Rohrbach - History at the School House

Our translator/tour guide managed to contact a very interesting lady in Rohrbach. She teaches history at the local school. There are two schools and a kindergarten. One school is grades one through four. The other one grades five through eight. After that I suppose one must go to a nearby larger city for advanced education. The school we visited was the primary school, and what we were shown on the second floor was a one-room museum dedicated to the history of Novosvetlovka. The teacher and museum curator, Galina Gorbachouk, was in front of the school house to greet us upon our arrival.

She spoke no English, so we relied on our translator. With immense concentration, I could occasionally follow her conversation. Along with old artifacts and pictorial history of Rohrbach/ Novosvetlovka, from early settlement until modern times, Galina has compiled an extensive list of names of the German inhabitants of Rohrbach. The pages are hand-written in Cyrillic. No computers or internet exist yet in Novosvetlovka.

I wrote out the name RIDINGER in roman capitals for her and she recognized it immediately, began leafing through her alphabetical listing, and started reading. There was Eduard Ridinger, my grandfather. Birth date, arrest date, execution date. Other Ridingers. The information she has jives with the information I have been able to obtain, so its likely to have come from the same sources. This has taken her an incredible amount of effort. How did she do it without internet?

Written in cyrillic, number 442 is my grandfather

After the museum session, I retrieved my laptop from the van and showed Galina some of the old photographs which I have collected, and asked if she would be interested in them. She was very excited, and I asked her to write down her address. No computers, no e-mail, we'll have to do this the old-fashioned way.