Tag #114198 - Interview #78009 (Alexandra Ribush)

We knew everything about my father and received letters from him. We knew nothing about my mum for a long time, since she was in prison and was deprived of the right to correspond. Dad managed to send her a message about us by prisoners' mail. He told her that my brother and I were alive and lived with our relatives. After Kislovodsk was freed in January 1943 we and Varvara Alekseyevna wrote to all the addresses where our relatives had ever lived. This kind of chain method worked. My mother was told that we were alive, that the children were alive and that the adults had all perished. My mother worked as an oculist at the children's penal colony # 2 near Tomsk.

There were a lot of colonies and places of detention in that region. When colony inmates under age were released, they were sent home under an escort. There was this boy who was sent home to Kislovodsk. His convoy also took the three of us, children, Varvara Alekseyevna, her mother and another kid from a Cossack [11] village, not far from Kislovodsk, along with him. He brought us to the colony near Kislovodsk. That's how I met my mum for the first time after ten years of separation. Me, Leonid and Inna came to Tomsk. I remember how we first traveled by train, then on board a ship to the colony where my mum lived. When we met, we all cried: mum cried, I cried, everybody was so glad. My mother had changed a lot, she had grown old and all her hair was gray. I also cried because I realized that I hadn't seen my mother for ten years and I hadn't seen how she lived all that time without me. However, I always knew and believed that mum would be back and that she thought about me and my brother while she was gone.

My mother and father kept in touch from the moment my mum was released and appointed to work at the children's settlement. We came to Tomsk in 1943 and in 1946 my dad arrived. Thus we all met again.