanish boy home with him, something the Soviet government supported in those days. The boy’s name was Valentin Zeyger.

      My father returned from Spain after I was born, though after his arrival he was accused of spying for Spain and was arrested as an “enemy of the state.” The day he was arrested, a neighbor picked me up from daycare, and when we got to my apartment the place had been completely wrecked. My mother was on the couch, crying, and I sat with her and cried as well. At the time my older brother Misha was living with my mother’s parents in Cherkasy. I never saw Misha again.

      According to my neighbor, my father’s name was Grigoriy and my mother’s name was Anna. Both had graduated from Plekhanov Institute with degrees in Soviet Trade. They were then sent to work in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where my brother Misha was born. My neighbor didn’t know much else about my family.

      My mother and I were sent to a prison camp for the wives and children of enemies of the state, where they separated us.[1] That was the last time I ever saw my mother. I was put in a cell with one other person and only one bed. Anything they could take away from us they did. They would feed us twice a day, morning and night, but we ate very quickly because the older boys would take our food from us. We became hungrier and dirtier as the days passed.

      One day in 1941, they gave us clothing, candy and bread rolls, then took us on buses to Belyaevka, where the main pumping station supplying all of Odessa with water was located. We were put into barracks there, and again we slept two-to-a-bed. There was no one there to oversee us and we roamed the whole area without guards watching us, looking for food. The older boys simply ran away. Local teenagers would come and take our food to feed their pigs, but in the end several elderly guards arrived, which brought the looting to an end.

      On June 22, 1941, the war began. I turned four-years-old one week earlier. The Germans started bombing Odessa the first morning of the war. Nearly all grown men disappeared from the barracks, replaced instead with women.

      About a month later, on one particular night, the sounds of vehicles and tanks woke us. Belyaevka had been occupied by the military, but from their uniforms and languages we knew they weren’t Germans. As it turned out, the forces that occupied Belyaevka were from Romania and Italy. That night we were quickly loaded onto horse drawn carts and taken to Odessa, 40 kilometers away, in order to further evacuate. They kept us quarantined at Odessa’s harbor, the terminal point for trains in the city. I don’t remember how long we stayed there, but it wasn’t long.

      Late one night they woke us and took us to a ship, “The Lenin,” which we boarded just prior to its departure. The Germans attacked the ship, but G-d spared me from being hit. Several people were killed. The man next to me was killed, though I only received a scratch on my forehead that they later bandaged.

      I don’t recall how long the voyage was, but we eventually made it to the city of Novorossiysk. I’d never seen so many people roaming around. Some carried tea pots, others with watering cans, everyone asking where they could find water. We were immediately separated from the crowds and taken to Gurzuf on a barge, where we were unloaded and left on the piers without being fed.

      We took to walking around the city asking for handouts. One morning when we awoke, we noticed a large number of carts being drawn by bulls instead of horses. We loaded into the straw-filled carts and the whole caravan headed out into the unknown. We didn’t know it at the time, but we were actually being taken to Cossack villages, where the residents wanted to take us into their families.

      We traveled for at least two months, eating once a day. It felt like an eternity. We were pelted with cold rain in the fall and we were barely clothed. Some wore women’s undergarments, others wore pants, but none of us had shoes or overcoats. The people transporting us didn’t know what to do. I remember very well that they put us close together in the carts and covered us with straw so that just our exposed heads stuck out. Children were getting sick. There was nothing to eat other than plain potatoes. Some people started walking through the villages we passed through, asking for help.

      We finally made it to the junction station at Proletarskaya, formerly known as Starokazachye, the central train station in the Cossack region. They put those who were sick into hospitals, which left only six of us: Shura, Volodya, Igor, Lyuba, Fima and me. Fima was a musician. They fed and clothed us, then put us in a wagon that was transporting horses. Our trip continued.

      They took us to Astrakhan, telling us there that they would not take us further. We got off the train at a station filled with military men, and settled in there. When the soldiers found out who we were they gave us sugar, bread, and all sorts of food. I don’t remember how long we were at the station, though I do remember that they put us in a vehicle and took us to the sea, then onto a ferry to take us to the other side. Once again, the transportation took a long time. From the other side of the sea, we rode in train boxcars filled with the wounded until we arrived at Ashkhabad.[2]

      So ended the long trip from Odessa to Ashkhabad, which I’m sure took from four to five months. We started with 40 people and ended with just six young ones.

      Ashkhabad was very large. We were put up in a school, in a classroom with desks. We sat on the floor and kept quiet. No one knew what to do or where to go, but we needed to eat so we got up and went to the city center to search for food.

      Going from one merchant to another, we asked them for food. Many of them gave, and some just popped us on the head. Through the course of the day, we lost track of Fima and Lyuba. One of the kids took off their shirt so we could gather all the food in it and return to the school. We couldn’t remember where the school was, however, and for the first time in months we became frightened. Nothing seemed familiar to us; different sorts of people, a different language, everything was different. We sat against a wall and waited, forgetting even about the food we had.

      Several older kids came by and saw us, so we told them who we were and they invited us to where they lived. We walked along the streets and wound up in a large park, where they lived beneath a large carousel. We poured our food out onto a mat and they added their food to ours. Their food wasn’t just handouts, but real food. Afterwards, they showed us where we could stay. We all slept very well on that mat and in the morning, the oldest of them got us up and we ate. He explained to us then what they did; they would try to steal all they could and then sell the stolen goods to shopkeepers in order to buy food with the money they made. We also began to steal. I wasn’t much more than five years old, and neither were the other kids. This is how we lived for about 10 days.

      One day, as we were walking through the bazaar, we came across Lyuba and Fima. We were overjoyed to see them! Lyuba asked where we’d been all this time and we told her the truth. She looked at us and said, “Guys, you got yourselves in a lot of trouble. We need to leave this city.” She told us that we’d go to Urengoy, and several days later that’s where we arrived. That was summer, 1942.

      The first thing Lyuba did was take us straight to the river from the train station, where she washed us and our things with river mud. After that, as we began to think of what we should do next, Lyuba got up and left. She returned with her arms filled with plants that were razor sharp, and handed them out. She showed us how to clean the plants and eat them. It was apparently sugar cane (it surprised us that she knew this). We also spotted some interesting fruit in the woods and ate the ones that had dropped to the ground. I’ve never eaten anything like this since then. We later found out that it was dzhida, which, along with mulberries, became a staple food for us.[3] We were full and our clothes were dry. That night, we slept down by the river.

      Lyuba got us up in the morning, and once again we gathered dzhida fruit. We ate and listened as Lyuba told us, “Boys, your childhood is over with. We’re going to the city park opposite the place we stayed overnight. I’m going to leave you there and find shelter.” She left us in the park, which was where the largest hospital in Uzbekistan was located. We waited a long time for her to return, and when she did, it was almost dark and she was with an armless soldier. “I’m Lieutenant Kas’yanov,” he said, “and from now on, I’m going to be your teacher, father, and leader.” They took us to a bathhouse to take real baths, and they cut old uniform shirts and pants to fit us. Then they took us to the kitchen where elderly nurse assistants fed us. Afterwards, we slept in one of their tents.

      In the morning they fed us again and took us to the other end of the park, to a tent city, where we would stay. There were other boys there as well, but older. An officer gathered us together and asked us whether we could read, though it turned out that none of us could. The officer told us we had two weeks to learn, and left. The reason for this, Lyuba said, was that there were soldiers and officers in the hospital who were blind or partially blind, and we needed to learn so we could read their letters and newspapers to them and help them with other things.

      Lyuba brought us old newspapers and we started learning to read. Believe it or not, by the end of the month we were already able to read by syllables! They took Fima away to play the accordion for the soldiers. He was an excellent musician.

      They took us to the hospital wards; the wounded were happy to see us and offered us cigarettes and sugar. By this time, Lyuba was working as a hospital attendant. We told them who we were and where we’d come from, and asked them not to be angry because we’d only learned how to read by syllable. We went through the wards and helped the patients drink water or roll their cigarettes. I somehow wandered into one of the remote wards, where there were patients whose jaws were rotting. The stench was horrible, as were the cries and howls of the patients. We couldn’t even come close so we ran off. We escaped the hospital to run to the river for a bath, where we could forget about everything.

      Hunger eventually took its toll, but where could we go? There was a lot of food at the bazaar, and nothing could stop us from stealing bread and dried apricots, as well as dried lamb meat. After a few hours, we were all full and looking for shelter. We found it at a freight station, where a small tunnel had been dug beneath a bridge, where we ate and went to sleep. Another group of boys woke us up, and we subsequently joined up with them as a gang and started stealing things again.

      They caught us all at once and took us to the police. From there we were taken to a labor unit in a large factory that made felt-lined boots for the men at the front. We were forced to get inside the large vats used to pour lye over wool and knead it with our feet. The guards there were like those in a prison. After several days, we noticed that there were sores all over our feet and we decided to run away. That night we did, but we had no other choice but to return to the hospital.

      The nurses helped us and Lyuba came and told us that if we ran away again they wouldn’t take us in. We began to care for the patients again, reading to them and going to the bazaar to purchase things they’d ordered. Death was in the air, and more people died than survived. That winter’s cold weather was unheard of and there was no way to warm up. We used wood from Saxaul trees, which are quite large with thick branches. We spent days trying to catch it in the river, and we used it to warm up our tent.

      We decided to head off to Russia after Lyuba found out that a large caravan was being readied to go there in March. We prepared ourselves for the trip and set out at night. There was a long line of armed people riding camels ahead of us, and behind us a line of camels carrying women and children. We didn’t ask where they were going, but there were another 10 Russians. They saw how we were dressed and wrapped our heads in scarves until only our eyes could be seen. They told us not to take them off and not to drink. We all had ropes tied around our waists with the other ends tied to camels. Between the camels and us was an Uzbeki man, also tied with a rope, but with a knife in his hands. When sudden storms came, the camels would lie in the sand and we had to hide behind them. At night they made a huge circle with the camels and put us and the women inside the circle, while the guards were outside the circle. They fed us dried meats and fruits, and gave us small cups of very sweet tea.

      The next morning we moved on, and at the end of the day we noticed that the camels were moving a little faster. Our guides explained that this meant there was water nearby. We traveled another day and made it to Solonchak, a village with several small, adobe brick huts and many palm trees. They put us in military vehicles, then on a ferry, and sent us to an orphanage. We escaped from the orphanage and ran off to Odessa, which we’d found out had been liberated. At the Odessa train station, the police caught us and sent us back to the orphanage. I lived there until 1947, going to school and working.

            In 1947 I was adopted into the Ginter family, Yakov and Ita, so I became Vladimir Ginter. I completed vocational school and became a carpenter. I immigrated to the United States in 1977 with my adopted mother, my wife, and our two children.

[1] Mr. Ginter is referring here to a Soviet labor camp within the GULAG system.

[2] Ashkhabad is the capital of Turkmenistan in central Asia.

[3] Dzhida is the fruit from a tree found in Central Asia. The fruit is about the size of an olive but more nearly resembles a date in both flavor and texture.