My twin sister and I were born in Kharkov, Ukraine, on September 28, 1930. She lives in Cleveland, Ohio. In the 1930s our family was very poor, but after my parents received their own apartment we lived comparatively well. My father bought a piano, and I studied music from the age of six. I was a good student, and received good grades. Everything was going well until the war suddenly began.

Because Kharkov was such an industrialized city there were many major factories there, such as the tractor factory which also made tanks and other military equipment. The Germans bombed Kharkov quite soon after the war began, although the Germans were still fairly far away. Our father kept us calm as a panic broke out in the city. He was born in 1891, and his village had been occupied by the Germans during World War I. He said that the Germans were intelligent and cultured, and that they wouldn’t treat people poorly or kill the Jewish people. He said they didn’t do this in World War I and they wouldn’t now. This calmed our family quite a bit.

My sister and I were ten years old and our father was fifty, so he wasn’t sent to the front. He was called up instead into the civil defense army that dug trenches and other things to slow the enemy down. The civil defense army sent him somewhere, though we weren’t sure where he was.

The Germans started bombing Kharkov right away. All across the city, homes were either completely destroyed or on fire. It was simply horrible. In just over three months the Germans occupied Kharkov, in October 1941.

Prior to that the trains continued to move. Kharkov was an industrial center and the government had to evacuate factory equipment to safer locations to continue making weapons.

Soon after the Germans entered Kharkov, my mother went to get groceries and saw an announcement that the Jews, to include the children, had to gather quite far from the city at the tractor factory with their money, gold and other valuables. That’s when my mother began to panic. She sewed small pouches from fabric to use as backpacks so we could take a few small things, and we left Kharkov.

We headed east, moving for quite some time from village to village. At first people helped us, but then it became very dangerous for them to do so. Nazi soldiers were going door to door searching. We always heard their dogs barking, so we were alerted. We would stay in cellars when people let us; everyone was in fear for their lives and some were afraid to let us stay. We were fearful as well.

We decided to cross the front, though I don’t recall very much of that. I remember that we went through the woods at night to get to the Soviet side.  This was extremely dangerous to do because the front wasn’t a straight line and was always changing. But we made it.

Someone told my mother a train with factory equipment was heading east. We made it to that particular station, but the train had machinery on flat cars and several boxcars, but no wagons for people to sit in. The boxcar doors were closed, so we sat down on the station platform. It was October, so it was cold. Someone saw us and opened a boxcar door, then helped us in. There were already people inside the boxcar.

The train moved very slowly. Near Belgorod (less than 200 kilometers from Kharkov), we heard the distended noise of a German Messerschmitt, which everyone recognized, and the earth all around us began to explode. People in the boxcar yelled that we should jump out and scatter, that if a bomb hit the boxcar everyone would be killed.

Through cracks in the boxcar we could see two small children crying and running around a woman whose body was lifeless on the ground. Our mother put us on her lap and hugged us, saying, “if our fate is to survive we survive together. I don’t want to live without you, and I don’t want you to be left without me.” The sound of that Messerschmitt has been in my mind since that day. I will never forget seeing the pilot in his cockpit, which was open, flying low and spraying those who had jumped from the boxcar with his machine guns. Afterwards, our train continued on, though slowly.

The second time we were bombed was after we passed Kursk. The rail route was one that existed long ago and went to Crimea, Kharkov, Moscow via Belgorod, Kursk, Tula, and Moscow. As we passed Kursk the Germans attacked the train, but the train was moving very fast and there were no casualties. There was just fear, because we’d heard the Messerschmitts and the ground rumbling around us.

As we passed through Orel I saw another sight I’ll never forget; the train ahead of us had been bombed and the station was burning. As we passed the station I remember that I could feel the heat from the flames, as if they were right in our boxcar. I could see human bodies scattered amid the destroyed train cars. It’s impossible for me to forget any of this.

We stopped for a long time in Moscow. The first snow had already fallen. Our train was set to go to a factory, and they knew there would be people in several of the boxcars. We stood waiting beside a burzhuika, which warmed us some.

The train took us to the Ural mountains area, in Siberia, to a small town in the Kemerovo region (I don’t recall the name). At that time in the Soviet Union people would say, “He who doesn’t work doesn’t eat,” so with two children to feed my mother found work quite fast. She received ration cards for bread, sugar, meat, and some type of grain. I remember that when my sister or I lost a ration card it was very dramatic.

Our mother worked in a factory (she was, in general, quite unhealthy and had heart problems) and would return from work very tired with pot of soup that had a spoon attached to it. Aside from this, we had to use ration cards for food. Of course we were hungry, but soon after my father found us via Buguruslan. Before I came to America I went to that same center to pick up documents related to the evacuation. While I was there I was shown a piece of light green paper with my father’s handwriting on it. It was his request to find us.

My father wound up in Gorky, 600 kilometers north of Moscow. He picked us up and took us to live with him there. Prior to the war, the factory in Gorky where he worked built bicycles. Once the war began, the factory started building military motorcycles with sidecars. My father was likely taken there on one of the trains from Kharkov.

The government had forced homeowners to provide rooms for evacuees, so we were given the upper room of a house with five windows. The room wasn’t used in winter since it only had a partial wall for the pechka, which was in another room. The winter of 1941-1942 was so cold that we didn’t go to school. We didn’t even have winter clothes. I remember that a glass of water on our table froze in that room.

My sister and I would sit by the wall of the pechka, across from the windows, and rub against the wall for heat. We did this so much that in the spring we could see the fire inside the pechka, through the wall. We were very cold and very hungry, and I became ill. I had horrible headaches, and could not look directly into lights. My family would cover the lamps for me. Since that time I never use overhead lights; just one or two lamps, and I’ve suffered from headaches ever since as well.

We felt better with our father near us. Both of my parents worked, but my father worked a lot. He was a barber before the war and had soft hands, but during the war he worked as a grinder Gorky, and was a real workaholic, sometimes working more than 16 hours in a day. They considered him a Stakhanovite. My mother would sell any awards he received (during the war they gave wine and vodka as awards instead of money).

We were given a ramshackle home to live in with a dirt floor. This time we lived by ourselves. Three-fourths of the room was taken up with a large Russian pechka, which we would lay on and watch our mother give bottles of wine and vodka to large men who gave her money in return for them. The next day she would go to the market and buy bread.

I didn’t start school until after the New Year because I was sick. The factory issued my father size 10 boots with canvas tops, and even though I was a little girl I wore those boots to school. The school closer to our house had been converted into a hospital, so we had to walk five kilometers to a different school. The second school was so filled with students that we had to attend in shifts, which meant we returned home late each night. During a bombing one day, they made us go outside, and somehow I ended up in a snowdrift. I couldn’t get out and wound up with frostbite on my legs and arms. Now I’m very happy to be in Tucson, since all my life in Kharkov I had to buy special mittens to keep my hands warm in winter. Even now I often have cold hands, but that’s all trivial, the trivialities of the war years.

There were several military factories in Gorky, and when the Germans approached Moscow they started bombing those factories. We didn’t live near the aviation and automobile factories that were making tanks and other combat equipment, but we could see the fires off in the distance.

Kharkov was liberated on August 23, 1943. My mother began to gather our things for the trip home, which we finally made in the summer of 1944. The factory wouldn’t release my father because we were still at war.

The three of us (my mother, sister and I) returned to Kharkov. Once we arrived, we found a huge crater where our house used to be. It had been a beautiful apartment building, two stories with stained glass windows.

Relatives of ours, who’d arrived earlier, provided us with shelter. They lived with other families in one large room, and we slept on the floor until we could get our own room. My mother’s older sister had been a doctor at the front, and she began the process of getting us an attestat, since we were considered family of a service member at the front. Because of this we received a room in an apartment with five other families. There was one toilet for everyone, and one wash basin in the kitchen. It had a cook top in the kitchen that didn’t work because there was no gas. Each room had its own pechka stoked with wood. This is where we cooked our food.

The war ended, but the factory in Gorky still wouldn’t release my father. In late 1947 he fell ill with malaria, and my mother went to take care of him. Only then would they let him return to his family. My father had the highest qualifications as a grinder, and was involved in making motorcycle part number 226. He was one of the only grinders who could make that part. He was a workaholic.

My father’s malaria cleared up quickly after he returned to Kharkov. It’s possible the change in climate helped him, but he remained quite weak and didn’t work for some time after. He eventually went to work as a barber.

I graduated from school in 1948 and was accepted to attend university, where I studied biology. The competition was fierce, but I was accepted. I wanted to be a doctor, and was later accepted to study animal and human physiology. This allowed me to attend postgraduate medical school after I graduated and worked some. I was already married by the time I graduated from the institute in 1953.

Although I was an active, excellent student, I was unable to find work right away because my passport showed that I was Jewish. Specialists were needed everywhere, but once I showed my passport people would apologize and claim the positions were taken. This occurred many times.

This went on until 1955, when I’d already had my daughter. One of my classmates introduced me to the director of the pathology laboratory at an ophthalmic institute. I became a laboratory technician at the scientific research center at Girshman Medical Institute. Professor Kopid taught me a lot related to pathology while I was there.

I took time off from work and began a two-year postgraduate medical school program, then returned to the laboratory. When Professor Kopid retired I became head of the laboratory. I was a junior researcher and was working on my dissertation when all of the scientific research centers in Kharkov were closed in 1963. Their closures echoed the “Doctor’s Plot,” as all of the branch chiefs in the ophthalmic institute were Jews who’d been in the war and had received awards. They were all highly intelligent PhD candidates, and I was lucky to have worked 10 years with them.

Our institute was closed. I began working at a regional health station, in charge of the food hygiene laboratory, where I worked for 30 years. I resigned from work two weeks before I left for the United States. I was involved in studies related to the influence of microwaves on B vitamins, and I’ve had several articles published on nutrition. I arrived in Tucson in January 1996.