All I could hear was the word “war”

Evdochia Grinspun: One day my father came home from work and I could see him talking to my mother. He was telling her something and she started to cry. I couldn’t understand because I was so little – I was 5 years old. I couldn’t understand what was happening. All I could hear was the word “war” but I had no notion of what it meant.* After two or three days we had to leave, to evacuate the area. We left all our things in our house.

* Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Evdochia told me she and her family left their home in Cobilna, Soroca (in the northern part of Moldova) on June 24, 1941. Like many Jewish families, they left the area as German and Romanian troops moved in.

I have two documents that I saved from my father. One of them has to do with the first place where we stopped, in Stavropol.* And I remember only that we climbed out of a carriage (or a horse-drawn buggy) and there were tomatoes. We got out of the carriage and I remember only tomatoes. I can almost taste those tomatoes.

I can’t remember exactly where we went from there, but I can remember that first we stopped in Kazakhstan. I remember the village where we stopped. It was very difficult in that village: it was winter, cold, and we were in a small room with no light. The conditions were beyond horrible. And then I don’t know – I remember my grandmother whom I loved very much died in this village. My father wasn’t with us – it was just me and my mother and my brother who was a year and a half younger. After that – we had cousins who were in another region, in a region where they had gone when they were pushed out of Ukraine in 1939, and we stopped there.

After that, I don’t know how, I don’t remember exactly, but we moved to a Kazakh area on the river Don. The river overflowed, and I remember the water had reached the threshold of the house where we were. We lived with a Kazakh family – an old lady who was very kind. She treated me like a granddaughter. She had grandsons who were terrible. They didn’t understand what war was, and this situation that we were in. And the grandmother would chase them away all the time and she took me everywhere with her. I even went with her to a funeral. She would feed me. She had a little gray-white hen and when the hen laid eggs she’d say, “This egg is for you.” 

Over there the watermelons are so very very very… we don’t have anything like it here (in Moldova). Here we make jam from plums, but there they make it from watermelon. They make the jam just like women do here – the scoop out the watermelon into a big cauldron and they spend all night stirring it. And I was by her side watching, and she would spread some of this jam on a bliny (a type of Russian crepe) for me, and I loved it.  

The milk there was wonderful. Kazakhs have big fields for pasture. The milk is placed in the oven in clay containers. The milk is very rich and after the fire dies down, on top of the milk there forms a little skin the color of coffee, and it’s very rich and very tasty. She would make a batch of bliny and then spread this milk fat on top – very tasty. 

(PHONE RINGS)

Recorded June 5, 2013 in Persechina, Moldova.

Editor’s note: Did you notice that tapestry with deer and green pine trees on Evdochia’s couch? My grandmother, who was from Moldova, had a similar one in our apartment in Bucharest — only hers had brown trees (if I remember correctly) and was hanging on the wall next to the bed where I slept as a kid. I don’t remember seeing deer tapestries in other people’s homes in Bucharest and had forgotten about it until I started seeing them in Moldova. Is it a local tradition?