Meyer Tulchinskiy

This is a picture of me taken in Yenakiyevo in 1945, where I underwent medical treatment after I had been wounded on the front in Hungary. In 1942 my mother, Tsypa Tulchinskaya got a job as a medical nurse at the navy hospital in Tbilisi. The Georgians treated my mother very well. As soon as I went to the front she was registered at the military office as a member of the family of a front line soldier, and she moved to an apartment where she lived until the end of the war. This hospital gave treatment to wounded military of the southern front. I was at the 3rd Ukrainian front. My mother was looking for me among the wounded soldiers who were being brought to the hospital. I wrote to her but now I think I could have written more letters to her. I was a private at the infantry, at the Zakavkazie, North Caucasian front, from where we moved to the South Ukrainian front. I was wounded by a stray bullet on a battlefield in Hungary in April 1945. I remember this incident as if it happened yesterday. I was sent to a field hospital and then to Odessa. Later I moved to Sochi where all recreation centers were turned into hospitals. After Sochi I was sent to Yenakiyevo in Central Russia to complete my course of treatment. My mother found out that I was in Yenakiyevo and wanted to come and visit me, but she wasn't allowed to leave her work. Then she got a chance by accident. Two majors, who had lost their legs, needed an escort to return to Russia. My hospital was near where they lived in Russia. It was a difficult mission with lots of arrangements to be made on the way, and nobody wanted to take it. The director of the hospital suggested that my mother went. She agreed, but her condition was to have a statement reading, 'Visiting Yenakiyevo to meet her wounded son', written in her route document. The director of the hospital didn't agree with it but she insisted that he did what she was asking for. She escorted both majors home - they were miserable people. She came to Yenakiyevo, and I was released from hospital. After the war I had an aversion to everything that I had seen or lived through during the war. I'm reluctant to answer questions related to the war. I had finished 9 years at school before the war. After the war I told my mother that I wanted to get higher secondary education. I need to give credit to my mother because she supported this idea of mine in spite of all misery we were living in. My mother respected educated people. She said that an uneducated person could hurt other people's feelings, however unintentionally, and she avoided such people. I started to study at an evening secondary school in 1945 and finished it with a silver medal in 1946.