The Stranger From Occupied Poland

I was born in the city of Mogilev in Belarus. My parents were teachers. My father taught mathematics, my mother chemistry. In June 1941, almost at the very start of the war, the Germans took Mogilev. My mother, my five year old sister Lara, and I, in the clothes we were wearing, with no belongings, money, or documents, fled the burning city in a freight car. My father did not manage to board the train with us, but the next day he too was able to evacuate. We met up in Orenburg.

“He asked to stay only one night, but in the end he lived with us. We never turned him out.”

My father was physically weak, so he was not drafted. In Orenburg we were given a dugout to live in, with a tiny stove by which one could warm a little. My father got a job at the tank factory as a laborer. He had to carry stretchers of construction debris, hard and grueling work, but we had to live somehow. We were often hungry. The work was beyond his strength. He came home barely alive and sat by the stove to rest.

Once a poor, exhausted man came to our dugout. He spoke Russian badly. He said he had escaped from occupied Poland and asked us to let him spend just one night, but in the end he stayed with us. His presence was very hard on us, but we did not turn him out.

The shop foreman at the factory where my father worked learned that he had been a teacher of mathematics. Seeing how hard the work was for him, he turned to the regional department of public education with a request to find my father a position in a school. After some time, both my father and mother were taken on as teachers. From then on life became easier for us.

When the war ended, our whole family returned to Mogilev.