The Taste of That Bread I Remember Eighty Years Later

Before the war our family lived in Belarus. I was seven when the war began. In the first days we managed to leave the city in a freight car. For a month we lived in that car. Daily air raid alarms, bombings. We hid in potato fields, in tall grass. They brought us to some village.

“For the first time in the whole war they gave me half a glass of milk and a piece of bread. The taste of that bread I remember even eighty years later.”

These were four years of hunger, cold, and poverty. We ate rotten potatoes and grass, and received a ration of oilcake. We never tasted bread. So that my younger sister and I would not die of hunger, my mother gave us to an orphanage in 1944. We lived there about three or four months. For the first time in the whole war they gave me half a glass of milk and a piece of bread. The taste of that bread I remember even eighty years later. Those were the hardest days of the entire war.

Every morning at six the children were sent out to agricultural work. My little sister cried, and I gave her my ration of bread. My older sister was mobilized to the labor front. For four years she dug trenches. My father went to the front as a soldier and returned a captain, with orders and medals.

My mother's brother was the commander of a partisan detachment in the Gomel region and died a hero. My mother could not bear such a hard life, and died at only fifty.

Many years have passed. I will never forget the suffering that fell to our share.