“The train would start moving as bombs fell. Some made it back on. Some didn’t.” Veremeykin Daniel

My story about life during the World War II is based on fragments of memory from when I was just two years old, and on what my mother later told me.

I was born in the small town of Roslavl, in the Smolensk region. When the war began, my mother and grandmother managed to gather documents and small belongings and escape on the last train out of town. The Germans later turned Roslavl into a Jewish ghetto and a concentration camp for prisoners of war.

We reached the town of Irbit in the Sverdlovsk region. What I remember most are the horrors during the train ride. Whenever the train stopped briefly and German aircraft began bombing, the whistle would sound and the train would suddenly start moving without warning. People had to run and catch up. Some managed to jump back into the cattle cars. Others didn’t. This happened more than once.

We finally arrived. I remember coming into a small hut made of clay and straw. At the entrance lay an old woman on some rags. I was terrified of her.

We had come because my father had been wounded and was recovering in a hospital nearby. I remember running around the hospital, where the wounded soldiers would give me candy and bits of bread.

My mother found work on a collective farm to support us and care for my father. Food was scarce. I came down with both scarlet fever and diphtheria. At my family’s request, and with support from the wounded soldiers, the hospital director allowed me and my grandmother to stay in the infectious disease ward for a whole month.

We returned to Roslavl after it was liberated from Nazi occupation in 1944.