My name is Musya. I was born in Riga, Latvia in 1934. I am sharing some snippets from my book, As Life Flows On.
It was the summer of 1941. I had recently turned seven, and I was looking forward to the day I would go to first grade in the fall, very proud that I could already read and count to fifty. However, when Germany declared war on the Soviet Union, the world turned upside down overnight to become an alien condition of cruelty, death, fear and hunger. Evacuated, our family faced the war far away from Riga, our hometown, in Uzbekistan—with its strange and unfamiliar landscapes, exotic people, and very different lifestyle.
I have no clear memory of the Declaration of War or the initial experiences of the new situation; however, I do remember that life became stranger and even more frightening with every moment. Several times each day, there were bombings and air raid warnings, and we were supposed to go down to our absolutely unprotected basement, which we impressively called a “bomb shelter.”
Every day it became increasingly dangerous to walk the streets. For a brief time, people communicated by phone, but soon the lines were disconnected, public transportation stopped functioning, and soon, the streets became empty. Silence fell over the city.
One such day, Father said it was the right time to leave. There were many indications that the danger to the Jews would come not only from the Germans but also from those who awaited them with great anticipation. At that early hour when we came to the train station we were the only people on the empty platform. The station seemed deserted. The only train at the platform showed no signs of life. Coming closer, we realized that the cars were crammed with people. Through the closed windows, we could see their wan faces, and their impassive eyes watching us. Nobody reacted to my father’s plea to open the door, until one window finally opened, and the head of a Red Army officer appeared. His noble face and bright blond hair are etched in my memory forever. I can still hear his calm voice, the voice of a kind and gentle man. He said, “We cannot open the door—it is physically impossible because the train is jam-packed. There is no place even to sit. The only thing I can do is to take the child through the window.” He turned directly to my mother and said, “I promise you that I will take care of her. I will do whatever I can to place her in a good orphanage.” Mother and Father looked at each other and Mother started to cry. The officer urged them to hurry, saying that the train was leaving any minute and that it might be one of the last trains.
Mother stared at him in despair with tears running down her cheeks. “O.K.!,” exclaimed the officer, “We will try to take the mother and grandmother.” Father turned to Mother telling her to go for my sake and promised that he would follow us as soon as he could. Crying and clinging to each other, we climbed through the window into the car. The train still did not move. Nobody spoke. Father’s figure against the background of the empty platform seemed especially lonely. He stood there lost, his face was twisted in a pitiful grimace. My mother’s face, looking at him from inside, was a motionless mask. I was terrified and, as always when that happened, something cold grew in my stomach. Then I began to cry and to call for my father. And then, suddenly, our benefactor said to my father, “Quick! Quick! Get in!” For me, that was a moment of pure happiness.
I don’t remember how long our journey lasted or what we ate if we ate at all. We were bombed several times during that time.
Then there was the dreadful night when the train was kept for hours at a small station squeezed between two tank cars filled with oil. When an air raid started under the wail of the sirens, there was no place to hide. Time turned into eternity. Inside, the railroad car was completely dark, and only flickering reflections of fires sporadically illumined our frozen faces and silent tense bodies.
All of a sudden, the silence was shattered by a harrowing scream. It came from a little man, the owner of a grocery store on our block, whom I knew well because my mother often sent me there to buy fresh bread. Now he was screaming like a man who had lost all his senses except terror. He cried that we were all doomed and that in a few minutes, we would be hit by a bomb and burned alive in a fire from the tank cars.
With every moment the people near me were becoming more tense and petrified, on the verge of hysteria. Instantly, and somehow imperceptibly he was surrounded by the officers from our car and taken outside. The next second everybody heard the crack of a shot. It was followed first by such a stillness that one could hear people breathing, and then by the cries and screams of the executed man’s wife and the children.
Our wanderings ended first in an Uzbek village (кишлак), and then in the city of Kokand, where Dad left for the army. My mother, grandmother, and aunt worked at home as knitters. From early morning to late at night, they were knitting. In return, they had workers’ provision cards that enabled us to survive. I remember a month’s ration: a tiny amount of sunflower seed oil, grouts, sugar, and a ladle of soup. And there was the daily ration of bread that changed according to the political situation.
My father was an ordinary soldier and could do nothing for his hungry child. Although many years have passed, the feeling of hunger at that time will be with me forever. One of my first American friends, an intelligent elderly woman, once said, speaking about life in wartime Russia, “I understand that you suffered from hunger during the War; I assume that all you had was bread and milk.” Her words sounded so incredible that I thought she was joking. “If during the War we had had bread and milk, we would have thought that we were in paradise,” I replied. “What did you eat then?” asked my friend in amazement. “We didn’t eat most of the time! We were starving!” I exclaimed. After which, we stared at each other for a long time.
I had almost no milk during the War. An exception was the day after my extremely complicated surgery for an appendicitis, when the doctor, an exiled former professor from Leningrad, said to my mother, “Miraculously she will live, but we do not have anything to feed her except a small piece of bread and black radish, which could kill her in her condition.” My mother did not know what to say but saw in my eyes a silent plea for food. The professor was probably a religious man because, after a moment of hesitation, he said to my mother holding her hands, “We must have faith in God’s will. Let’s give her something to eat.” My mother made up her mind, and a few minutes later, I ate the black radish and did not die.
The situation with bread was worse than with milk. Of course, like all citizens, we received bread. For the entire family — my mother, grandmother, Aunt Pania, her son, my cousin Moses, and me — it was a single loaf per day. And what a loaf it was, not even real bread, but the substitute which consisted more of water, bran, and straw than flour, very dark, as if kneaded on clay, heavy and wet! The moment the loaf was cut was the most important of the day. Everybody received his portion. Mine was given to my mother, who somehow managed to divide our two wretched pieces so that we had an unbelievably thin slice, three times per day. If we succeeded in finding a clove of garlic, we considered it a feast because garlic rubbed on the bread’s crust created the illusion of sausage. But such occasions were extremely rare.
During the long dark evenings, when the hunger woke up in full strength and started to eat at us from inside, our main topic of conversation was bread. Everybody had the same, simple dream: when the War ended we would not make do with mere pastries or cakes but would eat the most delicious thing in the world — bread, soft and fresh, spread with butter and powdered sugar. Even now, after all these years, if someone asked me what I like most, I would answer without hesitation — white bread with butter. I still cannot resist this indulgence whenever I am in a restaurant or somebody’s house, forgetting the eternal fight for calories and cholesterol.
Our dinner usually consisted of three courses served in consecutive order at the table. First was the so-called zatirukha soup, which could be made easily and quickly – one or two (at most) spoons of flour mixed carefully with a small amount of cold water, and as much hot water as was needed. At times of great feasts, the soup was enriched with an onion slightly sautéed in a teaspoon of sunflower oil. The main course was a slice of bread, sometimes combined with the “dessert,” namely, coffee made of sugar beets. Hunger made us not fastidious. We were glad to eat even oil cakes (cotton cake?) whenever it was possible to get them. Oil cakes are the remains of oil- bearing plants compressed in a special way after the oil is squeezed out from their seeds and are a wonderful kind of food for cattle. They were sold at the black market in briquettes of different color varieties, from pale yellow to dark brown, almost black, depending on which kind of plant it came. Some of them reminded me of chocolate. Whatever we ate, I was trying to imagine what human food it might resemble. This game was helpful but, unfortunately, not always successful.
While the grownups knit without lifting their heads the entire day in order to qualify for a worker’s ration card, I was entrusted with bringing home the extra food which was so vital to us. One could obtain already prepared dinners with special food coupons distributed by the work administration to those who regularly overfulfilled the norms as an incentive for work. Everything related to food was dangerous and required great responsibility. Ration cards and coupons were not only stolen, but snatched out of people’s hands, sometimes precisely at the moment they were produced at stores and dining-rooms. Lost or stolen ration cards turned during the War into the horror of starvation and hopelessness. People who had lost their cards were regarded as doomed. One can imagine the risk which was taken by my family when they entrusted their coupons to an eight-year-old child. For the trip to the dining room, I would prepare myself like a combatant, becoming very tense with every nerve in my body stretched tight. I clenched the coupons in my hand with such force that my fingers grew numb, while in my other hand I clutched a big green teapot. It was a long way to the dining room, across all the central streets of the town under the burning Asian sun. When I finally reached my destination, there would already be a huge crowd of wary adults. I do not recall seeing other children there, but some men and women came up to me offering to exchange coupons. I should explain that there were different kinds of coupons: for the first course soup; for the second some kasha with a bit of fat, and for the third, dessert, a slightly sweetened water called kompot which was supposed to be a cold fruit cocktail. My goal was to get rid of this kompot because the first dish and the second, whatever it was, I had to put together in the teapot. I must think quickly with whom and how to make the exchange. There was always the risk of confiding in the wrong person and being deceived. With my heart beating like a rabbit’s tail, I would stretch out the hand holding the coupons and with the other hand, in which was the teapot, try to catch as quickly as I could the exchanged ones. Fortunately, I had a lucky experience — I encountered only decent people and was never fooled. My next step was to get through to the distribution window. It was important not to be among the last when instead of soup there would remain only wash and dregs from the bottom of the pot and instead of the second course there might be only a little burned crust of kasha. When finally, the first and second courses were safely in the teapot, it was time to start home, guarding the dinner against encroachment. And then came the most frightening part because the real danger on my way back was myself –the struggling against the terrible temptation to at least sip the hot wash which would spread in my stomach with a calming satisfaction. This fight with myself was difficult and exhausting. On the way home I would always pick several landmarks, saying to myself, “Now, I will go without stopping as far as that tree and I will try not to touch the teapot.” If it turned out as I planned, I would stop in order to take the teapot in the other hand and would select a new landmark.
Quite often I had succeeded in suppressing the temptation, not because my willpower was so great, but because it was hard for me to endure the pangs of conscience, the feeling of “scalding shame,” after I would sip from the teapot. This journey home with the seductive heavy, green-enameled teapot full of hot food will forever remain the most difficult trial of my conscience.
Letter (condensed) to Dr. Steven Spitz & Staff at Smileboston Cosmetic and Implant Dentistry:
Dear Dr. Spitz, we are especially grateful for your exceptional willingness and readiness to take on the offer from the Holocaust Survivors Office concerning the care for the well-being of people whose lives were severely touched by the Holocaust. Thank you that you have not forgotten and can still feel the inhumane suffering of your brethren from Europe and have opened the door of your office to them.
With the warmest regards and wishes, Musya and Alex G.