Esther Feldman Icikson - October 23 & 29, November 5 & 12, 2001
Length of Journey
How many days were you on the river?
Uh, like I said, about ten to twelve days.
Ten to twelve days.
Yeah, maybe, maybe two weeks, yeah.
Okay, and then you're going down the river and you see Asino.
Uh, we come to Asino and we're very thrilled to be finally there. We hook up to the shore. We take our belongings um, off. Um, there is a special place for people to settle down until their next stop. And um, the first thing my mom does, she ventures out to find my daddy. We know that my father is there because we received a letter from him. Before you left.
Before we left Siberia, yes.
What did he say in the letter?
Don't remember exactly, but I, I think he might have said that he wants to come to us and my mom said stay put, we'll come to you. I'm not sure what...
She wrote back then?
I think so, I'm not sure. I had a feeling that that's what happened because he knew that--we knew that he's in Asino.
But let me take you back a second. The letter comes through to you...
Yeah.
...in Siberia.
Yeah. That's how...
What happened in your house in the room when that...
I think we received a letter that finally, that my dad is out of the, of uh...
Your mother must have been ecstatic.
Not only she, we were very happy. I think so, because we knew that my dad is in Asino, you see. We knew it. He was in Novosibirsk in jail. But we knew that he's in Asino.
I should have brought a map. Novosibirsk is how far from Asino?
This I cannot tell you because I don't know.
I'll have to check.
Yeah, you'll have to check this out. I don't know. It's away. Yeah. Um, we got to Asino, we unloaded our belongings, we settled down. My mom said to us "Children, you stay here and I'm going to find your father." So she and my aunt they were--went together to the city uh, to find my father and my uncle, because they were together, because they were all the time together. They were in jail together too. And a matter of fact, they made contact in jail by um, I don't remember exactly, my dad used to tell us that um, uh, they wrote on the wall in the bathrooms and somehow they got...
It wasn't a clicking on the wall.
I don't know whether it was cli...I don't think clicking, but somehow they made contact.
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