Tag #150233 - Interview #78110 (Mikhail Gauzner)

We lived in a small flat in Yoshkar-Ola until 1944. I actually didn't see my father during that time. He was busy at the plant day and night. It was a fusion of the Leningrad Optical Engineering Works and Odessa Kinap Plant, which also produced optics. The plant manufactured tank ordnance gun sights. Like all the plants associated with the People's Commissariat of Armament it was supervised by the infamous Laurentiy Pavlovich Beriya [8]. My father, who was present at the meetings in the director's office, told me that quite often he heard Beriya shouting, 'Where are the sights? Penal battalions - that's where you'll go!'[Editor's note: Penal battalions were subdivisions of the Soviet Army to which people were sent for punishment during the war. They were used at the most dangerous frontlines, basically sent to sure death.]

Soon my father was appointed superintendent of the engineering shop, which was under intensive construction. The work stopped neither at day nor at night. He came home from time to time, had a nap for several hours and returned to the plant. It was my father who made sure the work in this shop went ahead, and it was for that reason that he received the 'Order of the Red Banner of Labor' in 1943.