Tag #156083 - Interview #103885 (Malea Veselnitskaya Biography)

My mother Dina Mogilevskaya was born in Kremenchug in 1897. After her mother died and the children’s stepmother chased them out of their home my mother went to work. She was 5 years old. Their neighbors sent her to work at the tobacco factory. My mother worked at the cigarette loading shop. She had to load tobacco into cigarettes standing on a box to reach the table. When a foreman came into the shop other employees hid my mother. Later she earned by babysitting. My mother didn’t go to school. At the age of 14 my mother and her sister Chaya became apprentices in a stocking shop. Chaya learned the profession, but my mother failed. A year later my mother returned to the tobacco factory where she worked in shifts.