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So we evacuated. We only had a few bags packed for the road. This was all we could take with us. My mother, my sister and I and my mother’s sister Zhenia Liberman went to the railway station. My nanny refused to go with us. She said she would guard the apartment. My grandmother was living with uncle Ilia’s family at that time. They evacuated to Central Asia.
We boarded a passenger train that departed when it got dark. However, in the morning we discovered that the train didn’t leave Moscow moving along peripheral railroad tracks. This continued two or three days. There were few trains that had to take turns for departure to the east. We finally left Moscow moving in the direction of Voronezh, about 800 kilometers southeast of Moscow. In Kuibyshev we changed to a freight train heading to Central Asia. This was a train for cattle and prisoner transportation. We arrived in Frunze, about 3,200 kilometers southeast of Moscow. There was another shock waiting for us there. There was a lot of bread, vegetables, onions and fruit at the market as if there was no war. Back in Moscow there were already bread coupons. I also obtained a worker’s card at the plant. [Editor’s note: the card system was introduced to directly regulate food supplies to the population by food and industrial product rates. During and after the Great Patriotic War there were cards for workers, non-manual employees and dependents in the USSR. The biggest rates were on workers’ cards: 400 grams of bread per day.]
This abundance of food products lasted about a month and then it just disappeared as if ‘a cow licked it off with its tongue’ [Russian idiom], but there were still more food stocks in Frunze than in Moscow. We were accommodated in a room in a private house. Life was hard, but there was still enough food and it was warm. Children could play outside and run to the market. I went to work at the Kyrghyz scale repair plant where I was an apprentice to an equipment mechanic. There were high-skilled workers from Leningrad who trained me in their job. So the winter of 1941/1942 passed.
The local population treated us all right. At least I didn’t hear of any problems. Aunt Zhenia stayed at home and my parents went to work. My father became an executive secretary of the newspaper ‘Kyrghyzskaya Pravda’ since there was no work for a geographer. My mother worked in an office making provisions for artists in evacuation. She worked in the logistics department. When we returned to Moscow she continued her work in this office till she retired. My sister went to school. Life was tolerable, I would say. Aunt Zhenia worked culinary miracles. She made onion jam, for example. We didn’t starve, but of course our life in evacuation was far from the prewar level.
We boarded a passenger train that departed when it got dark. However, in the morning we discovered that the train didn’t leave Moscow moving along peripheral railroad tracks. This continued two or three days. There were few trains that had to take turns for departure to the east. We finally left Moscow moving in the direction of Voronezh, about 800 kilometers southeast of Moscow. In Kuibyshev we changed to a freight train heading to Central Asia. This was a train for cattle and prisoner transportation. We arrived in Frunze, about 3,200 kilometers southeast of Moscow. There was another shock waiting for us there. There was a lot of bread, vegetables, onions and fruit at the market as if there was no war. Back in Moscow there were already bread coupons. I also obtained a worker’s card at the plant. [Editor’s note: the card system was introduced to directly regulate food supplies to the population by food and industrial product rates. During and after the Great Patriotic War there were cards for workers, non-manual employees and dependents in the USSR. The biggest rates were on workers’ cards: 400 grams of bread per day.]
This abundance of food products lasted about a month and then it just disappeared as if ‘a cow licked it off with its tongue’ [Russian idiom], but there were still more food stocks in Frunze than in Moscow. We were accommodated in a room in a private house. Life was hard, but there was still enough food and it was warm. Children could play outside and run to the market. I went to work at the Kyrghyz scale repair plant where I was an apprentice to an equipment mechanic. There were high-skilled workers from Leningrad who trained me in their job. So the winter of 1941/1942 passed.
The local population treated us all right. At least I didn’t hear of any problems. Aunt Zhenia stayed at home and my parents went to work. My father became an executive secretary of the newspaper ‘Kyrghyzskaya Pravda’ since there was no work for a geographer. My mother worked in an office making provisions for artists in evacuation. She worked in the logistics department. When we returned to Moscow she continued her work in this office till she retired. My sister went to school. Life was tolerable, I would say. Aunt Zhenia worked culinary miracles. She made onion jam, for example. We didn’t starve, but of course our life in evacuation was far from the prewar level.
Period
Year
1941
Location
Frunze
Kyrgyzstan
Interview
Alexander Grin
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