Tag #149951 - Interview #90532 (Grigoriy Fihtman)

We arrived in Krasnovodsk. My mother was asking for some water. I couldn’t get any. There was no water in Krasnovodsk. One woman offered a glass of milk instead of water. I gave my mother this milk. In Krasnovodsk we got into a passenger train for the first time since the war began. We didn’t know where the train was heading. We crossed Turkmenia and arrived in Stalinabad (present Dushanbe).  There were changed for a narrow-gauge railway train and headed across the Pamir  [mountainous region of central Asia, located mainly in Tajikistan and extending into NE Afghanistan and SW Xinjiang, China; called roof of the world. Many peaks rise to more than 20,000 ft (6,096 m); Mount Communism (24,590 ft/7,495 m) and Lenin Peak (23,508 ft/7,165 m) are the highest peaks in the Pamir. The region forms a geologic structural knot from which the great Tian Shan, Karakorum, Kunlun, and Hindu Kush mountain systems radiate. Snow-capped throughout the year, the Pamir experiences long cold winters and cool summers] and covered over 100 kilometers over mountainous passes and arrived at Kurgan-Tubeh town [Tajikistan].