I was eight years old when we moved to Kyiv from a Roma collective farm. I learned very quickly, even before school, that it was better not to say you were Roma. I hid it myself. I felt intuitively that to be on equal footing with others, it was better to stay silent.

I first saw the Germans as they marched in a column down Khreshchatyk. The city was occupied. In our building, no one knew we were Roma; they were more likely to think we were Jews. My new baby sister needed milk, and my brother looked so much like a Jew that he couldn’t even go outside. I looked a bit less so. I passed for an Assyrian, and there was a large Assyrian family living nearby. I went with their children to shine the boots of German, Italian, and Hungarian soldiers just to earn a piece of bread. On my own, I couldn’t have gone out on the street. But in a crowd of Assyrian children, I was “one of them.”

My mother was ill, paralyzed on her right side. The responsibility for everyone fell on me, a ten-year-old. When the Germans began to retreat, they evicted people street by street. They threw us out too, with a sick mother and an infant. But I had managed to hide some bottles of vodka. At eleven or twelve, I already understood: vodka was the most valuable currency. I traded it for a poor horse and a cart. I put my mother, sister, and brother on it and led them toward Bila Tserkva.

We traveled through villages, asking for shelter for the night. People let us in and fed us — they saw the state we were in. Along the way, we picked up a stray cow, which gave milk for my sister. We finally settled in an abandoned estate and began to live again.