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Witnesses of Jewish genocide on the territory of Belarus in 1941-1944

Rivveka (Kagan) Aleyeva (born in 1923)

Before the war I was a student at a Smolensk college of foreign languages, On June 22, 1941 I passed and exam in college and was on the way to the post office to call my parents in Gorky to inform them I was coming soon. On the way I heard about the war. There was not transport to Gorky so we had to walk. All the people were moving away from there, to the east, while we were in a hurry to the west, to Gorky.

Place of Gorky ghetto between Yakubovsky street (former Internatsionalnaya) and Sovetskaya (former Mstislavskaya).

Our family gave shelter to refugees whose last name was Taklenok, with two small children. They warned us that Germans would within a few days arrive in Gorky and we had to leave. So we did. We only took our cow with us. In Kadino we met our relatives who joined us. Only aunt Rakhil with her husband and children and my friend Basia Krasik and her family decided to come back. They all were killed in the ghetto.

People were afraid to let us into their houses and give us shelter. We managed to reach Tula, where we sold our cow and continued our trip on a train. We stopped in Kinel. I got off to get some food and it happened so that the train left without me. I was lucky because I joined a hospital and reached Juma (Uzbekistan), where I met my parents.

Place of execution of Gorky Jews in 1941 near the village of Zadorozhie.

I continued working in the hospital but later fell ill with typhus and my mobile hospital left without me. In 1944 I came back to Smolensk and then moved to Moscow to study to be an interpreter. Later in 1946 I was sent to Germany to work as an interpreter. In 1949 I returned to Gorky and began working as a teacher of English. In 1952 I got married and we had two children: a boy and a girl.

Extract from the book by Leonid Smilovitsky
"Catastrophe of the Jews from Belarus, 1941-1944" (adapted by translator)
(Tel Aviv, 2000)

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