My name is Yuriy Gorelik, born in 1932 in the city of Kalinkovichy, in Belarus’s Polesia Region (now known as the Gomel Region). I had two older sisters, one brother, and one younger sister. My oldest sister moved to Israel with her family and died there. My older brother lived in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), was ill for a long time and died. My younger sister and I are the only ones left. She lives in Minsk, Belarus, with her children.

      My father was Faitel Gorelik, a deputy chairman for prefabrication and production of agricultural goods: cucumbers, tomatoes, and various pickled goods. These goods were all sent to Moscow and Leningrad. My mother, Ginda Golodetz, was a homemaker. She was the oldest in her family; her father was a cobbler. He died in 1935.

      I had just finished second grade in Belarus when World War II began. My father did not get called up by the military because of health reasons, but he was mobilized into a Destruction Battalion, a local defense force committed to catching German spies and saboteurs.[1] As such, he stood watch at a bridge and checked documents, looking for Nazi spies. His only weapons were grenades, which he carried in his pants pockets (he carried the fuses in a breast pocket).

      Because the Germans were advancing so rapidly to the east, it was decided that cattle in the area would be evacuated farther east. My father was appointed as the Deputy Chief of evacuating livestock, with headquarters located in Bragin, Belarus.

      I can recall the German FW-189 reconnaissance aircraft that flew over Kalinkovichy for some time in early July 1941, after which the shelling and bombing of the city began. With gunfire going off in the city, my mother went to the district leader’s office to ask for help in evacuating her and her four children from the advancing Nazis. They gave her a horse and wagon, and we loaded only our necessities before heading for Bragin. Just before the war we’d built a five bedroom house, which we now had to leave behind along with a cow, our chickens, and other belongings. We were finally able to join our father in Bragin.

      The next waypoint for evacuating the cattle was the city of Chernigov, Ukraine. The herd had crossed the Desna River as it headed east. Peasants from Belarus and Ukraine were passing out leaflets that said “Kill the Jews and the Commissars,” which were dropped from German aircrafts. With the herd, we arrived in Kursk, Russia, where the Germans bombed us. By this time, Kursk was on the front. My father was ordered to take the herd to Voronezh and hand over control to authorities there, which he did several days later. From there our family was allowed to evacuate by train farther to the east.

      We joined many other families in freight cars, where we all slept on a layer of hay that covered the car’s floor. We arrived in Kuibyshev (now Samara) via Michurinsk, then took another train to Chkalovsk (now Orenburg) Region.

      In the fall of 1941, we finally arrived to the Novosergievskaya railway station, in Orenburg region. Our family lived with a woman whose last name was Zatsepina. Her husband was at the front and her daughter lived in Orenburg. When we arrived we had nothing to eat, and were given soup made of water and pounded flour.

      My mother and older sister were assigned to work on a kolkhoz.[2] My father was assigned to work at a small multi-purpose village factory. He organized the production of leather soles for army boots and the processing of sheep skins for sewing army coats.

      Later, my parents rented a one-room house (the kitchen was in the room) in Novosergievskaya. Out of kindness, our neighbors there gave us some manure to make kizyak, which was used locally for fuel. We gathered straws in the fields, added it to the manure, stirred it by trampling on it, dried it into forms and cut the forms into bricks. In this way we stocked our furnace and stove. Following harvests, we would take the sunflower stalks from the fields and cut them for bundles that we used in the furnace during the summer.

      There were two schools in Novosergievskaya. One was a village school, and the other was the school for the children of railway employees. At home our family spoke Yiddish, and I had completed two years of school at home in Belarus so I only knew Belarussian. I did not speak Russian at all when we arrived in Russia, but I had to learn. Because of this I had to repeat the second grade in the village school.

      While I was a student, we were often taken out to the fields to collect the wheat ears that remained after machine harvesting. We then had to hand them over to the kolkhoz granary. We were also taken by truck to the forest to gather the rose hips that were used as remedies in the military hospitals. We spent almost three years in Novosergievskaya.

      In 1944, when Belarus was partially liberated, my father wrote a letter to the head of the republic, applying for permission to go back home in order to organize pickle production (cabbage, cucumbers, mushrooms and wild berries). My father got a permit to return home.

      In the late summer of 1944 our family left Novosergievskaya and headed first to Kuibyshev (now Samara), then to Myrgorod (Ukraine). Belarus was still partially occupied by the Nazis. From Myrgorod, we headed to Poltava. There I saw Americans for the first time in my life. They were cheerful and friendly. They treated us with food and chocolate. In Poltava, for a modest fee, we hired a truck that took us to a railway station. We took a train and arrived in Kalinkovichy, Belarus, in September 1944.

      We learned that my paternal grandmother and grandfather had been killed by the Nazis, who’d also killed my mother’s two brothers along with their entire families. Our house was completely destroyed and burned. Even the foundation of the house was destroyed. We settled at first with friends, then at my cousin Basia’s house. They were also evacuated, but their house remained undamaged.

      My father got a job. My older sister also got a job as an accountant in the consumer union. I went to fifth grade at a local school. Classes were held in an unsuitable building for school. The actual school building was occupied by a military hospital. When students came to school in the morning they warmed themselves by the fire in the schoolyard before class.        I remember one time that the bell rang and we ran to class, and there was a sudden explosion in the schoolyard. Someone had thrown a hand grenade into the fire. Fortunately, it exploded when everybody had gone to class, so nobody was hurt.

      In 1949, we finally bought one half of a house in Kalinkovichy. I graduated from the tenth grade in 1951 and applied to the mechanical department of the Leningrad Technological Institute.[3] They did not accept me and suggested I go study in the concrete school. I refused and collected my documents.

      I went to Tallinn and studied for a year, after which I decided to go back to Leningrad and apply again to the Technological Institute.[4] This time I was accepted into the mechanical department. I graduated in 1955 and was sent to work in Ukraine’s Donbass region. I worked in a factory in Gatchina, Russia, where I met my future wife. We married in 1959 and moved to Leningrad, where I was a mechanic and equipment operator in an integrated home-building factory for 23 years.

             My wife and I moved to Tucson, Arizona, in 1996.

[1] Destruction Battalions were created and controlled by the NKVD (forerunner to the KGB) as paramilitary units in western areas of the Soviet Union after Germany’s invasion.

[2] A Kolkhoz was a collective farm in the Soviet Union.

[3] Before 1990 there were just 10 grades in the Soviet school system.

[4] Tallinn is the capital and largest city of Estonia, formerly one of the republics of Soviet Union.