Sergei Yaroslavsky's Mother

Sergei Yaroslav's Mother had died well before the hostilities that began in 1939 between the Soviet Union and Poland.

At one point during the war, Yaroslav took shelter in a trench during a German air raid. Yaroslavsky remembered the smell of damp earth from his mother's burial and associated it with graves. Since he was being attacked with deadly force, the association was one he wished he had not made.