Tag #151646 - Interview #78225 (Iosif Gurevich)

I said to my father that we had to leave town immediately or we would all perish. My father and I went to the chairman of the kolkhoz to ask for a cart and horses. The chairman told my father to take all we needed. My father harnessed two horses into a cart and we rode home. On the way we went to pick up my mother's sister Nyunia. Her husband was a doctor and went to the front. My mother, my 8-year-old brother and Nyunia sat on the cart. My father reined the horses and I rode on my bicycle beside the cart. We rode 250 kilometers to Kursk. I don't remember how many days our trip lasted, but I don't think we covered more than 50 kilometers per day. When we were going past some town, Germans troops were landing, but we managed to escape. We didn't have any money. We only had some clothes. We stopped at a market to sell some clothes and buy some food. We were taken to the militia department. My father was charged of speculation, but we were released later.

What we saw on our way to Kursk was terrible: crowds of people on vehicles and carts running away. In Kursk we went to my father's brother Ilia, but he wasn't there. We were told that they had evacuated. We had evacuation papers for the town of Ruzaevka, in the Mordova Soviet Socialist Republic near the Volga River [about 700 km from Kursk], that we had obtained in Konotop and decided to head there. I don't remember how we got there. In Ruzaevka we were accommodated in the evacuation agency, which was the cultural center and stuffed with people. There were no chairs and people were sitting on their luggage. We got a meal: porridge. We were sent to a village that was also overcrowded. We returned to Ruzaevka and heard an announcement about a train going to Middle Asia and all those willing to move there had to come to the registration office. We decided to go because we didn't have any warm clothes with us and the climate in Middle Asia was warmer.