My husband attends the events arranged by Chesed and the Jewish Charity Committee and tells me about them. He attends lectures in history of the Jewish people and we discuss them when he comes home. I have a need in this information. Since I retired I began to fast at Yom-Kipur. I don’t always strictly observe it but my mother said that an ill person could afford to eat something extra – it is only good for his or her health. We receive and read Jewish newspapers and magazines. Chesed sends a nurse to help us. Volunteers visit us. We enjoy care and attention. I would like to wish all Jews in whatever country they live happiness and peace.
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Major events (political and historical)
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Holocaust
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Displaying 48841 - 48870 of 50504 results
Boris Molodetski
My grandfather was deeply religious. His co-villagers called him ‘tzaddik’. He had taught in the cheder until Soviet authorities closed it in 1922.
He dressed as a Jewish man should: a long black kitel, a black vest and a black quadrangular cloak with tassels on edges. He wore a black cap and a greasy kippah underneath. My grandfather’s true faith also expressed itself by the fact that he never shaved in his life, was never photographed or went to the cinema.
During collectivization 2 authorities demanded that they gave their cows to kolkhoz, but Basia managed to stand for one cow for the family. Roitershtein was a cheese maker and worked in a kolkhoz 3 decently. Even in 1933, when the children starved [during the famine in Ukraine] 4, he didn’t steal from the kolkhoz and didn’t allow the others to steal.
They got into a Jewish camp in Bogdanovka. Romanians treated tem more loyally than Germans, but they took away their valuables. They hardly got any food and every day another group of Jews was taken away to be shot. Yenta, Basia, her husband and son Shaika were shot on 21 December 1941. When Soviet troops were approaching in 1944 Romanians dismissed the camp and Rieva survived.
My father Gersh Molodetski was born in Grosulovo in 1891. The whole family built up their hopes with him as an older son. He studied in cheder and later learned to read and write in Russian by himself. My grandfather wanted him to become a rabbi and sent him to yeshivah in Kishinev when he turned 16. After studying there a year my father decided he didn’t like it and ran away to Odessa. He stayed at the railway station in Odessa. He had no documents until Odessa police office issued a temporary residential permit to him. He managed to find a job. In 1912 my father was recruited to the army. At first he served in an artillery unit in a fortress in Vladivostok and in 1913 he moved to Kharbin. In spring 1917 their regiment was sent to the Southern Front. When the train was in about 30 km from Grosulovo my father jumped off and walked to his village: he deserted the army. Nobody searched him. During the Civil War 8, in 1918 he was in a group of a self-defense unit consisting of local residents who were trying to defend their town from gangs 9 raging in the vicinity. Once bandits requested a truce envoy to be sent to them. My father went there carrying a white cloth. They didn’t reach any agreement, but when my father was on his way back they wounded him in his leg. In late 1918 my father moved to Odessa. His acquaintance from Grosulovo let him stay in his dwelling and helped him to become an assistant accountant apprentice. Shortly afterward my father met my mother. I don’t know any details.
Grandmother Matlia knew Yiddish, but she usually spoke Russian. She wore black clothes and a black shawl. At home she wore a kerchief. She was very religious. On Yom Kippur, when grandmother Matlia spent all day through at the synagogue and fasted she got so weak that my mother and I went to the synagogue to pick her up and had to lead her by her elbows two blocks. She had special crockery to use at Pesach, but she was the only one to use it since her daughters were not religious and didn’t observe these traditions.
When the war began grandmother Matlia didn’t want to evacuate however hard her daughters tried to convince her. She said ‘Be what may’. Her younger daughter Ghenia stayed with her. My neighbors told me afterward that when Romanians came they took them along with other Jews to powder storages in Tolbukhin Street and burned them in autumn 1941.
Rafail flatly refused to evacuate hoping to start his own business when Germans came. His neighbors told us that he perished in the ghetto.
My mother Chaya Molodetskaya was born in the town of Sosnitsa of Chernigov province in 1889. The family moved to Odessa when my mother was still a baby. The family had lower than average income. My mother finished an elementary Jewish school for girls where she also had sewing training.
My parents got married on 7 June 1919. They had a civil ceremony. There was no religious wedding.
In early 1920, when she was pregnant, my mother moved to my father’s sister Basia in Petroverovka to eat better food. This was at the time of the Civil War and once ataman of a gang that came to Petroverovka ordered to take all Jews to the square to kill them. My mother was in this crowd. She told me that they survived by chance: that very moment someone shouted to ataman that Kotovskiy 12 was in 5 versts from the village and they all rode away hurriedly.
When in 1925 a three-bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor in our house got vacant a meeting of tenants decided to give it to us. There was a tiled stove in a big room, an old folding oak dining table, a sofa and a cupboard that my parents ordered from a cabinetmaker. It was very beautiful with stained glass folds and copper shields at the bottom. There were two beds with string mattresses in another room, a small desk, a sideboard and a wardrobe. Uncle Isaac and his family resided in the third room. There was an old box with copper belts around it in the hallway. My mother kept old clothes in it. In summer she aired them on the balcony. There were ostrich feathers, my mother’s old embroidery pieces and an unfinished quilt rug. There were embroidered napkins on the furniture in our apartment. In 1928 our house was overhauled and the floors painted to imitate parquet.
My mother and father spoke Russian at home, but when they decided that there was something I shouldn’t know they switched to Yiddish. I knew some words in Yiddish.
My father worked as an accountant in Tserabkoop on the corner of Pushkinskaya and Deribassovskaya Streets. He audited stores and shops.
My parents were not religious. I was a convinced atheists and turned my head away when I passed by a church. We celebrated Soviet holidays at home, but never Jewish holidays.
My mother valued chicken. Our standard lunch consisted of chicken broth with rice and a piece of chicken with garnish. She also cooked gefilte fish and dishes from matzah. However, she rarely cooked with matzah since we could only get it at the synagogue and at this period it had to be done in secret.
At the age of 8 I went to Russian school #48.
In 1932 my father went to work in a closed store of NKVD. Life became easier for us. During the period of famine my father received food packages and flour. My mother baked rolls, but she didn’t give any to take to school since there were hungry children around.
My friend Igor Chop told me that Misha tried hard to convince him to repudiate from his father who was imprisoned in 1937 [during Great Terror] 16, for his former service in the tsarist army as an officer. In our class no parents of schoolchildren were arrested, but in the parallel class there were about five children whose parents had been arrested. Our director Mr. Radzinski was a decent person. He supported these children. Igor Chop recently told me that director called him to his office to say words of support. Once on a Soviet holidays we were in the theater where a representative of Komsomol district committee greeted us with general phrases I said aloud: ‘Again propaganda for the Soviet power!’ Our history teacher was sitting beside me. She heard what I said and on the following day she called my mother to school and said ‘You are playing with fire when you allow yourself to talk dangerously in the presence of your child’. At nights people in our house didn’t sleep listening to booted steps in the yard: to which entrance they headed again? My father returned home late and sat reading a newspaper until very late. He was very concerned about the situation, but he kept silent about it. In 1937 few of my mother’s acquaintances suffered, but she didn’t discuss it with me, although I was already 16 years old. My mother was a law-obedient person. She strictly followed whatever orders issued by higher authorities.
I finished school in 1939. I had my father’s jacket altered to wear it to my prom. I had all excellent marks in my certificate and was admitted to the Medical College without exams. We never heard about any limitations for Jewish appellants to colleges. I didn’t dream about medicine, but I joined my friends Boris Reznik and Grisha Golderberg (both Jews) were going to enter the Medical College and I decided to join them. I enjoyed studying there and the more I learned the more I got attracted to this profession. We had highly qualified lecturers.
When we were first-year students an order was issued canceling all privileges for students. We became subject to service in the army. Since I had inguinal hernia and a medical commission in the military registry office made a conclusion: fit for military service with limitations, reserve of the 2nd turn.
. We had a premonition of a war while newspapers wrote that we were friends with Germany and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 18 was executed: this was confusing.
Shortly before the war my father and I bought a nice 10-valve receiver. I was very proud of it. We listened to radio transmissions and music. On 22 June 1941 we didn’t turn on our receiver. Our neighbor Ida had her radio on. I heard her saying: ‘Madam Molodetskaya, Molotov 19 will speak on the radio’. I got scared; I realized there was going to be a war. I remember that Ida burst into tears: she had two children.
At the beginning of the war my father was to turn 50 a month later, but he received a subpoena and went to the registry office. Even younger men ignored such calls. When we were on the way back he said ‘Tell mother there was nothing I could do to avoid it’, but I knew that he didn’t even try. At first he was sent to Mariupol and then to Moscow to excavate trenches and long-lasting fortifications.
Four days later we arrived in Mariupol. We were accommodated in the foyer of the theater in Mariupol. We sat and slept on our bags for four days. After the first bombing of Mariupol we ran to the railway station. There was a train with open platforms heading to Kuban. We climbed those platforms. When we were going past the railway station in Rostov-on-the-Don some people were shouting to us ‘Hey, zhydy, are you scarpering to the rear?’ It was distressing. In Shkurinskaya railway station we received free borsch. We arrived in Stalingrad on 1 September 1941. It was quiet there. Then we went to Sverdlovsk where we heard by chance that there were many people from Odessa in Alma-Ata [4,125 km from Odessa]. My mother and I headed to Alma-Ata and uncle Isaac and his family moved to Tashkent [3,200 from Odessa]. In Alma-Ata I went to the Kazakh Medical College. My co-student Grisha Goldenberg added missing credit marks into my record book and I was enlisted on the third course. This enabled me to avoid recruitment to the army.
My mother got an accommodation in the apartment of Chadicha Ilgamovna, a single Kazakh woman. She worked in a public library and brought me books that I chose from a catalogue. I remember that I read scripts of American films. My mother received an assignment to work in a brick plant, but she fell ill and quit. When she recovered she went to wash dishes in the canteen of the confectionery factory.
All of a sudden, on my birthday on 10 August 1942 we received a letter from my father. He wrote that he was demobilized due to his age and was heading to the south looking for us. He settled down in Krasnodar where he worked as chief accountant in the all-union scientific research institute of tobacco and makhorka. Every day he went to the railway station hoping to see somebody he knew who could tell him about us and he finally managed. On that same day I heard on the radio that our troops left Krasnodar. In early 1944 when Krasnodar was liberated my mother wrote to this address and the woman that leased a room to my father replied. She said that when Germans came they ordered all Jews to come to a gathering point and threatened with execution to those who were hiding them. My father went there to not let down his hostess. She gave a jar of honey and warm socks. From the gathering point people were transported in mobile gas chambers. This was how my father perished in 1942.
I had all excellent marks and when I was a 4th-year student I made my first surgery: appendicitis. There were 220 students from Odessa in our college. We upheld our reputation in studies and in sports. Te basketball team from Odessa became won championship in Kazakhstan: and this was regardless of lack o food. In early 1943, when I was a fifth-year student I got another job: I lectured on sanitary standards in the railroad technical school and received a rail man coupon for 800 grams of bread. Even when I was exhausted after a night’s work in hospital I shaved before going to lectures: I was their teacher. On 3 July 1943 I received my diploma with honors and became a certified therapist.
On the following day we received subpoenas to the military office.
We arrived at the front in Nezhin on 6 November 1943. Our hospital assigned to the First Byelorussian Front was in a ruined building. We placed bricks into window frames and installed cleaned X-Ray tape to make a window leaf. Surgeons were released from doing repair works, but to engage us they sent us to a neighboring village to get some cattle. The villagers let their dogs free seeing us and we had to return with nothing.
We were following advancing troops to the West.
We arrived at the front in Nezhin on 6 November 1943. Our hospital assigned to the First Byelorussian Front was in a ruined building. We placed bricks into window frames and installed cleaned X-Ray tape to make a window leaf. Surgeons were released from doing repair works, but to engage us they sent us to a neighboring village to get some cattle. The villagers let their dogs free seeing us and we had to return with nothing.
We were following advancing troops to the West.