Esfir Lupyan - December 17, 2007
Father 2
My father sent many letter from north, from ??? Uh, letters without address, just Minsk. Just Minsk post mail. "Who knows my family, who knows what happened with my family? Let me know." So, he wrote her, her many times that--maybe ten hundred I don't know--in one letter somebody find it uh, somebody said, "Oh, this is for Bella. This is from ???" And somebody find my mom after ghetto, he wrote, "I need your address if somebody survive." So, here it was address and she wrote him letter, "I lost all family, I have only Tira." And whatever, she ask what to do and he, and he met her in 1945 and then I go in school up north. It... You know uh, it was ??? Koenig, Koenig. Small, north republic. A ??? republic.
Mm-hm.
??? Twelve years, twelve months. Twelve months. Dark and it was only dark or light, you know, all around twenty-four hours. It was winter. A half... No, it's ten, ten months. In two months maybe it, it was summer. Terrible, yes. Climate was, you know, very, very cold.
And this is where the Stalinist government sent your father?
Not only my father.
But the...
Thousands, thousands people, all different nations. What I know definitely, I was--this time--I was eight years old. At least I know that it was uh, it was Romanian, Bavarian uh, even one person or two persons was Black. They died, they could not leave from here ??? or from, from uh, stories. And it was American people, from Europe, thousand people, Russian ??? Georgian, and many, many Jews. Many Jews. But he sent it not because Jews, but because, because he said ??? there, you know...
Yeah.
... ??? Yeah.
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