I am looking at the calendar and it shows: 6/22/2010.
June 22. It is 1 A.M. now.
On June 22, 1941 at 1 A.M. my then 22- year old mom was sleeping in a small town on the Ukrainian border. She was on a summer internship at a local hospital. She just finished her 4th year in Medical School and had one year ahead.
She still had 3 hours before the life has changed for her, for her family, for her country... There were 3 more hours before the howling whistling sounds of falling bombs would awake the town, and she, who specialized in pediatrics, had to step to the operating table and take the scalpel to treat wounded military from a nearby airfield… 3 hours before all that chaos, destruction and death…
It was a long war ahead. For my mom it started with the first bomb dropped by Nazi Germany. There were 1,465 days ahead. On June 22, 1941 her parents were still alive. My grandmother was executed in a ravine in Baby Yar in Kiev in less than 4 months in September… with hundreds of thousands of other Jews…She came to Kiev from a small town to take care of her daughters. She made sure they ran.
My grandfather was waiting for her in Malin, a small provincial town not far from Kiev. She never came. Instead Nazi came. The rounded all the Jews and packed them all in the home where our family lived, and then put the house on fire… they burned them alive.
I never had grandparents in my life, and they never knew me…
It was just the beginning of this war
No blame…but still tears
It was 69 years ago today…
I will always remember that day… 10 years before I was born… which was a lucky chance considering the circumstances...
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