Tag #151098 - Interview #94394 (Maya Pivovar)

My mother and I evacuated with my mother’s factory where she was working on a barge in July. The factory products were dumped into the hold of the barge and we were sitting on those bales. We were heading to Dnepropetrovsk [500 km from Kiev]. It was believed that Germans didn’t bomb Dnepropetrovsk as much as our town and that factories could operate there. To describe our trip on those bales in the hold, I would give an example. One night I woke up having the feeling of suffocation. Somebody’s leg in a boot was on my chest. I tried to throw down this leg, when a man’s voice said: ‘Why are you pulling my leg?’ This happened to be a man stretching his legs to feel more comfortable.

When we arrived in Dnepropetrovsk, we were not allowed to get off: there were two lines of military men, and they made us board some freight railcars for transportation of coal – there were no roofs in them. We moved on we didn’t know where. It was pouring with rain, we got black from coal dust all over. I don’t remember how long the trip was: two or three days… At night we were told to get off. In the morning we were taken to a kolkhoz [13]. It turned out we were in Krasnodarskiy Kray. Starominskaya village [over 1000 km from Kiev]. We worked in the kolkhoz there till another party of workers of the factory evacuated to Zlatoust town [about 900 km from Kiev], and we were taken there. We changed few freight trains for transportation of cattle to get to Zlatoust. The conditions were terrible. Our trip probably lasted five days. This was a beginning of the winter 1941.