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Rockets and People
asm.The notion of a school of rocket engine construction is indelibly linked with
his name.
the winter of 1941–42 in bilimbay was the most severe of all the prewar and
wartime winters. First there was the strenuous physical labor to build the factory
in temperatures of –50°C (-58°F).Then there was the construction of the airplanes
and the operational development and firing tests on the engines. All of this took
place under conditions of food rationing that put us on the edge of survival. It is
amazing that under such arduous conditions no one complained of illnesses that
were normal for peacetime.
But illnesses inherent to wars did occur. Somewhere near Sverdlovsk, Polish
troop units had formed, and an epidemic of typhus erupted. Mama volunteered for
the team that went out to fight the epidemic. She could not protect herself and
ten days later they brought her back to Bilimbay with a fever of over 40°C
(104°F). By the time I ran over to the hospital she no longer recognized me or my
father. The female physician who was attending her told us that more than one
typhus patient lying in the cold barracks owed their life to my mother. But she had
completely disregarded her own safety. When she realized that she had been
infected, she requested that she be taken quickly to Bilimbay so that she could say
goodbye to her husband and son.“But we didn’t make it in time,” the doctor wept,
“If only we’d had just a couple more hours.”
Mama died on 27 March 1942. At her funeral, the head physician said that
medical personnel were performing feats not only on the front but also in the rear.
“The selfless labor of Sofiya Borisovna is a living example of that.” Her death was
a terrible blow to my father and me.
A week after my mother’s funeral, my father and I found out about other
painful losses among our relatives. In Sverdlovsk we found our cousin Menasiy
Altshuler, whom our family called Nasik. He was a railroad engineer who was my
age. Nasik and his wife, both only half alive, had managed to get out of Leningrad
by traveling over the ice of Lake Ladoga. He told us how his father, a mathematics
professor, his mother, my father’s sister, and his younger brother, my namesake,
had died of hunger in Leningrad.
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