VK - At school, they would tell us to keep our ears open and listen, and then to come to school and tell them what our parents were saying. So parents tried not to talk in front of their children. I remember as if it was today, my mother brought home a small boy and girl, younger than me, and I heard as she asked them where their mother was. They said that their mother had brought them and left them on the street. It was already late in the evening, so my mother brought them home and fed them, and in the morning took them to the orphanage. [The childrens’ mother] saw that she was dying, and decided to leave the children and hope that someone would take them, because one had to be inhuman not to help two small children. Often my mother would warn me that if I ever told anyone what my parents were saying they would take her away, and I’d be put in an orphanage. So I kept quiet because I was scared.

INTERVIEWER – So people lived in fear?

VK – Always. This did not change until the War.

We children would go searching for food. We heard that there was a huge mound of grain at the train station. So we ran over to the grain. But the entire mound of grain had been covered in gasoline, so that people wouldn’t take it. And this is a fact. This is not a story, nobody told me about this. I saw this myself as a small child. People who would go and collect grain stalks were also arrested.