Tag #156236 - Interview #78541 (Emilia Ratz)

If you had a diploma, you were given a mandatory job assignment 13. That was in 1944, at the beginning of the offensive, and Moscow or Leningrad was out of the question as they were still evacuated. In Dschelabis, an industrial city in the Southern Urals, there was a pipe rolling mill and much to our horror we were assigned there. But we took advantage of the chaos everywhere and simply went to the factory in Sverdlovsk where we had done or diploma practice training. Again we worked twelve hours a day, and, I think, also every second Sunday. The food was poor: bread, bad oil and tea made of dried carrots. There was a variety of food available at the market, but we didn’t make enough money for that. The factory in which we worked had been evacuated as well and we lived in horrible barracks. Winters can get as cold as 30 degrees minus in Sverdlovsk and we didn’t have running water and only a Russian stove 14 to cook on and heat the place.