Tag #153095 - Interview #94113 (Yevgenia Kozak)

The train was overcrowded. This was a train for cattle transportation. We had no food stocks left. We only had dried bread. When the train stopped, I fetched some boiling water in the kettle.  Occasionally we could get some soup or cooked cereals at stations, but this happened rarely.  During air raids the train stopped and we scattered around. Our trip took a month before we arrived in Ossetia in Northern Caucasus. The train stopped near Ordzhonikidze, Azerbaijan, and we were sent to a kolkhoz 15, in a village near Ordzhonikidze. We were given a warm welcome there. We were accommodated in a small room with a kitchen. A family from Kharkiv resided in the next-door room. Mama, my brother and I went to work in the field and my father went to work as a janitor in the kolkhoz granary. We received food products for work and in winter the kolkhoz provided wood for heating. The local residents gave us winter clothes and we managed through the winter.