Tag #150231 - Interview #78110 (Mikhail Gauzner)

When the Great Patriotic War started, the plant where my father worked was evacuated. However, my father was left behind with a group of workers, and they organized the production of mine housings at the machine shop, which was necessary for defending Odessa. About a month after the war began, in the middle of July 1941, Odessa started to be bombarded. There was a bomb shelter in the basement of our house. I remember how the older boys ran out into the streets after a night air raid to collect bomb fragments. I remember the bomb fragment with torn edges they gave me to play with. I remember how the mothers of those boys stormed out from the shelter and pulled them back in. When Odessa was bombarded excessively, and one of the bombs exploded somewhere nearby, in our street, my mother said, 'If it's our destiny, let us perish all together.' My mother and I moved into the little room beside my father's office at the plant and lived there until our evacuation.

My family, that is my father, my mother, me and my grandparents, was evacuated from Odessa, along with the last escapees, at the end of September or the beginning of October 1941.