Yevgeniya Kuzmenko

Yevgeniya Kuzmenko, 88, of Davenport, passed away, Tuesday, August 19, 2025, at Harmony. There will be no service held.

Yevgenyia was born January 1, 1937, in Russia, the daughter of Filipp Lepetookhin and Vera Kashenko.

True Memories

Recollections of Yevgeniya Kuzmenko

Address: 51 Volzhskaya St

Time period: The Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945

Author: Yevgenyia Kuzmenko

Our Home and Neighbors

During the war, we lived in Rostov-on-Don, at 51 Volzhskaya Street. The city changed hands twice-first occupied by the Germans, then later liberated by Soviet forces. I was only six years old-just a little girl, but I understood that there was a war, that our fathers were fighting the Nazis, and that the danger around us was real.

My father was killed at the front in 1943, though we didn’t learn of his fate until a memorial search in 2010. For decades, he had remained officially listed as “missing in action”. I stayed with my mother, Vera Alekseevna Lepetukhina (nee Kashenko). We were not alone in our home. Our neighbor, Pasha-Praskovya Ivanovna, moved in with her two daughters, Masha and Nadezhda, after their house was destroyed by a German bomb. They had nowhere else to go. We took them in, and together we shared everything: food, fear, and the fragile hope of surviving another day.

Danger and Escape

One day, I had just stepped outside when a group of German soldiers appeared, members of a Nazi SS unit, easily recognized by their black uniforms and ruthless demeanor. They came rushing toward our gate, running low with bent knees in a tactical sprint, their weapons drawn and eyes scanning for targets.

My mother screamed. “Come back!” -but it was too late. One of them raised his machine gun and barked, “you’re hiding a Soviet officer! I’ll have all of you-women and children-lined up against the wall!”

We froze. The next thing I remember, we were forced to stand against the wall in our living room, paralyzed by fear. We didn’t know if we were about to die.

What they didn’t know was that a wounded Soviet officer had indeed been hiding in our cellar. He had been too injured to escape when the Germans first entered the city. We did what we could to care for him. Just the night before the raid, he quietly slipped away into the dark. He was never found. Had they discovered him in our home, we all would have been executed. Someone must have betrayed us-but it wasn’t a miracle-we were just lucky.

A Romanian In the Window

At that time, the Germans dealt harshly with anyone suspected of theft or disobedience. One day, my mother returned home after bartering some of our last valuables for food and found a Romanian soldier climbing in through the window. She cried out in shock. He had stolen flour and other precious food supplies from our home at a time when every crumb mattered. Later, she was taken to the German commandant, not just to identify intruders, but to report a wartime robbery.

She was terrified, certain she would either be imprisoned or face the soldiers' retaliation. But the commandant looked at her and said coldly, “Don’t be afraid. He won’t live much longer”. Such encounters became part of everyday life. Fear was constant. At night, we hid in the cellar to escape the bombing raids; by morning, women would venture out among the rubble to search for survivors.

After the War

It was a terrifying time. When the war finally ended, there was little left of our city. Not a single street had been spared. Everything was in ruins. We had to rebuild from nothing. But we survived.

Even now, when bombs fall again and the world seems to tremble, I feel that same deep fear return. It’s as though those terrible years are still with us-never far, just waiting in the shadows of a memory.