Commemorative candle. The Taimyr Region during the years of political repressions . Memoirs
Born in 1923 in the village of Gelzel (Hölzel), Seelmann District, Saratow
Region, ASSR of the Volga-Germans. Deported with her parents to the Krasnoyarsk
Territory in 1941, to the Taimyr Region in September 1942. Worked as a
fisherwoman. Died in Dudinka.
I was born as a farmer’s daughter. My parents worked for a pig breeding farm. We had our own house, a little farmstead with a cow and a couple of chicken. In September 1941 we were deported to Siberia. My father, Mikhail-Mikhailovith Gerb-Sommer was mobilized to the trudarmy; since then he is missing. One year later they took us to Dudinka on board the steamship „Kirow“, from there by cutter to the hamlet of Ananevskoe. We were placed in a common barrack. It was terribly cold and we were hungry. Our mother, Jekaterina (Katharina) Andreevna Gerb-Sommer, died in April 1943, due to debilitation from hard labour. I was fourteen years old at that time, my brother Adolf seven, my sister Pauline sixteen.
Barbara, Pauline, Adolf Gerb-Sommer.
Settlement of Levinskiye Peski, 1962
In the automn of 1943 they took my brother to a childrens home. He did not want to leave us, ran away and tried to hide under Grandmother Yadviga Raissich’s (Reissig?) skirt.
My brother and I were to get reunited only eighteen years later, in 1961, when he removed to the settlement of Levinskiye Peski, where my sister and I were working for the fishing industry. During the last years my sister, Pauline Pabst, werked as a milkmaid for the „Polyarniy“ sovkhoz. She is in possession of numerous certificates of hounour and diplomas.
Recorded in Dudinka in 1991-1992
