“An elderly Jewish doctor, a woman, took me aside and told me she’d be gone in a few weeks, that I should just take her home.“

“An elderly Jewish doctor, a woman, took me aside and told me she’d be gone in a few weeks, that I should just take her home.“

Dora Postrelko was interviewed by Zhanna Litinskaya in Kiev in December 2002, when Dora was 84 years old. She was born in Tomashpol in 1918 and moved with her sister Hana to Kiev in 1936.

My older sister Hana did very well in her studies, but she came down with tuberculosis. She got better in 1937 and began to see her fellow student, Sasha Goldberg, a handsome Jewish boy. They planned to get married after finishing college, but, well, life had its own rules.

On June 22, 1941, the Great Patriotic War began. Hana, a construction engineer, was given the assignment to go to a small town near Kremenchug, around 155 miles from Kiev. She was to work in a factory repairing trains. I wanted to go with her.

Sasha took us to a ship sailing down the Dnieper to Kremenchug, then he went to the front. German planes strafed our ship, dropped bombs, but none hit us. People were screaming.

We arrived in Kremenchug at night while bombs were exploding; we were afraid that our eardrums would burst. We hid in a crater and managed to get to Kryukov. We were given a room and Hana went to work in the factory. But on August 6, 1941, German troops landed a few kilometers away.

We started running, but Hana got winded and had to rest. I feared that her tuberculosis was coming back. Oh no, I thought, not that. Not here. Not now.

We reached the Dnieper. It was incredibly wide, and we saw a ship filled with women and children approaching. A German plane dropped a bomb on it, and we watched hundreds of people drown right in front of us.

We found an older man with a rowboat who took us across, all while Hana was hacking and coughing. We scrambled onto a train full of people. Everyone helped Hana with tea and warm blankets. And she started to feel better.

We arrived in Donetsk, then we found two places on a passenger train to Kuibyshev—they call it Samara now—a city on the Volga River around 930 miles from Kyiv.

Hana was ideally qualified to work as an engineer on the construction of the gas pipeline—even more than working on those trains. But when the weather started getting cold, she collapsed, and in February 1942, I brought her to a hospital.

An elderly Jewish doctor, a woman, took me aside and told me she’d be gone in a few weeks, that I should just take her home. Hana died at night, on April 14, 1942. Some workers stayed awake that night and made a coffin. A few men and I tried to take the coffin to the cemetery but the roads, after the winter snows, had become impassable.

We buried my beloved sister at the edge of the forest. I stayed on in Kuibyshev and worked on the pipeline. In the meantime, Hana’s fiancé Sasha Goldberg kept writing to her, and I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. So, I wrote him back and pretended I was Hana. Later, as the war was ending, I wrote and told him the truth. He asked for a photograph of her.

And that was my only contact with Sasha Goldberg until one day, it was in 1960 in Kyiv, I ran into him on the street. He told me he had been at the front and had been wounded. After the war, he got married.

I never saw him again after that. As for me, I was married once, but not for long. And I have lived in this one room in a communal flat for a half a century.