Welcome To

Family Is All That Matters 34 the family would go back to Moscow where anti-Semitism would remain intact. "What will happen when we go back to Moscow and people find out that their father spent the war years as a Jewish prayer leader? Our children will have no future in such circumstances. They will not be allowed to go to school," he said. Reluctantly, he turned the offer down and made do with manual labor. Inna remembers being hungry. Each working person was allotted 300 grams of bread per day as well as some sunflower oil and sugar; those without work were rationed only 200 grams Above: Iosif in Yugoslavia, 1944. During WWII Iosif served as a senior aircra sergeant. of bread per day. In reality, only the bread was available. To get that bread, someone had to stand in line the whole day and then the whole night. These rations were barely enough to keep people alive. The family sustained itself by eating turtle eggs and turtle soup. The working conditions in Tashkent were horrible. The men had to unload the factory machines om the train while standing knee- deep in eezing water. Typhus and typhoid were epidemic in these conditions. Many people developed a condition called "chicken blindness," a common term for xerophthalmia, a form of night blindness that is the result of a deficiency of vitamin A. Shlomo, like most of the workers, soon came down with blindness. It was a pitiful sight at the end of the workday. All the women would run to the worksite to meet their fathers, husbands, and brothers to guide them home because night blindness made it difficult or impossible for the men to find their way home at dusk. Soon Shlomo became even sicker. He developed epidemic typhus and then had to be hospitalized for abscesses. Not that hospitalization did much good. There was no medicine to treat the disease, nor even food to feed the patients. People got better on their own or they died. No one at the hospital cared one way or the other. At least Shlomo did not have to work and his rations continued. While Shlomo was hospitalized, Ida and Inna both contracted typhoid, but were sent to different hospitals. Inna's hospital was in a big barn converted into an infirmary. Hundreds of patients were laid out in a row. Most were unconscious and conditions were terrible. Laments Inna, "My poor mother was run ragged. She had to run om hospital to hospital to feed us, plus she had to wait in line at the ration station to get provisions." At this point, sisters Ida and Rosa wrote to Stalin. They described the desperate circumstances of the family. They knew exactly what to say: they asked for help for a family with

• Cover