Tag #154656 - Interview #103914 (Rita Vilkobrisskaya Biography)

In Olevsk there were four of us: my mother, grandmother, sister and I. Olevsk is a small town in Siberia with one-storied buildings and population of few thousand people. There were not many people in evacuation and the locals were quite friendly with them. We lived in this town during the whole severe winter of 1941-42. We lived in a small room in a communal apartment. My mother went to work. She went to collective farms propagating to collective farmers to fight for bigger crops to give more grain to the front. There was a slogan ‘Everything for the front, everything for the victory’. My mother was away for several days. On one of her trips the coach that she rode on turned over and mother broke her arm. She had cast applied on it, but she didn’t stay home to wait until it healed. She went to villages and my sister and I stayed at home with grandmother. I went to school in Olevsk. The school was far from where we lived and I had to walk through knee-high snow snowdrifts.