Not online: the recording is held by the project and is not on Media Collections Online, YouTube or archive.org. Everything below is a paraphrase of a machine transcript, the weaker of this site's two transcript layers — see how it was made.
Recording of Zbirzher in Ribnitz (Rybnitsa), 26 June 2018, the fourth of seven consecutive camera files. The interviewee speaks almost entirely in Russian: first his rhymed autobiographical verses about his birth in 1933, childhood on Voykova street by the Dniester, and the outbreak of war, then a prose account of the bombing of Ribnitz, the flight east by horse cart, evacuation to Tajikistan and episodes on the road. Kerler interjects a few times in Yiddish, and the file ends as Kerler asks about the episode he mentioned.
The interviewee reads aloud his rhymed verses about his own life. He was born in 1933, the year of the famine, and his mother kept him quiet with a piece of bread. His father was a carter, his mother had a sharp temper, and he was an only child. The family lived on Voykova street on the bank of the Dniester in a small thatched house with a clay floor, with horses, a cow, ducks, geese and a goat. The text is in Russian.
Continuing the verses, the interviewee recalls childhood in Ribnitz. He describes bathing his father's horses in the river, learning to swim and swearing at five, a knuckleduster and street fights, mother's bread and jam, and life without light, gas or running water. He also mentions kindergarten and a loaf costing 16 kopecks. Kerler asks whether the swearing was in Russian or Yiddish and asks him to repeat it, and a Yiddish curse is quoted back to him.
The verses reach the summer of 1941: airplanes appear overhead, the children shout a rhyme as they watch them, and then the bombing begins. The children are put in a damp cellar, and sirens sound. The interviewee notes that Kerler is 60, and says his own age to the interviewer.
The interviewee explains in Russian how Ribnitz defended itself for about a month and a half (until 13 August, he says) with anti-aircraft guns in the courtyards. The Germans wanted to destroy the bridge over the Dniester. He saw captured German pilots led to the militia station near his house. He mentions an acquaintance, Perlov Nikolay (about 90), who lives in a different part of the area and comes from a village near Yampil (Yampol), where the Germans arrived on the third day of the war.
The flight east from Ribnitz by horse cart in 1941. The interviewee travelled with his mother and maternal grandmother Leye (Lea). A second cart carried his father's brother's wife and children and his paternal grandmother Khove. Both fathers had been called to the front. Kerler asks for the names of relatives, including an uncle Hershl and his wife Freyde, and discusses the words for aunt. The journey took about a hundred days, nobody was hurt, and German planes bombed them every day.
They sheltered from the bombs in gardens, cornfields and woods and saw dead people and horses. They arrived in Rostov at night to find lights burning in a peaceful city, then gave their horses and cart to a teenager and took a train to Stalingrad. They spent half a year in a village named Nikolskoe(?), working in the collective farm in the autumn. As the Germans approached, they chose to go to Stalin(a)bad (Dushanbe), where the grandmother's relatives lived, via Saratov and Tashkent. Kerler and S2 interject briefly.
Life in Dushanbe during the war. His father worked on the railway; the mother was ill. A worker's salary of about four hundred roubles bought only four loaves of bread, and Americans' help (powdered milk, saccharin, canned meat) kept them alive. They returned in August 1944 to find their house taken apart for fuel and its contents stolen. The interviewee offers to tell further wartime episodes.
Kerler says he would like to ask about the informant's children, but the informant begins another episode from the evacuation or return journey. They travelled through Dubossary(?) and a district named Krasnye Okna (Krasnooknyansky), when refugees suddenly scattered off the road because German motorcyclists appeared. Kerler asks how a motorcycle is said in Yiddish, and the informant answers with the Russian-based word.
Another wartime episode near the Dnieper (Dnepropetrovsk area). A German plane strafed the refugees with a machine gun, and they hid under the slope of a narrow valley. The plane returned very low, so that the pilot's face was visible, and nobody was hurt. The interviewee stresses that he remembers every detail clearly.
The interviewee explains that he remembers it all because he writes verses for every holiday, including Passover and Hanukkah, and posts greetings on the door of the Hesed society for the town's Jews. After his wife died two years earlier he stopped writing for a year. He mentions a collection of his songs and a patronage-service worker who types copies. Kerler asks what episode he means.