ABSTRACT
My first twenty-seven years had little to do with Japan, but had much to do with the world events that also shaped Japanese history. I was born in Tarnopol, at that time in Eastern Poland and now part of Ukraine, on 28 October 1937. My father, a graduate of a rabbinical school, was doing different jobs and dreaming to emigrate to Palestine. My mother was a teacher of Polish and Hebrew and worked for her living as a private tutor. When the Second World War broke out in September 1939, our part of Poland was occupied by the Soviets, while the rest was occupied by the Nazis. When Hitler attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941, my parents took their children and a few other members of the family and fled eastwards into Russia. Thus we were saved from the Holocaust, while all the other members of the family who had preferred to stay behind were killed by the Nazis. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, we were already on a collective farm (kolkhoz) near the town of Ulyanovsk, the birthplace of Lenin (now it is called again by its pre-revolutionary name Simbirsk). Then my father was drafted into the Red Army and my mother went to work at an airplane factory. My sister and I attended the local kindergarten, playing under a huge portrait of Stalin, whose smiling and moustached face I greatly admired. As the school was far from where we lived, I was sent there only when I was eight and then went directly to second grade. By that time I had spoken four languages: my parents spoke to me at first in Polish and later in Yiddish, at kindergarten and school the language was Russian, and my mother also taught me Hebrew.
