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I didn’t know much about what the Germans did to Jews during the war. We knew that they exterminated prisoners, as a rule, and that there were death camps. In the army I had ‘Russian’ indicated in my documents since if God forbid I would have got in captivity, everybody knew it was sure death, but we didn’t know any details about the camps, crematoria, six million of killed old people and children. [Being a Jew meant being surely destined to death in case they were captured, and for a Russian there was still hope to survive.] Nationality didn’t matter in the army. Personal values mattered. There was a mixture of nationalities in our units. Everybody was aware I was a Jew wherever I served, but there was no segregation in this regard. It was only after the war that anti-Jewish attitude on a large scale appeared. There were many Jews at the front. All boys in our family who came of the recruitment age were at the front. My two cousin brothers perished: one near Stalingrad and the other one near Moscow.
Interview
Vladimir Tarskiy