Tag #111724 - Interview #97132 (Bertha Isayeva)

My mother, my brother Zachariy, my mother’s sister Rosa and I evacuated on the ‘Tashkent’ boat on 2 August 1941. The street leading to Tamozhennaya Square in the port was overcrowded. We had to climb a ladder onto the boat. People were jumping onto the lower deck missing the ladder. We were all sent to the hold where adults, old people and children were lying side by side. The boat departed at night fearing air raids. When it got dark an air raid began. It was quiet in the hold at first until somebody started a song: ‘The sea stretched out wide and the waves are storming far away. My comrade, we are going far away, far from our land’.  It was a popular song. Then people began to cry and scream.  Everybody understood we were going to the unknown. The previous boat ‘Lenin’ bumped into a mine in the sea. It drowned. There were over ten thousand passengers on it. Only 419 survived. They were sent to Mariupol.  In Mariupol I met a girl from this boat. She was 20 and she was a brunette, but when I saw her, her hair was white. It was horrible what she went through! People were fighting for their life grabbing others by their feet pulling them down. Many of them drowned.