Tag #149950 - Interview #90532 (Grigoriy Fihtman)

The front was nearing and we evacuated again to Northern Ossetia, Zmeyskaya village of Elhotov district. We got accommodation and work in a kolkhoz there. In 1942, when I was about 16 I and other teenage boys and girls and men who were not fit to serve in the army went to construct fortifications in the vicinity of Mozdok town: trenches and escarpments. Military engineers were supervisors of these works. Some people dropped their excavation tools and ran away. I was afraid of running away. We were near the front line. We should be grateful to a colonel: he understood that our group of women, boys and children, might get in encirclement and he ordered: ‘Dear people, go away. Few hours from now Germans will be here’. There were hours left. We were 50-60 kilometers from the village where my mother and father were. They had packed by the time I returned and we managed to leave. Again we boarded a freight train. We arrived in Baku [Azerbaijan]. In Baku we waited for our turn to board a boat for five days.