Tag #146792 - Interview #83398 (Ninel Kunina)

In the summer of 1943 Mom took me, a 13-year-old, on the staff, as an apprentice sales person. At school there were holidays, but I worked at the store all the same. But now I had to go for work by eight o’clock in the morning and left at ten o’clock in the evening. I was so desperate to sleep. What work could they assign to a 13-year-old girl? I had the job to deliver buckets with water to women, who were storing up peat for heating, they dug peat straight out of earth. It was very hot there and peat glowed, igniting spontaneously. And another time, when cabbage leaves were brought to the store, I had to sell these leaves. At the end of summer I sold aerated water with saccharin.