Childhood, War, Working
“In 1937, in the school I was attending, there were among my classmates many children whose parents were prominent officials, and every day there was somebody missing in the class. We were all tearful, realizing that another parent had been arrested. Fortunately, the teachers in this school were very decent people, rather quiet about all these things and they didn’t talk about ‘enemies of the people’ in front of the whole assembly. Things were happening at home, but at least they were not aggravated at school.”
- Zinaida Lapitsky
“I was studying to be an electrical communications engineer. We had a special day at our college with representatives who were offering students different jobs. They had a list of more than two hundred graduates and 1 was in the first ten, but nobody gave me an offer. They tried to send me to the far east, to the Jewish district …
My grandmother told me that all the food reserves in Leningrad were bombed by Nazis the first day of the war because they had maps of all locations of the food warehouses. When she went to a warehouse looking for food she found only dirty grain together with soil. A soldier there said to her, ‘It looks like only soil, but it’s grain, and my advice is to take a lot of it.’ And maybe it saved their lives.”
- Galina Dreytser