Mother found her father alive, but very weak. He was infinitely happy about the arrival of his daughter, asked her mother to celebrate the Bright Holiday with him, and then return to Moscow. And so it happened. Mother exchanged tobacco and vodka, stocked up on food, and saw her old nun friends. At twelve o'clock at night, when the procession of the cross before matins was still standing at the closed doors of the church, my mother was alone in the church, standing on the soleum, where she had just finished reading the Bible. Suddenly, she heard her mother's voice: "Christ is risen!" and her mother was evacuated to Kazan, lying there in the hospital. Returning to Moscow, my mother sent a request to Kazan. She was told that her mother had died on the eve of the Bright Resurrection of Christ, at twelve o'clock at night, when the Paschal matins began in the church.

My grandfather Veniamin Fyodorovich blessed my mother, saying goodbye, with his baptismal cross, ordered her to give the cross to me, his granddaughter, for prayerful memory. I lost this cross when the gold chain frayed, but honest people found it and returned it to me. The grandfather also took care to wrap his daughter in a fur coat for the trip. "You will go from here in the car to the house, so you must not get cold," my grandfather said.

This coat has been serving us for fifty-five years. In it, my father shoveled the snow near the house, in this sheepskin coat I wrapped the children when they slept in a stroller in the cold in infancy. And now, when I am already over seventy, more than once a day I climb under my grandfather's sheepskin coat, warm myself and wish the Kingdom of Heaven to Dr. Veniamin Fyodorovich.

The landlady unexpectedly returned to the apartment of building No 1, which we occupied. She was an NKVD worker and her son, an armless teenager. They found that their wardrobe and closet were missing many expensive things. They accused us of theft and filed a complaint to search our apartment. Together with the investigator, they rummaged through all the corners and chest in our frozen apartment, but did not find anything. Of course, my parents had a lot of worries, because we had a lot of icons and forbidden religious literature. But my mother figured out how to explain all this, and told the truth: "Many of our friends, when they left for evacuation, brought us their things for safekeeping, so many things here are not ours."

However, it was no longer possible for us to stay in the passage room of building No 1: there was a man nearby who breathed anger at us and poured it out hourly. Then we began to drag our belongings again from the third floor to the first floor, to our old inhabited frozen apartment. That's when dad came up with the idea to build a brick stove in one of the rooms. He built a temporary stove and led a chimney out of the window. Together with my father, we enthusiastically extracted fuel, dug holes in the yard, where in the first months of the war we buried all the fences and sheds that had been demolished (to avoid fire). We also brought firewood from warehouses, made the entire father's office, which was not heated, with woodpiles. Our whole family huddled in the kitchen and dining room for the first winter, where the stove was built. Plus fifteen was considered quite warm, and often the temperature dropped to plus five. But they even envied us, because others were completely freezing: it was difficult to get firewood in Moscow.

One day, my dad, Seryozha and I were pulling a homemade sleigh with firewood along the snow-covered streets. The warehouse was in Lefortovo, behind the cemetery, and we were completely exhausted in the area of the German market. It was still about three kilometers to the house. Constant malnutrition had an effect, there was not enough strength. We began to stop more and more often, dad was suffocating, Seryozha and I were wet with sweat, and the frost was getting stronger. But when we reached a small climb up the hill, our sleigh with birch logs crashed into a snowdrift and got stuck. It was still light, but the streets were empty and covered with deep, powdery snow. Here, apparently, the father prayed fervently. Suddenly an officer came up to us, took the rope of the sleigh and walked up the hill so quickly that we could hardly keep up with him, and then even lagged behind.

"Where?" The military man asked.

"To Razgulyai," Dad answered.

The soldier brought us firewood almost to the house and did not take anything from us, although my father wanted to thank him. Then our mother met us.

"Remember, Lord, Thy servant," she said, "if it were not for this officer, my father's heart would not have endured.

My father's scientific work did not stop during the war. Soon the Institute of Engineering and Economics, where my father taught chemical technology, returned from evacuation. The government took care of the professors, and a canteen was set aside for them in the center, where they received a delicious hearty lunch every day. But the professors, remembering their families, ate only soup in the dining room, and managed to pour bread, snacks, a second course and even a glass of wine and compote into jars and take them with them. Then, for those who wished, the canteen was replaced by a card called "dry rations". For shopping, special stores were allocated, well supplied with products from America: bacon, egg powder, smoked fish, etc. In this "closed" (for other people) store, it was allowed to buy cards and family members of professors. Then we breathed a sigh of relief, because since then we have been eating quite well (since the beginning of 1943).

Father's gardens served as a great help in the household, the land for which was given by the institutions where the parents worked. In total, we had about five gardens located on different railways. In the fields, we planted potatoes and cabbage. And on the plots leased to us by our friends, from whom we used to rent dachas, we grew tomatoes, cucumbers, and all sorts of other vegetables.

Dad was very fond of vegetable gardens, fertilized them with chemicals and always got surprisingly large harvests. We all helped my father, he guided us, taught us to sow, weed, thin out, etc. From early spring until snow, dad simply disappeared in the gardens, fertilizing the land with manure, coniferous humus from the forest, arranging greenhouses. Father taught us to work carefully and with love. He himself was well versed in what substances to apply to tomatoes and lettuce, which to root crops, where potassium and phosphate salts are needed. After all, the caking and hygroscopicity of fertilizers was the topic of one of his scientific works. He took us to sheds where mountains of some salts were stored, he himself poured certain substances into our backpacks, he himself locked and unlocked warehouses, the keys to which were given to him on the spot. We worked hard, and by autumn our basement under the kitchen was full of potatoes, barrels and boxes of vegetables.

Harvesting vegetables was helped by our "grandmother", with whom my father always had a very friendly relationship. She was a nun, for twenty-seven years she lived in a closet in our kitchen, cooked, guarded the house, dressed in rags like a beggar, ate the remains of the table, went to church on holidays. Dad always made sure that the old woman had granulated sugar, medicines and everything she needed.