Isaac Gragerov's family

My parents Peter and Raissa Gragerov, my sister Asia and I on my sister's birthday in 1926 in Odessa. In the first years after the Revolution my father began to work at the leather and shoe factory in Odessa. He was an engineer at first and later was promoted to technical director. My mother also had a job. She got a job at the Glavchi Scientific Research Institute for Skin and Venereal Diseases. My mother and father spent a lot of time at work. When I was 5 years old, I joined a group of children who were taught by a Froebel tutor, a young lady, who had finished a Froebel Institute. There were five or six children of my age, and we studied French and the names of trees and flowers. Asia was born in 1924. Soon afterwards my mother's parents moved from Rostov to Odessa. They settled down in an apartment on a lower floor of the family's building. It was very convenient. I began studying at a Russian lower secondary school. There were pupils of various nationalities, but we were all friends. We had very good teachers. I became a pioneer and was very proud to wear my pioneer red necktie. We went in for sports, collected waste paper and scrap and spent our summer vacations at the sea. In 1930 our family moved to Moscow. My grandparents stayed in Odessa. They were supposed to join us as soon as my parents had settled down. My father couldn't find a good job in Moscow, and we stayed there for about half a year. I felt some hostility from my classmates at school in Moscow. They didn't socialize with me, and when I asked why, they told me that I was different from them. There were no other Jews in our class, and I understood what they meant.

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).