Tag #122813 - Interview #89853 (Iancu Tucarman)

We returned to Iasi and one week later we came to the Deployment Center to be sent to do forced labor to various places. All these 4 years I was never sent outside Iasi. In Iasi I worked at the Electrical Power Station, at a textile factory, all winter cleaning the snow. My father too cleaned the streets in winter. In 1941, my father was 52. People were taken to forced labor until their 50s, but he did not show his age and was taken for 2-3 months. He worked somewhere at Repedea, at a stone quarry. The work would usually start at 7am and lasted until 6 o'clock in the evening. I worked for a time at the Railroad Company [CFR] in Socola. It was very hard; some of those who supervised our worked were tougher, they would insult us: ‘Hey, kikes, faster! Don’t linger! Mind your work!’ They would even hit us. And this thing lasted for a while. At 1 o’clock we had a half-an-hour break when everyone brought something over if they could do so ... Many had nothing and I would share my meal with them, but I too didn’t have all the time. I shared a sandwich or so. And all this until 6 in the evening depending on the season. It was very hard for us. Because we were working together we could talk about how happy we could have been if we had had a weapon and knew that we were at war. Why were we subjected to these degrading situations regardless of education? Some of us were doctors, engineers, lawyers and worked side by side with everybody else. And this was not humiliating for them; the thing that was humiliating was that we could not be considered true citizens of our country like everybody else. In wintertime we were especially sent to the tramway company to clear the snow off the tracks. In Iasi sometimes it was as cold as -20. Your eyelids and nostrils froze together. We had to work from 7 in the morning until dark under very harsh conditions. Various people would pass by; some of them, indeed, you could see some kind of compassion in their eyes because they knew us. They were neighbors, acquaintances. Others behaved terribly: ‘Kikes! It serves you right!’ Why - I couldn’t understand. And this situation lasted until the end of the War: various labors in summer and cleaning the snow in winter.