Tag #155781 - Interview #103825 (Tatiana Tilipman Biography)

In early July institutions began to leave the town. Chairman of the kolkhoz gave Iosif a wagon and horses and said; ‘take your family out of the town. The Germans are approaching’. My parents and I and my brother with his wife Polina left the town. We went as far as the Dnieper on the wagon. We left the horses on the bank and crossed the river. My brother was to go back to take the horses, but there were Germans already on that bank. So we had lost our horses. Some drivers going in that direction gave us rides to Poltava. From there we went to Kharkov and then to Rostov. After Rostov we came to Stalingrad. In Stalingrad we stayed at the stadium for a few days. I met my school friend Rachil there. Then air raids began. We were put on a train. Rachil and I were in different trains. Ours was a freight train. They were stuffed with people. Some slept on the floor. We got some bread or some other food in evacuation offices at stations. The train stayed two or three days at each station. German troops followed hard on our heels. In Alexikovo station near Stalingrad my father sold his fancy coat that he used to wear to the synagogue. We bought some mutton. My mother fried it and put it in a jar with fat to keep longer. I remember that this was Yom Kippur.

So we got to Turkestan station in Northern Kazakhstan. My father was smart and said: ‘Well, since we don’t have enough money to get to Tashkent, we need to get off this train some place before’. So we got off in Turkestan. We didn’t know anything about the town. We stayed in a garden at the station for almost 24 hours until the ‘Berlik’ kolkhoz sent a camel-driven wagon to pick us.