In the Village of Smolensky, Altai Territory

After some time, many families received permission to move to the village of Smolensky not far away from the city of Biysk. My mother and I were among them.

We became tenants in the house of one Russian woman Zinaida Zenkin (I have forgotten her middle name) whose husband was at the war. She had two sons and a daughter. We were given the small place in the room where there was a narrow bed for two and a small table. Our hostess and her daughter slept in the same room.

Smolensky was a big village that had schools, a hospital, a movie theater, and stores with empty shelves. Next to the village there was a brick factory where some of the special settlers worked. Many other deportees, including my mother, worked at kolkhozes (collective farms). Large fields with fertile chernozem soil (black earth) spread around the village.

I continued to study hard. Sometimes students went on foot on field trips to Biysk. It was a sort of entertainment for the children. We spent the whole day on tour and came home tired from the trip.

My mother also needed to go to Biysk for business reasons. Sometimes she got a lift there and back from passing wagons. I remember that one day when she came back from the city of Biysk she brought me wonderful presents: a small children’s book with pictures and an apple. I bit into the magnificent juicy fruit. I have never had an apple so sweet and juicy. I still remember its heavenly taste. And it seemed to me, there was nothing as magical as that small book and the taste of that apple. It was the first and the last time in the years of the exile that I was given a present. I would read that little book which my mother gave me every day for several times.

There was a small shallow river flowing through the village. The river had deep holes in the bottom. If I am not mistaken, the name of that river was Poperechka. We children swam in it all summer. I learned how to swim there. It happened in the following way. I was afraid to go into the river's deep places without help, so I asked my friends to push me into that deep part of the river. They did but continued to watch me in case I got into trouble, they would be there to help me. I was trying to swim out of the hole by making random moves and floundering about in the water. However, once my fears subsided, movement of my arms and legs became more deliberate and purposeful, my swimming gradually got better and better, and I was able to swim out of the deep holes.

I also liked fishing in that river. I made my own fishing rod and exchanged some things for fishing-line and fishhooks. And once, when my mother was at work I fished all day long and caught fish: many gudgeons, roaches, perches, ruffs and even one small pike.

One day, I came home very hungry and immediately began cleaning and cutting the fish. Then I threw it in a frying pan and fried it in some butter. I also poured ten eggs over the fish. After some time, the dish was ready to eat. The portion was huge, but I greedily ate it all up. Apparently, it was too much for me. I felt sick and had to vomit. When my mother came back from work she cleansed my stomach. I could not even look at fried fish and eggs for a long time after that incident.

Large private vegetable gardens were laid out for each house in the village to provide families with potatoes, cucumbers, beets, carrots, pepper, cabbage, and other vegetables. The villagers also had been trying to grow tomatoes, but tomatoes could not be naturally ripened during the short summer. Green (immature) tomatoes harvested before frost were stored indoors and ripened in the valenki (felt boots) or other dark and warm places. Our hostess gave us a patch from her vegetable garden where we also grew vegetables.

The special settlers were given small, uncultivated virgin plots of land beside the village. They had nothing to plough the land with, however, and they did not have the physical strength to dig it with a shovel. Nevertheless they adapted themselves to the circumstances, and somehow dug out small holes in the ground, loosened the soil there, and planted pre-sprouted potatoes. They had to pull soil up around the stems of potato plants ("hill" them) once or twice during the season. And we harvested crops of large delicious potatoes.

It was during potato-harvesting season on the plot of land allotted to us that my mother suffered a cerebral hemorrhage. She was taken to a local hospital, but there was no medicine available at the hospital for effective treatment. I visited my mother every day, and each time she was worried whether I was hungry or unwell. On December 20, 1943, my mother Eidl Rykliansky died in the hospital in the village of Smolensky after her second stroke at the young age of 46. Obviously, the privations and miseries of the exile, the stress of constant worry and concern for her elder son, parents and other relatives who were left in Lithuania, and for her husband, who was in the camp of Kraslag, had a ruinous effect on her already weak health.

The memory of my marvelous mother Eidl Rykliansky will always be a blessing to us!

My mother was buried on a hillock in the village cemetery. Many Jewish women deportees conducted the funeral. Hirshl Mirkin, his mother, and other special settlers attended the funeral.

I, 10-year-old boy at the time, (born on July 25, 1933), had been left to live alone without my parents. I continued to live in the house of Zinaida Zenkin and paid for my accommodation with mother’s clothes. I ate with the Zenkin family; worked with them in kolkhoz and their vegetable garden near house. I slept on top of the Russian stove in winter; and on the polaty (planking fixed between wall and stove, used as a sleeping place) with the sons of Zinaida Zenkin in the summer. My countrymen-deportees helped me to endure and survive the harsh living conditions, not making one false step. They advised me, fed me, and even helped by sending food parcels to my father in Stalin’s camp. I still remember all these many years later how Rachel Mirkin, Itl Grach, the Khaet sisters, and other Jewish women took care of me. And I will be thankful to them for their kindness and support towards me. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the names of some of them by now.

However, I remember one incident very clearly. Once, I went to visit the Khaet sisters for some reason. Shortly after I arrived, an axe fell off one of the terrace beams and the sharp edge hit my left little toe (thank God that it was not my head) and partially chopped through the bone. Blood started pouring out of my wound. The sisters cleaned the nasty cut and bandaged it up but I did not go to the doctor. The bone has healed with time, but I still have the scar to this day.

I also clearly remember Victory Day. On that day (May 9, 1945) almost all of the people of the village of Smolensky gathered in the central plaza to listen to the announcement over the loud speaker declaring that the war with Germany had ended. As I stood in the square, I saw that many of the local villagers were happy and looked forward to seeing their relatives and friends soon. The widows and orphans were crying, some of them sobbed violently. Their husbands and fathers had been killed on the battlefields and would never return home. And I felt on that day only the darkness of exile, pain, grief, loneliness, and sadness. I did not know when my father would be free from the camp of Stalin’s GULAG or whether he would live to complete his sentence. I had heard of many husbands and fathers of special settlers who had died in Stalin’s camps, and it was still an open question how many more prisoners would die there after the end of the war. Also, I knew nothing about what had happened to my relatives who remained in Lithuania, and I was very worried about them and wondered if they were still alive.

However, great hope for a better future never left me in my childhood.

But now let’s get back to the moment of deportation of the people who were declared "dangerous" by the Soviet authorities from Lithuania to Siberia.

All men arrested in Lithuania were locked up in 1941 in the camps of Stalin’s GULAG without proper trial proceedings for an undetermined sentence period. Only in January 1943, the "Special Conference" of the NKVD USSR (so-called "Troika") started to "sue" the deported people from Lithuania in their absence with no prosecution and defense attorneys. My father Tsemakh Rykliansky was given a five-year sentence for being a "socially dangerous element;" for having many relatives overseas; for being a Jewish activist; and for owning a store in pre-Soviet Lithuania. Apparently, during that time, the "Special Conference" of the NKVD USSR passed sentences on many other prisoners of Kraslag who had been sent off from Lithuania. Those sentences were not subject to appeal.

Then, my father’s sentence was reduced by five and a half months in accordance with the declared amnesty of July 7, 1945, and he was released from the camp of Kraslag at the end of 1945. However, he was prohibited from leaving Krasnoyarsk Territory even to come and pick up his son. Tsemakh Rykliansky was assigned to work as a non-prisoner in one of the enterprises of the Kraslag system in the city of Kansk.

My father and I regularly wrote letters to each other. In August 1946, eight months after my father’s release from the camp of Stalin’s GULAG, he received permission to visit me in the village of Smolensky. He took me away and we went to Lithuania without getting permission from the special commandant’s office of the NKVD.