Tag #143809 - Interview #103979 (Elizabeth Waiser Biography)

​We moved to Novobogatinsk where we found a place to live. It was a 4-room hose. Our landlords lived in two rooms. We moved into one room and another room was occupied by a family from Moscow: a mother, a grandmother and two children. My father got a job at a store. My mother didn’t work. She was a housewife. She spent her time receiving bread and cereals per our food coupons. She had to get up early to stand in lines. Sometimes she had to stand in lines a whole day. My mother didn’t have any warm clothes with her. My father got a pair of pressed wool winter boots and we took turns to wear them. It was a very cold winter and my mother had continuous colds. She also had to bring and cut wood for the stove and fetch water from the ice-covered well. My mother was doing her best to make something eatable from what was available. I was a telephone operator and was doing well at work. Most of operators were married women whose husbands were at the front.

​I didn’t go to school. I had to earn my living. My father and I had certificates of employees and my mother had a dependant card. We could get 600 grams of bread per day per our cards. This was different bread of bran and peas. It was heavy and when shop assistants were weighing it there were always smaller make-weights. My mother always told me to eat make-weights as I was growing up and was constantly hungry.