Naum Balan's school report

This is my school report for finishing the 9th grade in Karaganda in 1945. Our family was there in evacuation during the Great Patriotic War. There were not enough notebooks and we wrote in the ones that we made from newspaper sheets. There were no special official forms in school then, and I had to make a form for my school certificate to be filled in by myself. We arrived in Karaganda [2,000 km from Odessa] in 1942. There were one and two-storied buildings with stone foundations and wooden structures in the town. There were barracks for workers from other locations near the railway station. There were lots of robberies and murders in Karaganda during the war. In evacuation, people were supposed to find accommodation by themselves. We stayed in an earth house for two years. There was so much snow in winter that it was rather warm in the earth house. There were frequent snowstorms. Once there was so much snow that our father could hardly manage to get outside to shovel snow. After two years we moved to an apartment in a private house. Another family lived there. We stayed in this apartment until August 1945. I went to the 7th grade at school. The school was big and there were wooden floors. There were children of various nationalities. I studied well. I became a Komsomol member in this school. Several times some boys called me 'zhyd' [kike] in the streets, but I fought back. Once, a boy hit me with his skates. This happened during a snowstorm in winter and I was caught unawares. There were two of them that came unexpectedly out of the blizzard saying, 'Ah, zhyd!' Well, there was some fighting, but when injured I had to run home. My mother got so worried when she saw blood dripping from the wound. I told her that I had had a fight. Basically, besides some minor episodes of this childish fighting I wasn't suppressed or persecuted in all those years.