Tag #156178 - Interview #94930 (Yelizaveta Zatkovetskaya)

We took a freight train to Begovat station near Tashkent where we met a Russian woman from Nikolaev. We started talking to her at the station. She helped us a lot. She found accommodation and paid for us, lent us some money and helped me to find a job. She also helped us to obtain a residential permit [19] through her Uzbek acquaintance working in the militia. We lived in a small room in the basement. Tsylia and I went to work at a shop manufacturing ropes for the front. Mikhail and Yenia went to a kindergarten and Genia went to school and helped her grandmother about the house. Tsylia received letters from her husband. I wrote many requests searching for him, but it was in vain. One of commanders wrote me that my husband may have perished never reaching our troops. I was ready to do any work to support my family. After work I made jam from cherry plums or apples – whatever I could pick in the streets, and ran to the market to sell it. I sold jam in glasses and then bought food for the money I got. I was surprised that locals didn’t make jam, but willingly bought it from me. My father-in-law fixed shoes sitting and working on his box outside. He earned a little, when a financial inspector [state officer responsible for identification of illegal businesses], a young and strong Uzbek man demanded that we paid him 10 rubles per day. My father-in-law didn’t have this much. Once this inspector pushed his box throwing his tools about the street and told the old man to stay away from the street, if he didn’t have money for him. When we came back from work, my mother-in-law and father-in-law were crying. I wrote a letter to the Ministry of defense in Moscow. I wrote about our life, about having to escape from our home leaving all our belongings behind, and that our husbands had perished and the old man was trying to earn some money to support the family and we didn’t beg the state to help us, while this young strong inspector was not at the front for some reason. Two weeks later a commission came from the executive committee. They inspected our room, saw drying bread on the stove and allowed my father-in-law to do his work without fearing anyone.