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On 12 July uncle David, the first one in our family, left Odessa with the Bolshevik plant. People were saying: ‘Why leaving? Germans are decent people’. I witnessed my grandmother arguing with Jewish glasscutter Kogan. He was yelling furiously: ‘Germans are decent people!’ They were almost on the edge of fighting.
My parents and I and grandmother Esphir evacuated with Conservetrest at dawn on 22 July, actually one hour before the heaviest bombardment of Odessa. There were small boats called ‘dubki’ hauling watermelons from Kherson to Odessa. We went to Kherson on one of them. Then we went by boat up the Dnieper to Zaporozhiye. My father went to town to listen to news and he bumped into two of his colleagues from Odessa. They yelled at him: ‘Are you out of your mind? Go pick your family and join us in the train’. This was one of the last trains leaving Zaporozhiye shortly before the town was given away. This train often stopped on its way. We arrived in Northern Caucasus. When the train stopped we bought everything people brought to sell: hard-boiled eggs, bread and boiled potatoes.
My parents and I and grandmother Esphir evacuated with Conservetrest at dawn on 22 July, actually one hour before the heaviest bombardment of Odessa. There were small boats called ‘dubki’ hauling watermelons from Kherson to Odessa. We went to Kherson on one of them. Then we went by boat up the Dnieper to Zaporozhiye. My father went to town to listen to news and he bumped into two of his colleagues from Odessa. They yelled at him: ‘Are you out of your mind? Go pick your family and join us in the train’. This was one of the last trains leaving Zaporozhiye shortly before the town was given away. This train often stopped on its way. We arrived in Northern Caucasus. When the train stopped we bought everything people brought to sell: hard-boiled eggs, bread and boiled potatoes.
Period
Year
1941
Location
Russia
Interview
Gherda Kagan
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