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Eventually, my aunt sent us papers saying we could travel to Yoshkar-Ola; they would put us up. Aunt Sonia and Gita remained behind in Kazhakstan. Gitta, my mother and I travelled to Yoshkar-Ola by train, and then by river, the Volga, on a barge. It was a long trip. We slept on the floor, hungry, dirty and afraid. My mother had become a toothpick, she was just skin and bones. And she was exhausted. It was a terrible ordeal. We had no food and we were scared. When we arrived in Yoshkar-Ola, hungry and exhausted, my aunt started in on us right away that we had tofind work quickly. Otherwise, they would have to feed us. At that time, if you didn’t work, you didn’t get bread. The fact is they were quite comfortable. They were buying and selling things on the black market, buying in bulk, making up little packages of saccharin or whatever, and then selling them. My cousin Halina was working for a company and she took me with her the next morning. I got a job right away and with it a card that entitled me to buy bread. My mother and my sister took a little longer finding work. But we had only been at my aunt’s a few days when she announced they were getting an apartment from the government and were moving. There was no way they could take us. We were on our own. Here we were on the outskirts of Yoshkar-Ola, about to be abandoned by my father’s sister and her family. My mother asked the landlady where my aunt had been staying if we could stay on. We didn’t have any money but my mother showed the woman a watch of my father’s that she was willing to sell, one of our last possessions of any value. She and my sister would find jobs, my mother assured her. But she said no; she told us that my aunt had advised her not to take us in since we were penniless. Late the next afternoon, a truck arrived, my aunt and her family loaded their furniture on it and drove off, leaving us behind. It was already getting dark and there we were standing on the street in a strange city, holding each other and crying. I remember the sound of dogs barking. For hours, we knocked on doors, asking for help. Finally, at eleven or twelve o’clock, we decided to knock on one more door. We told our story to the young Russian woman who answered, that we’d come to stay with our family but that they had abandoned us. Would she be willing to let us stay for even a day or two? We didn’t have any money to pay her at the moment but we would. Again my mother took out the watch and said she would sell it. The woman told her to put the watch away; she didn’t want to discuss money. She was a teacher and had an extra room, though it didn’t have a proper door. Her husband was in hospital, wounded. We could stay until he came back. When we brought in our belongings, she said, “You must be hungry.” We pretended we weren’t but she didn’t believe us and went and broke off three little pieces of bread from her ration and opened a little kerchief where she kept a lump of sugar. She broke off three little pieces, gave each of us a piece of bread and some sugar and made a samovar. She was an angel. The next morning I went back to my job. I worked in an office as a kind of girl Friday, mostly doing invoices, making the calculations on an abacus, which I still have. When my cousin Halina came in to work, she asked how we had managed the day before. I told her that since what had happened yesterday hadn’t bothered her then, it shouldn’t be of any concern to her now. I told her I didn’t want to talk to her. My sister eventually found work, as a bookkeeper in the offices of a supermarket. My mother found a job too in the same office where I worked. She collected the workers’ bread coupons, took a little buggy to the bakery and bought bread so the workers wouldn’t have to stand in line at the end of a long day. I began going to night school; I wanted to get my high school diploma. I would rush to class after a long day at work and get home about eleven o’clock at night. After two or three months of staying at the teacher’s house, some compassionate people where my sister Gitta worked told us about an empty storefront which belonged to the supermarket and arranged for us to live there. We put schmattes on the windows and moved in in early 1944. We lived, slept and ate in that one room until the summer of 1945.
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