The Tevelyov sisters’ journey from Velizh to Merke in Kazakhstan

In 1941, Tamara Tevelyova was nine years old and her sister Raya was six. They lived in Velizh, Smolensk Region. After German troops arrived, the girls found themselves in a ghetto with their grandmother and other relatives. Tamara later said that Polina, their father’s second wife, brought them food. Polina helped the sisters leave the ghetto and hid them. 1 3

The journey east

Velizh changed hands several times. During another flight from the city, the family crossed the frozen Western Dvina under fire. Tamara, Raya and their mother then reached Toropets and boarded a train heading east. At one stop, their mother was left behind. The sisters were taken off the train and sent to an orphanage in Tavda, Sverdlovsk Region. Tamara recounted these events to Kazakhstan’s Vremya newspaper decades later. 2

Their mother found her daughters in 1946. After they were reunited, they moved to Merke, a village in Dzhambul Region; the sisters later moved to Almaty. Kazakhstan thus became part of the story of a family that had survived a ghetto, separation and evacuation. 2

Names restored to the family story

Historian Yulia Serovayskaya worked with the sisters’ recollections and documents about relatives who had been killed. Her research was presented at a history conference in Almaty in 2016, where Tamara spoke in person. Archivist Yevgeniya Chilikova later named four relatives on their father’s side who were killed when the Velizh ghetto was destroyed, and reported that recordings of the recollections had been deposited in Kazakhstan’s Central State Archive. In a 2018 interview, Tamara spoke about her life under her later surname, Malykh. 1 3 2