Childhood, social relations and languages: school

“And the staff of the sawmill were deportees, people like my mother, with children. There weren’t only little children like us. There were families with adolescents of 16 or 17. They were there waiting till they were called up. There were Gypsies and Lithuanians. One of the Lithuanians called Yuzik became my school mate. We were all in the same school, the primary school, where we were taught for the first four years, then we moved to Bolshaya Koda, where there was a school for the older pupils. We were boarders. We went there for the whole week, taking our own food, otherwise we wouldn’t have been fed. Some people rented rooms from the locals. That happened for my brothers. I was a full boarder.