Grandma, part 2

Grandpa Mulya's position in the army during the war was pretty good: he was somewhere near Ufa (I think the name of the town was Birsk but I might be wrong), close to Ural mountains and very far from any front lines, teaching soldiers how to use radio equipment. Grandma was there too. During the war all the doctors of both sexes were drafted to the front lines, leaving behind only the old, the disabled and the mothers of small children, and therefore Lyuba, 23 years old and 2 years out of medical school, got to be the chief doctor of a small local hospital and the only doctor of the local Spanish orphanage at the same time. (Russians took the orphans of some Spanish Civil War participants for some reason.)

Grandma's parents were living in Ufa at the time, about 50 kilometers away. Apart from their work and army duties, my grandparents and my greatgrandparents had to watch over a mob of kids (not sure who was watching whom): Mulya and Lyuba's baby daugher Rimma, Mulya's little brother Peysakh, Fayvish's nephew Vova and Ester-Dvoira's nephew Matus. The babysitting was apparently not going very well, because one fine day Vova and Peysakh got tired of school, locked the school after classes with teachers inside, poured some fuel all around it and set it on fire. Luckily they did not have a lot of fuel and the teachers all made it out of the windows without any injuries, but the school was burnt to the ground. Poor Mulya had to run around different offices quite a lot whining about the poor children whose parents are at the front lines, so that the poor children were not thrown in jail but merely expelled from school, which was not much of a punishment considering that the school was gone anyway, and, I suspect, would not have been much of a punishment for Vova and Peysakh had the school been still standing, either.

At some point Fayvish could not stand the crazy relatives anymore and figured he'd be safer in the army, and signed up. He was right too, because they made him a colonel and made him the chief inspector of military hospitals of the 3d Ukranian Front, which was far enough from both Germans and relatives.

One hungry and cold winter Lyuba and Mulya managed to steal a truckload of frozen peas from somewhere and decided to take half of it to Ester-Dvoira in Ufa. Halfway there their truck broke down. The temperature was minus forty Celsius, the night was coming, the cell phones were not invented yet. They managed to walk to a forester's cabin that they had passed a little while ago and knocked on the door. The forester and his family did not want to let them in, fearing that they were criminals. My grandparents said they were not criminals, they just wanted some shelter, and they were ready to pay for it in frozen peas. The forester still did not believe them. Lyuba and Mulya started shooting through the door, all the time claiming to be decent folk, but the forester still did not believe them. After a while they managed to shoot their way in and then stopped shooting, forester figured they were not trying to rob him, everyone went to sleep and in the morning they fixed the truck, the forester got his peas and the rest of the peas were delivered to Ester-Dvoira without further mishaps.