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My husband was chopping wood for a factory. And one time he mentioned to his director that I wanted a job. What we wanted was for me to have the right to exist there, to have a bread ration. And that director, a woman, hired me first of all as a gardener. I had no idea about gardening! They showed me the shears and told me to cut the tomatoes as they started to ripen. So I spent maybe 2 weeks on the tomatoes. Then my director said that I wasn’t going to be in the garden, but in the mill. I spent half a day there theoretically getting experience. They taught me which grain was for what – before that I knew next to nothing. What it was called, what my title was at that mill? I can’t remember. I was paid well, every week I would get a small bag of flour, every Saturday. That was a fortune. There was a free canteen.
I had very pleasant conditions at work, ideal. It was a company with 5 different things: there was a mill, there was a buffet, there was a fishery, I can’t remember the rest. My superior, the director of that company, was from Moscow, she’d been resettled there from territory occupied by the Germans. That was how the Russians protected people, because her husband was a Jew and was at the front, and she, her mother and her child were in Koz’modem’yansk. She was a party member. Treated me very decently. She was a teacher by profession, a very cultured woman.
I had very pleasant conditions at work, ideal. It was a company with 5 different things: there was a mill, there was a buffet, there was a fishery, I can’t remember the rest. My superior, the director of that company, was from Moscow, she’d been resettled there from territory occupied by the Germans. That was how the Russians protected people, because her husband was a Jew and was at the front, and she, her mother and her child were in Koz’modem’yansk. She was a party member. Treated me very decently. She was a teacher by profession, a very cultured woman.
Period
Interview
Emilia Leibel