Yefim Fabrikant

This is my father, Yefim Fabrikant, wearing his military uniform. This photo was taken in Lutsk, Volyn region in 1939. After finishing college my father stayed to work at the department with a popular Odessa physician, Buchstub. My father was his favorite student. When he was a student, my father was renting a room in my mother's parents' apartment, and that's where he met my mother. My father sometimes did private practice: he received patients at recommendations of his friends. In 1938 Strazhesko, the greatest physician at the time invited my father to Kiev. In Kiev my father was awarded the title of professor. During any military campaign initiated in the USSR, my father was immediately taken to the army. He took part in the operations for the annexation of Western Belarus and Western Ukraine, and Moldova to the USSR and took part in the Finnish War. He was in the rank of colonel and had the position of chief physician of the army. My father was mobilized on the very first day of the Great Patriotic War. He was in the army troops defending Kiev. They were retreating to the town of Pyryatin where the headquarters of the Western Front got in encirclement and its commander perished. The survivors, including my father, found shelter in a deep ravine, but the Germans discovered and encircled them too. My father and a few other officers shot themselves to escape captivity. The witnesses, doctors, who had been captured then, told my mother and me about it. The Germans made them work for them as doctors and they managed to survive. We received a notification that my father 'was missing'. I have no official confirmation of my father's death. After the war and later I made inquiries at the Department of Medicine in Moscow, but they responded that Yefim Fabrikant 'was missing' and that they had no further information about him.