Basya Chaika's nephew Zyunya Kuperman

My nephew Zyunya Kuperman - one of the future creators of the hydrogen bomb in the Soviet Union. In this picture he is 3 years old. The photo was made in 1920 in Kiev. For the first time I saw a taleth and a tefillin with my father's father. His name was Aaron Pan. He came from the town of Kazatin, Kiev region. The family of grandfather Aaron was very poor, I never knew what he did, but his lifestyle was very Orthodox Jewish. He and his wife - my grandmother Hannah - kept this lifestyle till their very death. Aaron and Hannah had three sons: the eldest - my father Ber (later - Boris), Yakov and Nyuma. They also had daughter Genya, who died in 1917 in childbirth. Grandmother Hannah and grandfather Aaron brought up the son she bore - Zyunya Kuperman. Later, he became an aircraft designer. Prior to the war he worked as a chief engineer at the Makeyevka Chemical Plant. During the war and after the war, he worked at secret defense plants, taking part in creation of a hydrogen bomb. Both during and after the war, we were forbidden to keep up a correspondence with him.

The Centropa Collection at USHMM

The Centropa archive has been acquired by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. USHMM will soon offer a Special Collections page for Centropa.

Academics please note: USHMM can provide you with original language word-for-word transcripts and high resolution photographs. All publications should be credited: "From the Centropa Collection at the United States Memorial Museum in Washington, DC". 

Please contact collection [at] centropa.org (collection[at]centropa[dot]org).