Tag #155577 - Interview #94720 (Sarra Shylman)

When we came to college on Monday all students were sent to dig trenches. I came home and said to mother ‘I am going to do trenches’. She cried so bitterly, because I was so sickly: I had running nose all the time and my legs swelled. ‘At least put on your galoshes!’ she fell on her knees begging me to stay, but I was a Soviet person: they told us to go and we went. In college we boarded trucks and drove in the direction of Vasilkov. We were accommodated in cowsheds. We were provided with food: there were boxes with bread and butter and sausage. We were digging trenches: it was raining, there was mud, it was cold, my legs swelled. We were there about a month. It was the end of July. Germans were advancing and we, students, had to walk back to Kiev. I came home – there was nobody in. The door was open, everything was a mess. I cried so… My neighbor Bella Pristup told me that my brother went to the front with the Polytechnic College. My parents didn’t want to leave without me, but my sister had a friend named Buma Bentsionov. He was a driver of chief of a military registry office and my sister convinced my parents: ‘Don’t worry, when Sarra returns from trenches Buma will help her’. My sister left me a letter: ‘You are no longer a small girl. Our parents have left. When you return to Kiev Buma will arrange it all’. Olia was more independent than I. Though she was younger. Buma helped our parents to leave Kiev in a special vehicle. The special school where my sister worked was modified into a hospital at the beginning of the war and my sister was employed as a storekeeper in it. While I was digging trenches Olia was sent to the front with her hospital.