The End of Evacuation, and the Victory (Autumn 1942 — May 9, 1945).
My elder brother Leonid helped us to get a permission to return from evacuation in summer 1942. During a waiting period at one of the railway stations we met the liberators of our home town. A Latvian soldier came up to my Dad and said: ‘Why are your children lying under the bench? The floor is concrete, and it’s so cold’. My father replied: ‘Where else can they lie? All benches are occupied, and they haven’t slept for so many nights’. Then I and my brother crawled from underneath the bench, our mother was left lying on this very typical railway bench. We began to talk, my father went away, and this soldier started paying me compliments. Then he asked me where we were from. I told him that we were evacuees, now returning by permission. ‘Where did you live before evacuation?’ he asked. ‘In Borovsk’, I said. As soon as he heard this, he shouted an officer over to us, a Latvian, too. Together, they explained that their division liberated Borovsk. I later read about this in the press.
In autumn of 1942 we arrived to Yaroslavl. My sister Vera lived in a room in a communal flat and could hardly fit us all, so we had to stay in my aunt’s flat. She was the Head Financier of the Armed Forces Supply Committee (Voentorg-Военторг). She arranged for my father to do carpentry work in several canteens in the city. The rest of us did not work.
In the winter of 1942 Hitler’s troops were attacking Stalingrad, which caused panic in the city. Had Stalingrad been taken, in spring as soon as the ice would melt on the River Volga the Nazis would have entered Yaroslavl. These were extremely tense, difficult days. The checks were carried out every night, with military patrols visiting each and every flat in the city. Nobody would even think of not opening the door to the patrol — vigilance was the prime objective.
We left Yaroslavl in autumn 1943. Our house in Borovsk was burnt by the Nazis. There was no point going back because there was a lack of living spaces in the town, so there was no chance anyone would put us up or rent us a house. We went to stay with my elder brother Pyotr, who lived at Mamontovka Station, not far from Moscow. When we were going from Yaroslavl to Mamontovka, at the Yaroslavsky Railway Station in Moscow we put our basket with bread under the bench, and someone stole it from the other side.
We came to Mamontovka in autumn 1943; the first snow had already fallen. Peter worked in the Moscow Regional Office of the People’s Education (MOONO-МООНО), and he lived on the territory of the Nadezhda Krupskaya Foster Care. We lived there for some time, and then we were given a small derelict house at Klyazma Station, which was a railway station just before Mamontovka. The house had neither doors, nor window frames, but we did not care much. My father was a carpenter, and he very quickly made windows and doors, I even guess they have not ever been changed.
[Note: Lydia and her daughter Olga left the house in 1970. In 2003, the house was still standing].
We met the Victory in Klyazma. The radio had never been turned off, and at three o’clock in the night we heard the signal. We rushed to turn on the black radio plate, and next minute we were hearing the voice of Levitan, who announced a special declaration from the Soviet government. He said that Hitler’s Germany signed the Pact of Capitulation. We ran outside, and the village streets were all full of people, and they were all cheering, and crying, and everyone was very happy.