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This is me, Igor Brover and my sister Rosa Garysheva. This photo was taken in Ursat'yevskaya town, Tashkent region (Uzbekistan) in 1943. We are standing in the yard of the house where we accommodated in the evacuation. Behind us is the front door to the annex building where we had our room. This photograph was made to be sent to my father at the front.
During Great Patriotic War our family evacuated from Ukraine in early July 1941. We arrived at Ursat'yevskaya town in Tashkent region in Uzbekistan. From there we had a truck to take us to a small kishlak village not far from the town. The houses in this kishlak were built from the mixture of straw and clay. They had flat roofs where the villagers dried apricots and grapes. We were accommodated in a small room in one of these houses. Our landlords were good to us. There were no demonstrations of antisemitism. My mother worked in the field and my grandmother and grandfather were with the children. I picked the Uzbek language promptly and even learned to curse. Since there was no Russian school in the kishlak, my grandfather taught me. Of course, I preferred playing outside, but my grandfather was strict and made me study. He had no books or an ABC book. He found old Russian newspapers and taught me to read.
We stayed in the kishlak for about two years before we moved to Ursat'yevskaya. My mother began to work as an inspector in the financial department, I went to school, my grandfather became a janitor and my grandmother looked after my sisters at home. Our family received bread per cards. My mother received 500 grams, my grandfather - 400 grams as a janitor and we, children - 300 grams each. When I went to school, my mother made me a bag from some pieces. There were no books. I wrote on blanks that my mother brought from work. They were stapled together like notebooks. I finished the first form in three months. My grandfather prepared me well. I shared my desk with the boy whose father worked in the military registry office. I think he was a military commandant. We were hungry, and our teacher gave each of us a little piece of brown bread during an interval, but this boy had slices of bread and butter every day and he didn't need these pieces. He didn't want to study. I did his tasks for him and he gave me his bread. I ate brown bread that he had and took white bread to my sisters Rosa and Raisa at home. They were so used to it that when I was coming home from school they were waiting by the window and seeing me they ran to me and got this bread out of my bag. Usually my grandmother took it away from them to prevent any argument and gave it to them by little pieces.
