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Chapter 5: 1943
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C = After groping in the dark for a couple of hours, we came to Lougovaya. I knew the area around the railroad station and the delousing bathhouse, but we turned onto an unpaved side street and Mother went from house to house trying to find the right place in the dark. She finally found a sort of double kibitka and knocked on the window to the right of the door. A feeble light appeared in the window and we entered a small, windowless hallway with a door on the right side. In the wobbly light of a soot-maker we saw three sleepy-eyed, unshaven young men, probably in their late twenties , in a room about ten feet wide and fifteen feet long. I do not know how Mother managed to talk them into sharing this already overcrowded place with the six of us until we could find a place to live. Along the wall to the left of the door was a cot about two feet wide consisting of boards on sawhorses, where one of the men slept. Along the opposite wall was a similar cot, but about three feet wide, on which slept the other two men. They told us to make ourselves as comfortable as possible. Eva with her brood spread their rags on the clay floor between the cots; the only place left for Mother, me, and Vilya was either on a crude table under the window in the corner opposite the door, or under it. We decided to sleep on it and shoved our bundles under it. With a crumbling stove occupying the corner next to the door, there was not more than a couple of square feet of free space left. In the morning, the men had to slide out of the ends of their cots (be- cause there was no room to step down on the side) to go to work. Since everyone slept in their clothes, there was no problem with lack of privacy, and since breakfast consisted only of bread and water, the lack of space did not create a problem in preparing meals either. In winter, when it was so cold that water froze in the room, Mother’s overcoat, which we used for a blanket, frequently froze to the windowpanes and had to be chiseled away. The reason these men were not in the army, like all other young men, was because they had been Polish prisoners of war and had been released only recently from prisoner-of-war camps; they were not Soviet citizens. They were taken prisoners when, after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Germany attacked Poland from the west on September , and then the Soviets attacked it from the east several days later. Since most Soviet able-bodied men were away in the army, some of these guys had a choice of jobs where there was food, such as unloading sacks of flour in the bakery, or work in warehouses. Such jobs presented opportunities to siphon off valuable foodstuffs, usually with the knowledge of management , who received a share of the proceeds when these goods were sold on the black market. = Mother had lined up jobs for herself and for Eva as cleaning women at the local artel. The pay was low but it assured a permit to live in town and to receive bread-ration cards: grams (less than a pound) for adults and grams for children.The bread was dark and mushy, with embedded wet pieces of salt the size of beans; most days it was all we had to eat. It was my job to stand in the bread line at the store, and it took a superhuman effort to refrain from pinching off more than my share on the way home. Vilya, who by then was six years old, frequently waited for me several streets from the house and, upon seeing me, ran shouting, “Bread! Bread! Give me some bread!” When occasionally the bakery did not receive flour on time or some equipment broke down, there was no bread for a day and sometimes for several days. While our situation was unenviable, in comparison with some other people ’s it was not the worst. On warm evenings we usually ate outside, sitting on the ground. I had built a sort of fireplace in which we burned weeds that A R B .134.85.87] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 01:45 GMT) Vilya and I gathered beyond the outskirts of town and, if...