Tag #154633 - Interview #103568 (Yuriy Paskevich)

I remember well 21 June 19418, the day when the war began. Our family was in Sochi [the most popular Soviet resort at the Black Sea, Caucasus] Or, I would say, the orchestra where my father was playing was on tour there and my mother and I were following them. It was almost every summer that we did so. My mother was a post-graduate student in Kiev University. She was specializing in the history of the USSR. I went to the Riviera on this day. We were staying on top of a mountain and I took a trolley-bus down the hill. When I was on the way I saw many planes in the air, they were all flying in a line. And almost at the same moment a terrible storm, a fantastically horrific storm began in the sea. Never again in my life did I see anything like this. There was a lighthouse quite at a distance from the seashore. Now the sea receded far beyond it, stripping the pier to the pebbly bottom. And then another wave surge and the embankment was covered with water again. The waves broke in about 100 meters from the lighthouse.  One of local people told us that according to the legends such storms only occur before a war. We didn’t know then that Kiev had already been bombed. Sochi hadn’t heard Molotov’s9 speech yet.