Tag #114260 - Interview #78243 (Alla Kolton)

In Kazakhstan we lived in a barrack. I remember a long corridor and, along its two sides, an infinite number of doors, behind each of which one family lived in one room. Meals were cooked in the rooms, too. Our neighbors were also evacuated people of different origin, Jews, and non-Jews. Relations were good. There was no anti-Semitism. We had three beds in our room. I remember that I agreed with my brother that we would take turns sleeping in my mother's bed. My brother was older and more artful than I was, and I couldn't count very well yet. He told me: 'We'll sleep in mother's bed two nights each - two for you, and two for me.' And all the time deceived me, saying: 'No, it is not your turn yet, only one night has passed.' It turned out that he slept in mother's bed all the time, and I, very rarely. Mother didn't intercede for me: I was a fretful girl, and Grigory was a kind boy.

I remember aunt Guta, to whom we arrived in evacuation, saying: 'I was afraid, that your mother, the spoiled French, wouldn't know how to behave on a state farm.' But mother was a strong-willed person and adjusted herself very easily to the unusual circumstances. I remember how we worked on the plots of land and planted potatoes. She sawed and chopped firewood. She could do anything. Mother worked as a teacher of mathematics in the senior classes of the state farm school. Aunt Guta was the deputy director of that school and she said that she was never ashamed of mother. There were only old and sick men in evacuation. All the healthy and young were at the front, therefore women had to do all men's jobs. I didn't go to school then.