I was elected Komsomol leader of the hospital. My attendance of all party meetings was compulsory. There was a staff propagandist in our hospital. He read us newspapers in our political training classes in the morning. He also watched that girls behaved decently. He checked them peeping into their windows in the evening. There was one Smersh [special secret military unit for elimination of spies, under the slogan ‘Death to spies’] officer per 2-3 hospitals. Once I had to address one. A train with the wounded arrived at our hospital. Every patient had records of his wounds. Some wounded had a package. This meant that they had had surgeries. I noticed that one patient with a wound in his right hand behaved differently turning away from everybody. I approached him and opened his package. There was a paper with ‘verdict of the military field court’ in it. It turned out to be a self-inflicted wound. I was bound to find a Smersh officer to notify him. He thanked me, took this patient on a truck and they left.
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Major events (political and historical)
4232
- Armenian genocide 2
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- 151 Hospital 1
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Holocaust
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Communism
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Displaying 48871 - 48900 of 50504 results
Boris Molodetski
On 2 May 1945 chief of hospital put us on a truck and we went sightseeing to Berlin. We signed on the Reichstag. We were told to not come inside houses. There were many mined things in them. On 9 May we got to know that Germans signed capitulation and by two o’clock in the morning we began to receive patients again. It turned out they saluted from different weapons without looking where they were shooting and wounded many people.
In 1945 I came to Odessa to visit my mother who returned from evacuation. There was a family living in our apartment. I came in my uniform and an order on my chest, put my gun on the table and said ‘Either you give one room to my mother and I am leaving or I shall stay until you move out of here!’ They accepted the first option and later they moved out. Our furniture was stolen. I saw our sofa in our janitor’s apartment and brought it back home. Our neighbors told us how grandmother and Ghenia perished. They were reluctant to tell us the story since they couldn’t do anything to help them. My neighbor Dasha who did people’s laundry kept a suitcase with valuables that my friend Boris Reznik’s father gave her before evacuation.
In 1947 I met my future wife Lidia Vdovina in the hospital. We got married two years later.
Before the war Lidia finished an obstetrician school in Gornoaltaysk. During the war she was an assistant doctor and joined the Party.
The period of Doctors’ Plot 20 didn’t have any impact on me. I knew that accusations against leading doctors in the Soviet medical science about purposeful poisoning of the population were obviously made up. However, I didn’t dare to express my critical opinion about it to anyone. Nobody changed their attitude to me at my work. Besides, chief of our hospital was a Jewish man.
Two days before Stalin died I read a report on his health condition in a newspaper and thought that it indicated that he had a stroke, his Chain-Stocks breathing and other symptoms, this indicated that he was dying. When Stalin died my wife who was a communist said like everybody else around ‘How will we go on living?’ I didn’t share her opinion since I believed that Stalin was a dictator and had been thinking so for a while. My only concern was that Beriya 21, this butcher of a man, could win the struggle for power.
We lived in Chernyshevskoye village, in Nesterov district, Kaliningrad region. I worked as a military doctor in a military unit. We very poor living conditions. I had to fetch water in buckets onto the third floor. We cooked on a kerogas stove.
In 1956 we moved to Paplaka in Latvia. It was a district town. There were an artillery and tank regiments near this town. They had a medical unit, a bakery and a bathtub. I served as chief of medical unit in the rank of a major. We stayed there for over a year.
I think glory to Khrushchev 22 that he was brave enough to speak the truth about Stalin on the 20th Congress 23. Khrushchev had many imperfections. He was a voluntary and made a mistake with his corn ideas: I saw corn fields in Latvia when I served there: the plants were maximum half meter high. [During Khrushchev’s rule corn was widely grown in the USSR without consideration of climatic specifics of regions]. In the early 1960s I read ‘One day of Ivan Denisovich’ by Solzhenitsyn 24. It made a big impression on me.
At the age of 6 my son fell ill with asthma and I requested a transfer to Belgorod-Dnestrovsk town in Odessa military regiment in 1958. They reduced me in the rank, though. In 1962 I was appointed senior doctor of the regiment. The Party organizer of our regiment exhausted me with his talks that I should join the Party. I saw how shaky a position of Jews in the army was. The policy was to put no obstacles to resignations and to not promote. Deputy political officer Frolov used to tell me that I had to be the best being Jewish or they would pick on me if they got a chance. I understood that if I didn’t demonstrate my loyalty to the party they would force me to quit, but I had two children to think about. Chief of headquarters and commander of the regiment gave me their recommendations and three months later I was elected a Party organizer of the headquarters. I had 48 party members under my supervision.
In Belgorod-Dnestrovsk our children studied well at school and had many friends. They didn’t face any anti-Semitism. In their birth certificates in the line item ‘birth origin’ Russian was written.
In 1969 Grisha finished school. He tried to enter the Law Faculty in Odessa University twice. They required some work experience for admission to this Faculty and preference was given to young militiamen. After working in a social insurance department for a year Grisha managed to enter an evening department. I insisted that he went to work. Grisha worked as polisher/joiner in Prodmash plant. He worked night and shifts sometimes, but this helped him to become mature. Upon graduation from University Grisha worked as a lawyer at the Centrolit plant. He was in conflict with his boss (who was a Jew). He mistreated Grisha and didn’t give him an opportunity for promotions and provoked minor conflicts. Grisha quit his job and went to work as a legal consultant in the construction department of Odessa military regiment.
Zoya studied in the 9th and 10th grades in school #100 that I had finished. She finished school in 1970 and for 3 years in a row she tried to enter the Faculty of Foreign languages where there was always high competition. Having lost her hope to study there, that same year she married Albert Shenkerman who was born in 1941. He was a foreman at the medical equipment plant. In 1974 their son Misha was born. They divorced. My daughter worked at the library of the Medical College. She was manager of a professor’s department. Her salary was small and Zoya had to earn additionally. She decided to learn a profession of medical nurse. She entered a medical school in Odessa. After finishing it she studied in an acupuncture academy in Moscow where she received a diploma. She made massages very well and earned her living doing this work. Wealthy clients paid her $5-6 for one massage at home.
In 1994 her son Misha moved to Israel at the invitation of coach of the Israel handball team. Now he is a professional sportsman and plays in the team of Israel. In 1996 Zoya followed her son. They live in Nes Ziyon near Tel Aviv. She passed exams and got a massage license. Now she is learning cosmetic massage and children’s massage. I have positive attitudes toward Israel. The people of Israel built a prosperous country in a deserted area. I’ve visited in 1999 my daughter and I know what I am saying. I stayed there for two months.
In the 1970-80s I gradually began to develop a critical attitude toward life and rules in our country. I was interested in politics and subscribed to at least 10 newspapers and magazines reading and analyzing and situation. I understood that this wasn’t a socialist system, but a dictatorship of the ruling Party clique. In 1977 my wife and I visited aunt Minna in America and I saw how much worse our life was.
Every year my wife and I spent vacations hitchhiking. In 1980-83 we went on horse riding trips to the Altay mountains. We traveled to Bashkiria, Georgia, Subcarpathia, Yerevan and Petersburg. We bought tours to Czechoslovakia, Germany and Poland.
Gorbachev’s 25 perestroika 26, in my opinion was a high-minded effort with wrong tools. Gorbachev was too weak and started reforms without appropriate persistency or giving a thought to peculiarities of the people. Perestroika was a progressive process, but it had to be implemented with different methods and more resolutely.
I am not religious and do not observe any Jewish traditions or holidays. I think that when former Soviet citizens demonstratively observe Jewish or Christian traditions, they are not sincere. However, I respect charity efforts of Jewish organizations. In 1998 one of my acquaintances who worked as a volunteer in Gmilus Hesed advised me to ask for their assistance. I did and they offered me aid at home. A social worker helps me to do my apartment. This assistance is very important to me considering my health condition. Besides, I receive food packages once per month. They deliver it to my home. There is a cultural center in the Gmilus Hesed where I read lectures about soviet poetry.
Alexandr Nepomniaschy
Elizabeth and her husband got a job assignment in Odessa. They lived there before the war working at the department of commerce. In 1938 their son Yury was born.
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Before WW2
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Elizabeth entered Department of Economy at the Novgorod Institute of Commerce after finishing school. She met there a Russian young man Pavel Liapunov and they got married. My parents welcomed their marriage regardless of their religious convictions. It was a common idea after the revolution that there should be no nationalities in the new world free from rich people and that we were all Soviet people. My sisters didn’t have any wedding parties. They had civil ceremonies to register their marriage.
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Before WW2
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Tsylia married Aron Grossman and moved to Leningrad with him.
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Before WW2
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After finishing this College I got a job at the Kirovograd agricultural machine building plant. I was 19 years old then. My father went to Petersburg looking for a job. He wrote that it was an interesting and beautiful town.
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Before WW2
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I also became a Komsomol member at College.
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Before WW2
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I got the profession of a turner.
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Before WW2
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After finishing school at 16 I entered the Jewish College in 1926. Besides academic subjects we also studied profession. Teaching was in Yiddish.
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Before WW2
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They convinced me at school that there was no God and that religion was vestige of the past.
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Before WW2
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At home we lived our routinely life celebrating Jewish holidays, going to the synagogue and celebrating birthdays. However, I didn’t observe Jewish traditions any more.
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Before WW2
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Beside cheder I and my sisters, went to a Ukrainian lower secondary school. I became a pioneer at school – we were called young Leninists. I was doing well at school. There were children of various nationalities at school, but I didn’t know any difference between a Jew and non-Jew then. We were friends, played football, went tobogganing in winter and swimming in the river in summer. There was no national segregation.
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Before WW2
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I went to the cheder when I was 8. Cheder was only for boys and my sisters didn’t go there. Our teacher was teaching us to read and write in Yiddish and Hebrew. We studied arithmetic and knew our prayers by heart. When I reached 13 I had Barmitsva at the synagogue. I read my prayer by heart. I don’t remember the whole ritual, but I remember feeling myself very mature after it was over. I believe it was for the ceremony that my father gave me his thales and tfillin, but at that time it was a mere formality for me and I never put them on afterward.
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Before WW2
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