| Len's cousin
Siberia
Joe: First, of course was in Siberia. In Siberia, we were working with the wood. The main industry there is cutting trees, making wood. And needless to say -- I don’t remember, I was a little boy, I was about five -- but everybody worked. Did you work, Lou?
Louie: No, we went to school.
Joe: How old were you then?
Louie: About 10. We went to school. They had schools there, because they had villages, Russian villages. And we went to school. But over 18, everybody had to work. They had a very bad system.
Joe: How much did they work? Seven days a week?
Louie: Well, our village was on the river. What they use to do, cut down the wood. They had camps. Every place was camp. The whole thing was camp. And some camps were cutting the wood, and they pushed it in into the river. And it was supposed to go with the river to Hungarsk. And they were supposed to catch it there.
But then the winter came, and it used to freeze. But our camp had to work. Like every 2-3 kilometers was villages. They worked, they had to diner [? phonetic] by the ice and pull out the wood and put it, to drag it out on the shore. Stack it on the shore. And then when the ice broke up, then they had to push it back into the river.
And then, as the wood was floating, it used to create islands of wood, and they had to, all summer long, keep pushing the wood it should go. A very bad system. But all the camps were working on that, on that wood, to get it to Hungarsk, because they had no choice there. They had no other means of transportation. It was very undeveloped at that time.
You see, the White Sea freezes. Hungarsk is on the White Sea, and that freezes. For about 9 months it is frozen. And the Americans, when they sent supplies to Russia, they sent it to Murmansk, which is more north, the port -- it’s near Finland, but that has the Gulf Stream there, and that does not freeze. But Hungarsk freezes up. |
