I am Galina Mishchenko. I was born on August 15, 1937, in Pushkin, Leningrad Oblast, USSR. My father worked as an engineer at an aircraft factory in Leningrad. When I was four years old, the war began.
The siege of Leningrad
In August 1941, the Siege of Leningrad began. (By September 1941, two and a half months after the invasion, the city was completely surrounded by German troops. The siege lasted 900 days. At the time of the siege, approximately 2 million residents remained in the city; during this time, more than 1 million civilians died of starvation.)
The factory where my father worked was dismantled and evacuated to the Urals, to the city of Nizhny Tagil. The workers were supposed to go with the factory. The departure date was unknown in advance. The news of the departure was announced two hours in advance. My parents couldn’t even take their belongings because they were working loading equipment. I remember the long journey we made in a cold freight car, without food or water.
Nizhny Tagil had a very cold climate. We had no clothes, no shelter, and no food. My parents worked 16 hours a day, seven days a week. I was often left alone. It was very cold and there was very little food (my father was given 250 grams of bread a day, and my mother and I were given 125 grams each). There was no kindergarten or school. It was a very difficult time for me and my family.
My father’s death
In December 1941, my father contracted pneumonia and died. When he died, the temperature was -40°C. To bury him, my mother and I were given two old men to help us dig the grave with shovels (the younger men were away at war and at work). The ground was very hard, and my mother and I carried firewood and lit a fire all day long to thaw the earth so we could dig.
The next day, they gave us an old man and a horse-drawn cart, into which they placed Dad’s coffin. We went to the cemetery. The grave we’d dug the day before was already occupied; someone else was buried there. Mom started crying, and the man with the cart, who was supposed to help us, said he had one hour and then he’d leave.
Mom didn’t know what to do. So she started digging the grave with her hands, removing chunks of earth. We did it together and cried. Then we placed Dad’s coffin on top of the one already there and covered the grave with earth. It was bitterly cold. Mom’s fingers got frostbite, her nails broke until they bled. She was 27 years old.
Travelling
A few days later, Mom said we wouldn’t survive there and would have to go to Kazakhstan, where it was warm. So we went. There were no regular trains. We traveled for a very long time and changed trains many times. We arrived in the Almaty region, in the village of Mulaly. My mother worked there on a farm until the end of the war. We lived there until 1945.
When the war ended (in 1945), our house in the town of Pushkin was destroyed by the occupation, and we had nowhere to return to, so we went to Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, at the invitation of my father’s family. His brother and two sisters lived there. Here, at the age of 9, in 1946, I went to school for the first time.
Kryvyi Rih
At first, we lived with my uncle; later, in 1946, my mother got married. Kryvyi Rih was heavily damaged after the war, and we lived in a barracks for 11 years. It was a long house in which we had one room, 14 square meters, with no amenities, no running water, no toilet, and no bathroom. It had a stove, so we had to heat it ourselves with wood. The toilet was outside, water was carried from afar in a bucket, and we went to a public bathhouse for bathing.
I lived in Kryvyi Rih my entire life. I studied, then worked at a factory for 35 years as a chemical engineer in a laboratory. I was married. I have two children: daughter Tatyana, born in 1958, and son Yuri, born in 1964.
In 1992, I retired. In 1993, my husband, Nikolai Mishchenko, died. In 1995, my son Yuri became seriously ill. I cared for him for four years. In 1999, he died of cancer at the age of 35. His wife then died in a car accident in 1995. They are survived by their son, Stanislav Mishchenko, age 11, my grandson.
In 2000, my mother died. It was a difficult time for me. I lived in a fifth-floor apartment in a building without an elevator.
The war in Ukraine
In 2022, I was 85 years old. My health was poor, and I couldn’t walk easily. On February 24, 2022, early in the morning, our city was shelled by rockets. The airport and other buildings were destroyed. I couldn’t believe it was possible. I was in shock.
The shelling was frequent, and loud sirens sounded very frequently, telling me to take cover. There was no shelter close to my building, and I couldn’t often walk from the fifth floor. The sirens sounded very frequently, day and night. I was constantly stressed and afraid. I stopped sleeping completely, day or night, and often sat in the hallway, afraid of broken windows and glass. My health deteriorated.
Another journey
In March 2022, Russian troops approached to within about 70 km of the city. A curfew was imposed in the city, regular trains stopped running, and power and water were cut off.
I was terrified. I had already experienced war and shelling as a child, when we were leaving Leningrad, and now, at the end of my life, I was experiencing war again. I realized I couldn’t bear it a second time, and I decided to leave with my family.
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