Bay Area woman, sister reunite 74 years after being split by war
Tamara Terichow was leading a quiet life in San Rafael when she got a call last year that would give her one of the biggest shocks of her life.
It was the Red Cross. They had found her sister, Lidia, lost a lifetime ago when they were children and the world was at war.
Next would come phone calls back and forth and, finally, a reunion. Over the summer, Terichow flew to Finland, where the sisters met for the first time in 74 years.
“We talked, we were happy,” Tamara said. “We cried.”
The last time they’d seen each other, they were two little girls caught up in the swirl of World War II. Their mother had died and their father had been taken away from their Russian homeland by the Germans. They had fled one army, then another. They nearly starved in an orphanage, survived being bombed by the Russians, roamed through the ruins of Berlin. By the end of the war, the sisters had lost each other, and Tamara was
living in a refugee camp.
She said she was ill when she and Lidia were separated. There was too much confusion, and she was too young to remember.
As little girls, Lidia and Tamara Haltsonen lived with their parents, Alexsander and Tatiana, in a house on a hill just outside of Leningrad, as St. Petersburg was called then. Lidia was 9, and Tamara was 5, when “in 1941 the Germans came,” Tamara said matter-offactly.
They kicked the civilians out of their homes and took their father away to a labor camp.
Left on her own, Tatiana took her two girls and started walking toward Pskov, some distance away. But Tatiana was very ill. “Starvation, sickness, I don’t know,” Tamara said. “All I know is she died. I was 5 years old and don’t remember. I do remember seeing her dead.”
Now the two sisters were on their own. They went south to Lithuania, to an orphanage. There were few comforts — no heat, no running water. “All we had to eat was dried peas,” Tamara said. “I remember looking for food in the dump.”
Lidia and Tamara moved again; farther south, this time to a monastery. Then, by some miracle, the girls’ father, Alexsander, reappeared. He had gotten away from the Germans. But now the sisters got separated when a married couple, Peter and Adele Filatov, adopted Tamara. While she went with her adoptive parents, Lidia went with her father.
“I left my sister behind,” Tamara said. “What could I do? I was a kid.” It was 1944, and it would be the last time Tamara saw her sister until her visit.
Tamara and her new family went south and west with streams of refugees fleeing the Russian armies. “We rode trains,” she said. “We went where they went.”
She remembers being in Berlin, then to places in eastern Germany. When the war ended in April 1945, she and the Filatovs were in a displaced persons camp in the American zone of occupied Germany. They stayed for four years.
Eventually, the family made its way to the United States, where Peter Filatov had relatives in Chicago. “He was a civil engineer,” Tamara said. “But the only job he could get was in a bakery, washing pans for 50 cents an hour. He took the job. We had to survive.”
The years went by. Tamara learned English in school. Filatov eventually got a position as a draftsman. Tamara married Oleg Terichow, an engineer who was born in Yugoslavia of Russian parents and immigrated to the United States in the 1920s.
The Terichows had a daughter and a son, and moved to California. Tamara has lived in the same house in the Marinwood neighborhood of San Rafael since 1972.
Her sister, Lidia, had a more difficult life. She ended up behind Russian lines and lived after the war in the Soviet Union, first near Leningrad, then in northern Russia. Lidia also got married — her last name was now Isakov — and had a daughter. Life was difficult in the old Soviet Union, especially in the north. “She had a hard time,” Tamara said.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, Lidia was able to move to Finland. Eventually, Lidia’s granddaughter, Anna Haltsonen, became curious about her mother’s life and her longlost sister.
The sisters had left a paper trail — Tamara in the displaced persons camp, Lidia in Russia, the documents required to immigrate to Finland.
Haltsonen heard of a Red Cross program called Restoring Family Links. The Finnish Red Cross worked with the American Red Cross to find Tamara in California. When the Red Cross called, she thought they were trying to raise money and told them she wasn’t interested. But the call changed her life. The sisters are both elderly now. Lidia is 88 and has vision problems. Tamara is 83.
Tamara hopes to pay a return visit to her sister again next summer. “But at our age it depends on our health,” she said. “That’s life.”
But they talk often on the telephone. There are a lot of old stories, a lot to remember.
“You couldn’t make a movie like this,” said Tamara’s son, Andrew Terichow.