an older woman in lavender holding a photo of herself and father as a child

Caught between Hitler's troops and Stalin's: How one family escaped

A mother recounts her journey of survival during the final years of World War II.

The author’s mother, Helena Sigman (nee Elena Vorobiova), holds a photograph of her father, Arkady Vorobiov, and herself, age four, enjoying time together outside Kiev in 1938. Throughout their years as refugees, Arkady made sure his daughter studied math, grammar, and Russian poetry.

Photograph by Becky Hale, National Geographic

One of my mother’s earliest memories of the war is of a well-fed German boy about her age—seven or so—slipping her the outer skins of the salami his family presumably had just enjoyed. The boy lived across the garden in a five-story apartment building taken over by the Nazis who had occupied Kiev. The Nazi party viewed the city’s residents as “superfluous eaters,” and fertile Ukraine as the Reich’s breadbasket.

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