Tag #110924 - Interview #78186 (anna schwartzman)

The local population hoped that Hitler would liberate them from the Soviet power. Each day they expected him to come in a month or two. One morning we got up, got ready and walked 15 kilometers to Essentuki. There were trains running from there. From Krasnodar we were all going to Tashkent. We squeezed into a train car and continued moving ahead. We reached Georgievsk station, which is still in the Caucasus. This was a German colony. All local residents were deported there. Everything remained untouched, as it was when the owners were still there. There were cows, pigs, chickens and so on. We were told to move into empty houses and live there as if they were our own. These houses were very lowly, but everything was clean. None of us stayed because Georgievsk was a dead end. The road literally ended there. If Germans had come there we wouldn't have been able to escape. We kept moving. We reached Makhachkala, but it was full of evacuees. We remained there for three days. Leaving there was fraught with difficulty because the trains were packed. My brother got himself hired as a stevedore on a steamboat. In exchange he was given three tickets, and we traveled on this ship. We sailed for three days. The moon was luminous against the velvet sky, but we were hungry and all our thoughts were concentrated on food. We arrived in Krasnovodsk. There was even more hunger there. There were thousands of people. It was impossible to get a piece of bread. From there we took a train to Tashkent.

In Tashkent we met our sister-in-law, Khuna's wife, who was pregnant, at the end of her last trimester. Again we were put onto a train. Each day we were informed that the train was now passing Samarkand, Namangan, Fergana and so on. We stopped at Ursatovskaya station in Tashkent region.