Travel

Abram Bashmet
Lvov
Ukraine
Interviewer: Zhanna Litinskaya
Date of interview: November 2002

Abram Bashmet is a young-looking man, a smart and pleasant conversationalist. He is a very busy man. He spends almost all of his time on the study and propaganda of creative activities of his son Yuri Bashmet 1, a genius musician, a great viola player of the present time. Abram Bashmet lives in the center of Lvov, in a quiet street, in a prewar house. These houses are called Polish in Lvov; before 1939 this part of Ukraine belonged to Poland 2, and the Poles constructed buildings here. His apartment is spacious and clean, there is nice modern furniture and house appliances – his son’s presents. One can tell that there used to live a big and close family here. There are many photographs of his family, parents, children, grandchildren, posters, calendars and playbills with his son’s pictures on the walls. The master of the house can talk about his son non-stop. He didn’t quite like our request to talk about the past of his family at first, but later he warmed to this topic realizing the importance of the subject discussion.

My family

Childhood

During the war

Marriage and children

Recent years

Glossary

My family

According to the legend that has passed from one generation to another in our family, at the very beginning of the 19th century – presumably in 1805 –our ancestor escaped from Odessa 3 to Istanbul, Turkey, to avoid service in the tsarist army. His name was lost, but his nickname of ‘Valet’ [‘knave’] has been preserved in the memory of his successors speaking for his daring and reckless character. Sometime later he returned to Odessa bringing with him a young wife: either a Turkish girl, who adopted Judaism, or a Jewish girl from Istanbul. All Bashmet men have taken after this great-grandmother: they’ve been swarthy, with aquiline noses and dark eyes.

Valet also brought with him the new surname of Bashmet. ‘Bash’ – means ‘head’ in Turkish, and ‘met’ is a typical ending for Turkish surnames. He started the numerous Bashmet clan. It’s a rare surname, and if we bumped into somebody with a similar surname this somebody happened to be one of our relatives of some kind. He must have also founded the business that his successors continued: they kept the ‘Colonial Goods’ shop at the biggest market in Odessa selling goods supplied from Africa and Asia: tea, coffee, spices, etc.

Of all his children – and there were five brothers – we only know my great-grandfather Mordhe [Mordekhai] Bashmet [1835-1915]. He continued the trade business of his father. He was not a rich man and he was religious. He married a Jewish woman from Odessa: Malka-Perl [1837-1913], a daughter of the trader Aizik – I don’t remember his surname. They had two older sons, Yankel and Moisha, who moved to the USA at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century and were lost there. The daughters Surah and Tsyvie lived their life in Odessa; their husbands were vendors at the Privoz market, and they also dealt in trade. Odessa was a trading town – everybody dealt in trade and crafts.

Mordekhai’s younger son, my grandfather Avrum, was born in Odessa in 1872. He studied in cheder, like his brothers, and was helping his father in the shop. He kept the Jewish spirit in his house, the order that his ancestors had established, though one couldn’t call Jews in Odessa very religious. They went to the synagogue because this was a custom. On major Jewish holidays all neighbors, relatives and acquaintances dressed up, went to the synagogue and had traditional festive dinners at home: matzah dishes on Pesach, gefilte fish, chicken stew and broth. However, those meals did not have any special religious meaning: they were just paying tribute to their ancestors and general customs. On Saturday or Jewish holidays the Jewish stores were closed. 

At 17 or 18 my grandfather was recruited to the army. He served as a private in an infantry regiment located in the vicinity of Grodno [today Belarus]. At that time soldiers who had Judaic faith were given leave on religious Jewish holidays. They joined Jewish families for celebrations. So one seder my grandfather came to the family of a wholesale fish trader named Michel Rohkes in the town of Indura [26 km south of Grodno, Belarus]. Everything was different for him on this day: the festive celebration according to all rules, the children posing four traditional questions, the family reclining on cushions, the thick red wine the remainder of which they poured into a big jug calling this the ‘Egyptian tortures.’ He was a soldier, and the food seemed extraordinarily delicious to him.

There were many people at the table, but Avrum laid his eye on the daughter of the master of the house, Feiga, born in 1876. I guess Avrum happened to visit the Rohkes house more often than holidays occurred. He got to know Feiga more closely in no time, and they got married before Avrum was to demobilize. Of course, this was a real Jewish wedding in a special building, there was a chuppah and a special chair for the bride. [Editor’s note: in smaller towns in Belarus where the majority of population was Jewish they had special community halls for family celebrations.]

My grandfather returned to Odessa with his young wife in 1894 or 1895. This is all I know about the part of our family from Grodno. My grandmother had brothers, but I don’t know how many there were of them or their names. Avrum went to work upholstering furniture, and Feiga, as they say nowadays, joined in the family business. She owned a stand selling oriental ‘Colonial sweets’ such as rakhat-lukum, khalva, sugar almonds, candied fruits, etc. She had little education that she got at home: she could read and write in Russian and Yiddish so-so, but she could calculate nicely and was successful in her trade. 

My grandmother was a beautiful woman and a good housewife. She knew customs and rules, spoke Yiddish and worked hard, but she didn’t have a happy life. She became a widow at the age of 44. My grandfather died of typhus at the age of 48 in August 1920 and was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Odessa according to traditions. My grandmother loved her sons and grandchildren dearly. Her children were the most beautiful, talented and intelligent in the world. My grandmother died in 1952 in Lvov where the family came to live after the Great Patriotic War 4 when they returned from evacuation in Alma-Ata. She was 76. She was buried in the Jewish sector of the town cemetery in Lvov according to the Jewish customs.

Grandmother Feiga had six sons. One son died in infancy, and five survived and grew up. The sons attended cheder in their childhood. They studied the basics of Judaism, could read prayers, went to the synagogue on holidays, knew Yiddish and spoke it at home, but like most Odessites, they spoke a mixed language: a terrible mixture of Russian, Ukrainian and Yiddish. When the situation improved and the family could afford to send them to a grammar school, it didn’t make them educated people. What was common for all brothers was that they tried to not work at state enterprises, but rather preferred to work individually. [Editor’s note: during the NEP 5 and afterward some people in the USSR were involved in handicraft production: shoemakers, tailors, embroidery craftswomen, toy and jewelry manufacturers. They obtained licenses and paid taxes for permission to sell their products at markets.]

My father’s older brother Iosif – he was called Juzia at home – was born in 1898. He didn’t leave a good memory of himself. Though it is not allowed to speak badly of the deceased, he was remembered to be a tough, greedy man dictating his rules to his brothers and his family. He was a despot. He was a skilled leather handler at an enterprise, and later as a private businessman. He was wealthy since leather handling was a good craft, but he never supported his relatives, even at the hardest time. 

His first wife, a Jew called Sonia Basman, died in Odessa before the Great Patriotic War. They had two children: daughter Maria, born in 1919 and son Abram, born in 1923. Maria’s husband Victor Lezhanskiy was the director of a big enterprise in Lvov after the war. It was to his credit that the family moved to Lvov after the war.

Iosif remarried in Lvov. His second wife Yelena was 25-28 years younger than him. She was a beautiful Russian woman. He supported her, but when he grew old and fell severely ill, she didn’t care about him. She had other men. One of them beat her mercilessly of jealousy and Yelena died from the injuries. Iosif had a son in this marriage. His name is Valentin and he lives in Lvov now. Iosif’s son Abram, his wife Sophia and their children – daughter Larisa and son Mikhail – moved to the USA in the middle of the 1970s where Abram died in 1986. Maria died in Lvov in 1991 and her husband Victor Lezhanskiy also passed away.

My father’s second brother Grigoriy, born in 1901, was known in the family for having four wives. I even remember their names: Mania, Vera, Riva and Musia. They were all Jews and Grigoriy loved each of them. He was an amorous man. He was a handsome man. He resembled my grandmother. From his second marriage with Vera he had a boy. His name was Israel, but I have absolutely no information about his life. His last wife Musia had a daughter. Her name was Concordia. They lived in Saratov [today Russia] before the war. Like the other brothers, Grigoriy dealt in craftsmanship, something to do with shoemaking. During the war Grigoriy was at the front where he perished on 6th May 1945 in Germany. My father was thinking of visiting his grave for many years. He even had an invitation to Germany, but he never went there.

My father’s third brother Solomon – Jewish name Shulim – was born in 1903. He was a specialist in shoe painting; before the war he worked at the shoe factory in Odessa. During the war he was in Saratov in evacuation and he stayed there after the war. He painted shoes as a private craftsman. While working at the factory Solomon was exposed to hazardous acetone and had lung problems. He was married twice: his wives’ names were Tsylia and Milia. I met his second wife, with whom he moved to his brothers in Lvov, when he was a pensioner. Solomon died in 1987. He had no children.

The youngest brother Aizik – he was called Izia at home – was born in 1910. He was the most enterprising of all the brothers. We were the closest with him and his family, and he and I were friends. Every time he had different ideas. At first he thought of becoming a photographer and he arranged a ‘Photo salon’ that was a small room with a garden bench in it and decorations of all kinds to take photos with the mountains, sea or a waterfall in the background. He also painted over the pictures with different colors.

His wife was Shprintsia Ostritskaya, a Jew from Odessa. He had four sons and a daughter. The older son Yakov lived near Odessa. He had diabetes and was very ill. Now his wife Flora and daughters Lilia and Maria live in Odessa. His second son Mikhail was killed in Lvov. He was a troublesome person. He had a strange life, nobody knows any details, but he probably didn’t live an honest life. Once he disappeared and later it turned out that he was murdered. This is all the information available. The third son Grigoriy is very smart. He moved to Los Angeles, America, in the 1970s. Their daughter Lilia lives in Israel and her son Felix also lives there.

The youngest son Vladimir moved to Germany in the middle of the 1990s. He has two children: son Sergey living in Israel is married, and daughter Yelena lives in Germany. Vladimir finished a college, worked as a railroad engineer for a long time, then life became unbearable – he got a very low salary at the railroad, and he went to work in private business. He had a tourist and a commercial company, but then he closed them and moved to Germany with his wife. His wife Irina is Russian. She is a teacher. They live near Baden-Baden in Germany. 

My father Boris – Jewish name Ber – Bashmet was the fourth son of Avrum and Feiga. He was born in 1905. My father studied in cheder and then began to study in a grammar school, which he never finished. My father had little education and wrote with mistakes in Russian. His older brother tried to involve him in his business, but my father separated from him.

My father was very handy and had smart ideas. He knew that after the horrors of the Civil War 6 people would like to decorate their homes, he modified an embroidery needle, with which people could embroider rugs, pillow cases and tablecloths with color threads. The pattern was imprinted on cloth, and the needle was used to make little tight knots that made the embroidery look very fancy. These needles were in great demand. He was an entrepreneur, as they call it now, he had a patent and paid taxes. A financial inspector [state officer responsible for identification of illegal businesses] visited him, and he filled in taxation forms.

The family was not poor. My father was a breadwinner his whole life. He liked working for himself. He didn’t want to be subject to tough discipline at work. When the weather was bad, he stayed at home making his needles and later he went to the market to sell them. He always paid taxes on time. He didn’t want to have any problems with the authorities. He was very independent. He started working at the age of 15, after he lost his father, in the middle of the Civil War. Life was miserable in Odessa in those years.

Boris Bashmet was a very kind man. When he was 20, he met Tsylia Birstein. She was the same age as he. He always shared his food with her. She never had sufficient food and needed support. They met in a company of young people. They got married in 1925. They just had a civil ceremony registering their marriage. After the revolution of 1917 7, religious weddings were not popular.

I know very little about my ancestors on my mother’s side. My grandfather’s name was Chaim Birstein. I don’t know his date of birth, though I guess it may have been in the 1860s, or occupation. They lived in Odessa and had a better education than the Bashmet family. Their children finished a grammar school. There is one photo of my grandmother Etl Berstein. Her nickname was ‘De sheine’ – ‘the most beautiful’ in Yiddish. My mother’s sister Lisa moved to Buenos Aires in Argentina in 1910. Her older brother Haime moved to London in England in 1912, and we lost track of them for good. I think they must have been born in the 1880s. My mother was a little girl then and remembered them dimly.

In 1919 my mother’s parents died of typhus. My mother went to live with her older sister Yevgenia, born in 1887. Her husband Vladimir Lipshitz came from a poor family in Odessa. He was an enthusiastic revolutionary in the underground. In 1916 he moved abroad escaping from the tsarist police. He returned after the revolution of 1917 and held many leading posts. He was a ruthless man and had his principles. He believed everybody had to support himself. My mother didn’t have a good life with them.

In 1925 Lipshitz got a job in Moscow. At one time he was deputy minister of the meat industry of a republic and then became director of a big factory. In 1937 he was arrested 8 like many other revolutionaries and he disappeared for a long time. When he was released from prison, he was not allowed to reside in Moscow. This separated him from the family.

Yevgenia had three sons. One of them, David, was an artist, and so was another, whose name I don’t remember. Marat, the youngest, was eager to go to the front in 1941. He was under the recruitment age, but he managed to get enrolled. He perished in the first month of the war. Yevgenia died in 1967.

My mother studied in a grammar school. She loved music, literature, theater and art. My mother’s family must have spoken Yiddish among themselves. My mother could speak it well. The family was probably not so religious. My mother didn’t go to synagogue or lit candles on Saturday. We observed some traditions and on Pesach my mother made some dishes from matzah, but this was merely all. As far as I know, the family traditionally bought their children new clothes before holidays.

After the revolution my mother finished a secondary school. She was good at music and had a good voice. She entered the Vocal Faculty of Odessa Conservatory, but she only studied two years there. The hard conditions of her life at her sister’s, lack of food forced her to give up her studies. She did the laundry and worked as a baby sitter as much as she could to earn at least something. In 1925 her sister’s family moved to Moscow. My mother didn’t have anybody to seek support in Odessa, when she met the young, interesting and reliable Boris Bashmet, who was her rescue.

At first my parents were renting a room before they got a room of their own in Knizhny Lane in Odessa where I was born in 1926. I remember our yard surrounded by two- and three-storied houses with many apartments and many tenants in them. There was a common toilet in a corner in the yard. In the middle of this yard there was a big branchy tree. It seemed huge to me then. Most of the tenants were Jewish. There was one old Greek man, a shoemaker, with his wife, and a couple of Russian families.

I remember Tsynishin. He worked in the shipyard and was a Stakhanovets. [Editor’s note: this title was awarded to the workers who displayed advanced performance, exceeding their work scopes during a shift.] He received a good salary, bonuses, gifts, but he was an unrestrained drunkard. I remember his drunk yelling and anti-Semitic demonstrations. In the morning he made the rounds of apartments to apologize for his conduct. He was the poorest man in our neighborhood. There were also educated families. The son of one such family was my friend, Sokolovskiy, a very talented boy. He was about two years older than me. He perished at the front during the Great Patriotic War.

There were many routinely rows in the yard: one housewife began telling off another housewife for rushing up somebody’s laundry getting dry on a line, somebody’s child walked somewhere wrong, somebody left a door open and so on. These rows were actually like theatrical performances. My mother never got involved in such rows. She got along with the neighbors and didn’t come into conflict with people in general. She had a good sense of humor. The others respected her for her voice. She used to sing romances or songs popular in the 1920-30s. When the weather was warm, housewives did their cooking on primus stoves in the yard. [Primus stove: a small portable stove with a container for about 1 liter of kerosene that was pumped into burners.] They also did their laundry, washed their children or themselves in washtubs. There was a pump in the center of the yard and tenants fetched water in buckets.

Childhood

Our apartment consisted of one 17-square meter room and a 10-12 square meter kitchen. The front door led to the kitchen from the yard. There was a wood or coal-stoked stove in the corner of the kitchen that served for cooking and heating. There was a basement in the house where we had a cell to keep vegetables. There were two windows in the room, a wardrobe, beds and a mirror on the wall – this was all, I think. There were carpets on the walls that my father made.

My mother was crazy about cleanliness and we had to watch ourselves to keep things clean. Everything was white: the tablecloth, napkins and cover sheets. My mother often whitewashed the stove. She cooked delicious traditional food. I remember the monotony of similar dishes: Jewish stew, chicken broth with beans and boiled cereals. Our family liked sharp tasting dishes: ground radishes with oil and onions, herring and sauerkraut, and we always had them at meals. My mother made gefilte fish, soup and borsch, but not so often. She cooked egg plants deliciously; they were popular in Odessa: she stewed them ground with vegetables, filled them with carrots and onions and pickled them. My mother also baked strudels and cookies. We had water melons and melons till late autumn.

My mother also made dishes with matzah on Pesach. We bought matzah at the synagogue every year and brought it home in a tin tub called ‘balia.’ My father went to buy matzah at the synagogue. He sometimes took me with him, but my mother never went to the synagogue. My mother bought a chicken to cook it for dinner on Pesach. We had a special dinner, but we didn’t have any special crockery for Pesach. My father went to the synagogue on other holidays: Simchat Torah for sure. He had a prayer book, tallit and other accessories for praying. I remember the synagogue on holidays, the candle light, everybody dancing, but my father didn’t take me inside. We, boys, watched it through holes in the fence.

Before I turned eight, I was only allowed to play in the yard. My mother even beat me or punished me making me stand in a corner, if I left the yard. She was afraid of bad influence of hooligans, ‘shpana’ as they were called in Odessa. When I turned eight, my parents used to send me to buy bread in a shop. I hardly ever went out with my parents. They were busy at work and I spent my time playing with other children in the yard.

We lived in Knizhny Lane that was called so due to the nice building of the library in the center of it. When I turned ten, I began to borrow books from this library. My mother read a lot and we had many books at home: my mother read Russian and world classics and was also fond of detective stories. I remember a story teller in Odessa. His surname was Haimovich and he always told sensations and news. There were always rumors that either a comet would fly by, or a meridian had broken and they spread fast and then there were books on this subject written. We could also borrow books from him: he charged 2-3 rubles for 3-4 days.

My mother loved opera and ballet, and she took me with her to the theater. I remember how I admired the luxury of the Opera Theater. My father never went with us. He read newspapers and magazines, but I never remember him discussing what he had read. My father had a simple attitude toward the Soviet power. He had a saying: ‘never ask the tsar for anything better.’ My father belonged to the people who understood that they had to earn their living and food, and everything else was all right. My father worked, worked and worked. He sold what he made at the Privoz market where he had a folding table, a frame where he embroidered and a display board where he had all these embroideries. However, he didn’t like to sell his articles. Sometimes, he made carpets by orders.

He had days off on Soviet holidays: 1st May, 7th November 9 and on Jewish holidays. My father didn’t work on Saturday. He didn’t take part in politics. Before 7th November my father went to an artist to have him paint ‘Long live 7th November’ or ‘20th anniversary of October.’ My father embroidered these paintings and sold the rugs. The Soviet power only appeared in our house in the person of a financial inspector, but my father found a common language with him. He got along well with people. I also knew how to develop a tax declaration, when I went to school.

My parents had their friends who got together to play cards and lotto in our home. They also sang Jewish and popular songs. My father knew many songs. Most of their friends were Jews. We had a record player and many records. In summer my parents put it on the window sill and opened the window and then everybody in the yard could hear the music. Later we got a radio, a big one. This was the first radio set in our yard and I was very proud of it.

In 1933 there was famine 10, I remember it well: we were miserably poor then. I remember that my mother and father had golden rings and they took them to the Torgsin store 11 to buy bread or something else. My father even had to take our pillows to sell them at the market. My father went to work at the garment factory. We didn’t have coal or wood to heat the apartment. I fell ill with measles. It created complications with my eyes: I had a squint, poor sight and long sight. I even couldn’t go to school at the age of seven: my parents decided I needed to get better.

A year later life began to improve. To prepare me for school my mother decided to send me to a Froebel tutor 12 who had finished a Froebel school before the revolution of 1917. There was a group of children. She taught us to read and write in Russian. She was a Jew, Faina Markovna, an intelligent woman. She was very good at teaching children. We sang and learned poems, went for walks in parks, and in the evening she took us to our homes. We had our snacks with us and our Froebel tutor watched that we ate what we had with us.

I went to the second grade of a Russian secondary school for boys and girls. There were many Jewish children in my class. Our class tutor was a Jew, a kind woman. Nobody distinguished us by nationality. Like everybody else I became a young Octobrist 13, and then a pioneer 14. I don’t remember anything special about the admission ceremonies, probably, I didn’t care much. I was an active pioneer. I issued our class wall newspapers, one to the 100th anniversary of Pushkin 15, and also recited poems at concerts. I had friends, we used to play football on a ground near school. My friend Sokolovskiy and I took part in contests at school. One of them was called ‘Years and towns,’ and we read encyclopedias and maps to be able to answer questions. I studied well in the junior grades, but then I was less successful. Mathematic was a difficult subject for me.

In 1935, on 17th February my sister was born. This was a grand event in our life. I even made a calendar and marked that she was born at 10 o’clock. My sister was named Emma, it was close to my mother’s name Etl. She was a lovely fair girl, everybody liked her and she loved all.

My father quit his job at the factory and worked at home. Besides, he and Aizik worked together making color pictures, painted cards and sold them. They were in great demand at the Privoz.

In 1937 I was an eleven-year-old boy. We believed everything at school and on the radio unconditionally. We didn’t doubt it that Stalin would protect us against enemies and traitors. My friend and I removed portraits of enemies of the people 16, devoted communists, recent legendary commanders, favorites of the people, who had only recently been our idols, from books. They told us at school and on the radio that this person was an enemy of the people and that one was a murderer, and we believed it without going into detail.

This subject was not discussed at home, but there were talks about the war. We knew about the horrific war in Europe. We didn’t know any details, what Hitler was doing to Jews, but we understood there was bloodshed and towns on fire. In 1939 people said there was going to be a war in 1940, in 1940 they said there was to be a war in 1941. These were mere talks for me, and only when bombs began to fall on us, we realized this was the war.

During the war

I remember well the day of 22nd June 1941. In the morning we heard the roar of planes and heard the firing. We ran outside. We were terribly scared. The thing is, there was a raid on Odessa on the first day of the war and then there was a month of quiet. My father was called to the military office; he was subject to recruitment. There was an order to take all radios to the officials. We wrapped our radio set in a pillow case and sewed it on. We obtained a document to get it back later, but this never happened, of course.

Institutions and organizations began to evacuate. Our family didn’t hope to leave the town. Uncle Aizik’s friend, who worked in a railroad office, was responsible for the evacuation of equipment of a plant and had a railcar at his disposal to evacuate the family. He took my uncle’s family and us into this railcar. Our trip in the overcrowded freight railcar lasted over two months before we finally arrived in Central Asia. We had a suitcase of clothes, a record player and few records with us. There were many Jews from Bessarabia 17 in the railcar. They spoke Yiddish and I actually learned the language there.

People were getting off the train wherever they wanted. My uncle’s family got off in Saratov, but later they joined us in Central Asia. My mother was so scared that she decided to go as far as the train took us. So we arrived in Alma-Ata, the capital of Kazakhstan, about 3300 km from Kiev. Alma-Ata is an interesting town, but our life there was very hard. At first a Jewish family gave us shelter. We slept on the floor for a few months.

My mother rented an apartment from a very rude Kazakh man living in the suburb of the city. There was no wood to stoke the stove. There was a tree, a saxaul, in the yard, where I used to spend hours waiting for our landlord to drop me a branch from it. My little sister was ill, my mother worked as a cloakroom janitor in a theater and we received bread cards 18.

I went to the eighth grade at school. There were terrible anti-Semitic demonstrations in Alma-Ata and there was no escape from it. The main subject of it was that Jews were staying in the rear rather than going to the front. [Editor’s note: Many people evacuated to Central Asia during the Great Patriotic War, including many Jewish families. Many people had an idea that all Jewish population was in evacuation rather than at the front and anti-Semites spoke about it in mocking tones.] Russians talked about it at markets endlessly, though I never heard any Kazakh talking about it. I kept my father’s photograph that he had sent us from the front with me as evidence that there were Jews at the front.

My Jewish name Abram [Jewish names were targets of mockery, vulgar jokes and often exclusion at the time] provoked all kinds of trouble for me, and my mother and I decided to change it to Arkadiy without making any changes in my documents. Since then I’ve been called Arkadiy at school, college, work and home.

My mother was very concerned about me fearing that I would have to go to the front, when I became of age. Frankly speaking, I had no desire to go to the front. My sight became so poor in Alma-Ata that it was impossible to find proper glasses for me. The medical commission attested me as ‘not fit for military service,’ but my mother kept worrying. She often cried, my sister was ill and my father disappeared and we didn’t know anything about him.

My father was a private in anti-tank troops. He was in captivity, and he was wounded and had to stay in hospital. Near Stalingrad he was sent to a village riding a horse. There he was captured by Germans and they intended to shoot him. A Russian reported on him saying: ‘But he is a Jew,’ and Germans were going to kill him, but my father managed to escape. My father hid on a stove and the Germans were too busy to look for him.

When the village was liberated, my father was sent to a punitive company being a former prisoner-of-war. At that time prisoners-of-war were treated as traitors. He was wounded by a mine and taken to a hospital. There were splinters from this mine in his legs for a long time, and he also lost few fingers. When he was discharged from this hospital in 1944, he came to us in Alma-Ata. He arrived walking on crutches. He decided to learn to ride a bicycle and it took him a long time. We had to help him on and off the bicycle since he could hardly move at first.

By this time Uncle Aizik, his family and Grandmother Feiga moved in with us. My father and his younger brother obtained a license for making candy. They rented a facility, purchased sugar and boiled candy using some interesting technology. They boiled sugar, added color agents, poured this mass into pans and cut it. Then they cooled, dried, sugar powdered and sold them. They also made ice cream for sale. My uncle had a stand at the market. They also bought gauze, colored it and made curtains. They also painted cards. My father was very handy. 

Alma-Ata became a cultural center during the war: many Moscow theaters, cinema studios and popular art activists evacuated there. Uncle Aizik went to work as a scenery laborer at the musical comedy theater and always took me to rehearsals with him. The Moscow Jewish Theater was also in this building, and it was all very interesting. There were many Jewish performances in Yiddish. I remember ‘The Wandering Stars’ and ‘Tevye the Milkman’ by Sholem Aleichem 19. There was a beautiful Opera Theater where we often went. I met my first love in Alma-Ata: she was Clara, a Jewish girl. Her father was a high ranking official in a ministry. I met her in a company of young people. She was a theater-goer and took me with her.

I had finished school by then, passed my exam externally since I hardly ever attended classes. There was a theater for children and teens created in Kazakhstan. They were hiring actors and I went there immediately. I passed all exams, sketches and music tests, and they admitted me to the preparatory group. However, when it came to the issue of my employment at the theater my mother was sobbing bitterly. The theater didn’t release you from army service and she was afraid that I might be recruited despite my poor sight. 

So I went to the preparatory course at the Railroad College that provided a release from army service and a bread card for 800 grams bread per day while other cards were for 400 grams. This all played a significant role. I wouldn’t say that I disliked this profession and regret that it happened so. During my first year, when there were general subjects, I didn’t like them and spent more time organizing concerts and so on. Later I got fond of the automation subject. I defended my diploma well. Though I never became an outstanding specialist, I became a good engineer.

The 9th of May 1945, the Victory Day 20, was a very happy, but also a sad day for our family. The day before we received a notification that my father’s brother Grigoriy had perished. My father and Aizik were in no hurry to return home to start everything anew on the ruins.

Marriage and children

In 1946 my college was transferred to Leningrad. I had finished two years of studies and went to Leningrad with my college. I got accommodation in a hostel. We admired the theaters, museums and the highest cultural level of people in Leningrad. I was very fond of attending the amateur art club where I played in the amateur theater and was particularly good at playing strong characters. I met my future wife Maya Krechiver in the college theater. She wanted to be an actress and loved theater, but she never managed to realize her dream. She studied in Leningrad University and became a philologist. 

Maya was born in Kiev in 1926. Her father Zelik Krechiver, born in 1896, an old communist, worked as chief of the planning department of the Ministry of Light Industry. Her mother Daria Shapchenko, born in 1908, very young, 16-17 years old, a beautiful Ukrainian woman, was a cleaning woman in this ministry and that was where they met and got married. Later she finished a college and became a design artist. Maya was their only child, but before the war her parents separated.

When the war began, her father before going to the front, made his daughter sit on his lap, gave her some money and clothes and said, ‘Go to Molotov [present Perm, Russia, 900 km from Moscow]’ where his brother and sister lived. Her mother was the director of a museum in Lubny [Ukraine, 200 km from Kiev]. She must have perished during another raid. There is no information about what happened to her. The father perished at the front defending Kiev in 1941. Maya stayed with her father’s sister in Perm. Aunt Revekka and her husband Boris Yelentuh became Maya’s family, and later they became family for me. Maya and I often saw each other. Her uncle was deputy director of the college and had an apartment in the hostel where I resided. We often went to the theater.

My parents remained in Alma-Ata till 1949. I went to visit them on vacations. My trip lasted six days, and I got a cheap ticket to sleep on the third-tier berth since I couldn’t afford to buy a more expensive ticket. My father also visited me in Leningrad and stayed with me at the hostel.

By the time of finishing college Maya and I already knew that we wanted to live our life together. At the end of 1948 we had our marriage registered in the registry office, and in the evening Aunt Revekka arranged a small dinner party. I got a job assignment 21 to Siberia. Maya’s uncle Boris pulled some strings for me. He was logistics manager of our college. At the very last moment I got another job assignment to the Northern Caucasian railroad, to the Russian town of Rostov-on-the-Don, 920 km from Kiev.

They were to provide an apartment to the young specialist, but instead, they rented one for me. Maya stayed to study in Leningrad. We corresponded, she came to me on vacations and I went to see her in Leningrad. She defended her diploma brilliantly in 1949, and she was already pregnant. On 3rd July 1949 our first son Yevgeniy was born.

Sometime later I went to Leningrad to take my wife and son to Rostov-on-the-Don. We got an apartment in a former office building on the bank of the Don. There was no bathroom or hot water in the apartment, but at that time hardly anybody lived with comforts. I worked in a railroad office. There were not many Jewish employees there. However, I remember these polemics and resolutions in the course of the struggle against cosmopolitism 22. It might seem that it had hardly anything to do with us in the technical environment, but my wife and I were very concerned at this period.

Then came another burst called the Doctors’ Plot 22. It was necessary to join the party to make a career. I submitted my application, but they refused to admit me and explained that  Jews could not be trusted. I remember that my colleagues stopped visiting doctors, and my manager used to repeat, ‘How do we go to a doctor now?’ There was a hostile attitude and distrust. Later, when it stopped after Stalin died, I remember the disappointment of those who appreciated this process.

Maya worked at school a little. On 24th January 1953 our son Yuri was born. Stalin’s death on 5th March 1953 wasn’t a big event for us. We spent all our time with little Yuri. Of course, we were concerned about what was to happen in the future, but I always remembered what our father said, ‘Don’t ask the tsar for anything better,’ and didn’t expect anything good from this regime. We lived our own life. We played in an amateur theater in Rostov. There was a good producer and what we did was quite serious. I went to work at a design institute and found this job more interesting. There were more Jewish employees there, but I didn’t notice any prejudiced attitudes.

By 1950 the Bashmet family gradually reunited in Lvov. Victor Lezhanskiy, the son-in-law of my father’s older brother Iosif, was director of a big enterprise in Lvov, and in the first years after the war it was easy to get an apartment here, and he helped all of them to get apartments and they moved to Lvov.

In 1952 my grandmother Feiga Bashmet died. She was very old and lived the end of her life with her younger son Aizik. My father continued making needles in Lvov and they were in demand. My mother was very ill. She always had a weak heart, but then she fell ill with cancer of the blood and glands. She died in late 1956. She was buried in the Jewish cemetery in Lvov. My father and 20-year-old Emma were left on their own. I realized that I had to support them and got a transfer to a similar design institute in Lvov. At that time we had a two-room apartment in Rostov that we exchanged for an apartment in Lvov in 1957.

In Lvov I climbed the career ladder promptly. In the 1960-1970s I worked as deputy director of the design institute. When our director died, everybody believed that I was to become director. The chief of the railroad department had a discussion with me and seemed to like what he heard, but later I was expressly told that the party district committee didn’t approve me due to my nationality. During the Soviet time a candidate for any official post was to be approved by the Communist Party district, town or central committees. So I remained to be deputy director of this institute. Many times I heard the others saying about me that I was a good specialist and a good man despite my being a Jew. When our institute was closed, I went to work at the railroad production site. I was chief engineer and when I became a pensioner, I stayed to work there as a dispatcher.

In 1957, when we moved to Lvov, Yevgeniy was eight. He went to the first grade here. Yuri was four years old. They grew up like all other Soviet children. They were pioneers and Komsomol 24 members and they were atheists, of course. Our boys were very different: if Yuri was born on a sunny day, Yevgeniy was born on a cloudy night. He studied at school poorly and always got involved in incidents. He was very musical and we decided to teach him to play the accordion. We bought an expensive accordion, but Yevgeniy didn’t want to play. We had to sell his accordion for peanuts.

He hardly managed to finish nine classes at school and went to serve in the army. By that time he learned to play the guitar, and in the army he played in a band. He served in a construction battalion in the Crimea. Once he fell asleep in a trench, caught a cold that developed into pleurisy and came home. We arranged for the medical treatment and sent him to a health center in the Crimea where he continued to play the guitar. Then he returned and played in bands, one and another, and then I made all arrangements for him to study in the railroad technical school. He was even admitted without exams. He left it after studying three years.

He married a woman with a five-year old daughter. Her name is Angela. It didn’t matter that his wife Nina Yeliseeva was not Jewish, but what mattered was that they didn’t get along. In 1986 their daughter Maria was born. Yevgeniy worked as a driver, then was a conductor in an orchestra, an entrepreneur, but nothing really worked out. Two years ago he moved to Germany with his family. Maria finished a choreographic college here and studies in a grammar school in Germany. She is a good girl.

We knew that Yuri had a talent for music since he was a child. He loved listening to records and later he learned to play the guitar by himself. Grandfather Boris gave him his first guitar. Maya sent him to a music school. We needed to buy a musical instrument for him. The cheapest instrument was a violin, so we bought him one and later we bought a piano. Yuri studied in a general school for the first four years and in the evening he had classes in the music school.

After finishing the fourth grade he went to study in the music school. He didn’t give up playing the guitar either. Some of his friends told him that it was easier to play the guitar and he didn’t have to spend all his time like he did playing the violin. The violin class was too full and teachers suggested that Yuri went to the class of viola players. They always offered viola to unsuccessful violin players. They asked my son, ‘Will you learn to play the viola?’, but he didn’t care – he didn’t know what it was like. We didn’t know it either. One musician whom we knew said, ‘It doesn’t matter what instrument you play: it’s important how you play it.’ It decided it all.

For a couple of years, in the fifth and sixth grades he continued to play the violin since he needed to have a stronger hand to be able to play the viola. In the seventh grade he started to play the viola. He played drills from morning till night and our neighbors were crazy about it, but he liked it and he was responsible. Other people paid their attention to Yuri and serious musicians took part in arranging his future. So he’s become the number one viola player in the world and an outstanding musician, and there have been about 50 pieces written for viola and for him, Yuri Bashmet.

He is very fond of playing the piano and plays it wonderfully. Yuri is also known as an outstanding conductor now. His wife Nathalia is a violinist. Their daughter Ksenia, born in 1980, is a pianist. She is married to Dmitriy Bulgakov, an oboe player. Their son Alexandr, born in 1986, declared there were too many musicians in the family already. He studies at the College of International Relations.

Yuri lives in Moscow and goes on tours to many countries. His schedule is busy for a few years ahead. Besides, Yuri is a public person. He takes part in many events: music festivals, contests, etc. In many interviews my son mentions his family. He says he had ‘a great mother,’ who took every effort to make him what he is now. He recalls Grandfather Boris with whom he was very close. He remembered that his grandfather used to send him a little money till his last days: ‘Young people always want something.’

Though our boys have been so different they’ve always been close to one another. They went to pioneer camps together and played in bands. Music tied them together. Yuri has always acknowledged that Yevgeniy is talented. My sons were raised knowing their Jewish spirit. They could pick up their grandfather or my jokes in Yiddish. They fought the neighbor’s children, when they heard their anti-Semitic expressions or teasing. When Yuri studied in the music school in Lvov, most of his classmates were Jewish, and so was their class tutor, a teacher of physics. This teacher humiliated the boys, gave them lower marks and told them off, so that the others did not suspect him in supporting his own kin. There were Jews, who were most of all afraid of being suspected of being Jews.

In 1969 my sister Emma died. She was young. I always loved her. She was an amazing person, kind and fair and never recognized the evil. Regretfully Emma was single. She was very ill. She had an ulcer in her stomach, consequences of the war and poor food. She was a philologist and worked in the library. She was very fond of Pushkin. She loved her nephews, my children, and spent a lot of time with them.

When the children were at school, my wife Maya was a housewife. To add to the family budget she made clothes at home. She had her clients. Later, when the children grew older, she went to work at the conservatory where she was chief dispatcher of the curriculum department. She did very well at work and her colleagues respected her. She worked till her last days. She had heart problems. Maya died from a stroke in 1985. I lost my big friend and a very close person. The two parts of her – the Slavic and Judaic ones – were in harmony in her, she never liked pressure on one or the other side. She hated anti-Semitism and didn’t like the Orthodox Jewish demonstrations, disregard or disrespect of other nations. She raised our children to share her vision.

My father was growing older and couldn’t work any longer. He received a pension of an invalid of the Great Patriotic War. I often went to see him and we talked a lot. He told me much about the history of the Bashmet family. He died at the age of 87 in 1992. I have his prayer book, tallit and some other religious accessories. He went to the synagogue in Lvov, and to pay my respects to him I go to the synagogue four times, during readings of the prayer of commemoration of parents.

Recent years

I was enthusiastic about perestroika 25. I believed that it was the right turn. I couldn’t imagine the fall of the Soviet Union. Like any other manager I propagated the Soviet way of life, conducted political classes and said things that even I knew were lies. Sooner or later this propaganda had to fall apart, the things were getting worse and worse. I saluted the independence of Ukraine. I believed that every nation must have a state, but I could never guess that this independence would result in what we have now. This nationalism is not normal, I don’t understand how people can be so intolerant to others.

I’ve traveled to Israel three times. My son Yuri paid for my trips. This is a wonderful country, exotic, but still it is not mine. I don’t remember my reaction when Israel was established – it was far away from me, but now that I’ve been there, I understand how wonderful it is that there is this country, there is the land and the state.

However, I live my life here. I don’t even want to move to Moscow, though Yuri has a nice house out of the city and a nice five-bedroom apartment in the center of Moscow with all comforts, etc. Why would I need it? I have my friends and I am at home here. I meet with my old friends. I have a woman friend here, we see each other, she has a daughter and a family, but we meet when we can and go to theaters or listen to music. 

I often read lectures in the Hesed 26 about Yuri’s creative activities, show videos of my son’s concerts. I have 25 video tapes. Since I am an old man living alone, Hesed helps me with cleaning the apartment and doing the laundry, but they treat me like they do everybody else. I try to observe traditions that my father developed in me, but of course, I am not religious. I am just interested in the history of the Jewish people and I am an active person. Yiddish helps me – I can understand what people say and can talk.

Glossary:

Russia
St. Petersburg
Interviewer Olga Egudina
October 2007

Naum Efimovich is 94 years old.

He can independently take care of himself, 

goes out sometimes, does physical exercises in the morning.
He has poor sight and hearing.
 

A nice person to talk to, polite, 
ready to recount his life without interruption. 
He feels lonely without his wife and friends.

• My family background
• Growing up
• During the war
• After the war
• Glossary

• My family background

I can remember my great-grandfather. My great-grandfather, Naum Tseitlin, lived in Belarus, and the main residence of the entire Tseitlin family was the provincial town of Mstislavl. During the war I happened to pass through this town, and when we came across a Jewish cemetery, quite by chance, my comrade, a soldier like me, said: ‘Look, Tseitlin,’ pointing at a marble monument. I went up and saw that it really was Tseitlin. I looked at the next – Tseitlin, too. A whole row of Tseitlins. That is, an entire burial place for the Tseitlin family. And I noticed the years. The graves were not only recent, but dated as far back as the 1700s, that is to say that Tseitlins were already living in Mstislavl in the 18th century. I then recalled that in the days of Catherine the Great our ancestors moved to Russia, coming through Germany, the Baltic states, and finally settled in this very place, in Belarus.

I noticed that those were only men's tombstones, and remembered what Father used to tell me. According to Jewish custom, men are buried in one row, and women in another, so that a husband’s and wife’s graves will be found in different places. Only men's tombstones. And a lot of names that I knew so well. My father also told me, that names recurred in our family. My name is Naum, my father’s Efim, his father was Yakov, Yakov’s father was Naum.

Since Jews were not allowed to own land and it was prohibited to sell land sites to Jews, they were mostly dealers, merchants, craftsmen. My grandfather Yakov in particular was a craftsman specializing in many things. His basic trade was pitch-making, so he called himself a pitch-maker. This place in Belarus abounds in woods, so they were very much taken up with extracting pitch, turpentine and rosin. Grandfather was certainly the source of well being for his family. He was really a jack-of-all-trades, and Father, too, inherited all his skills.

It is enough to tell you that I remember as a small boy, how Grandfather fixed a broken samovar. One of our neighbors put on a samovar once [in those days live coals were put in samovars to boil water]. But someone had poured out all of the boiled water, and the coals continued to burn, and the samovar cracked at the seams. This made people upset. Grandfather comes out and says, ‘I’ll fix it.’ ‘How in God’s name are you going to fix it?’ ‘It’s very simple.’

I was a witness to that, a small boy while a big crowd gathered from all over and watched how he was going to repair a completely broken samovar. The pipe had split off the pot, it was all melted down. And Grandfather used the same live coals to fire up the solderer, because electricity was unheard of in the vicinity, soldered whatever required soldering and assembled the samovar in front of the entire crowd. Everybody gasped with surprise. It impressed me, too.

But Grandfather wasn't finished yet. He said, ‘OK, I have put together the parts, but the thing has to be soldered from inside, that’s why I’m going to cover it with tin from within.’ And he showed us how to do it. He melted the tin right there in the fire, and prepared a broom in the meantime. I remember it all very well. I was about five years old then, it was shortly before Grandfather died. And he lined the insides of the samovar with tin. He sprinkled the melted tin on the broom and twirled it fast inside the samovar. Then he called to a man and said, ‘Look to see if I have missed any place?’ No, everything was just fine, lined all over. So, Father and Grandfather were mending, people were paying.

My grandmother on father’s side was called Genessa. I remember trying to find out, as a small boy, what the Russian equivalent would have been. She was always very strict, I cannot remember if she ever laughed. And she brought up her kids along tough lines. She had several children. Of the two boys, my father, Efim Yakovlevich, was the elder. Her other son’s name was Michael Yakovlevich. He received a good education, was a dental technician, and such a good one, that he eventually became a professor at the Moscow Medical Institute’s dental surgery faculty. After the war he worked, being already prominent in his trade, in the dental surgery clinic of the Main Moscow Department of the GPU 1. I have no information about the sisters.

My grandmother, grandfather and parents were religious people. My grandmother did not change her habits during all her life; she baked challah on Fridays, in order to celebrate Sabbath, though she wore secular clothes every day. Both my grandparents and parents spoke mainly in Yiddish amongst themselves, and with us – only in Russian. All of them knew Russian.

My mother was born in Belarus, in the small settlement of Smolyany, not far from Orsha, in 1875. She was known, in the Jewish manner, as Tseita. People tried to call her Tsetsilia in the Russian way, but all to no avail; sometimes neighbors called her Teresa, but she remained Tseita Alexandrovna.

Her father’s name was Grigory. My maternal grandfather, as many Jews, had two names – Grigory and Sender [Alexander]. I actually also had a second name, Matvey, and I was called Motya as a child. His surname was Hoffmann; he was born in Belarus too. He died, when she was a very young girl. His wife got married a second time to Schwarz. And a girl was born out of this marriage, my aunt Fanya, who later lived with us. They were quite rich, could educate their children in Warsaw, and as a young girl she completed a corset-making school in Warsaw.

My mother’s maternal relatives took her into their family. She grew up rather far away from Orsha, or from Smolyany, where she was born, on the bank of the Dnieper River, brought up by her uncle and aunt. I passed through this settlement during the war as well; it is now a district center, where my mother spent her youth. The front line passed right through it. My mother had not received any education. Her childhood was such that she had to start working very early. She met her husband-to-be, Efim, in Orsha, when she was seventeen years old and she worked as a saleswoman in a big store in Orsha, in Belarus. Soon they got married.

My father Efim was born in 1876 in Smolensk [a town not far from the border between present-day Russia and Belarus] beyond the Jewish Pale of Settlement 2. As a matter of fact, his mother and my grandmother Genessa helped her husband and my grandfather Yakov with his commercial business, which was often connected with various trips. Being pregnant, she went on one such trip, thinking to be back home on time. However, when in Smolensk, premature delivery started, and Father was born in that town. He spent his childhood and youth in the town of Mstislavl.

My father moved almost simultaneously with Grandfather, they broke away from the Pale of Settlement. Although it cost great efforts, as my father used to say, they managed to settle in Russia. It was before the revolution 3, at the end of the 19th century, when my father was newly married and decided to take advantage of the opportunity, which presented itself then – of course, they had to bribe some officials to be able to leave. Since Jews were authorized to settle only in some cities, he chose the town of Saratov on the Volga River. Grandfather followed right after him.

Father had to take examinations for a trade, because without a profession Jews were not allowed to move. He had passed an examination for drugstore assistant. It meant being able to prepare distilled water, make mixtures, obtain goods for a drugstore, in short being a worker in a drugstore. In order to do so it was necessary to pass an obligatory examination in Russian, and Father had not studied in school, he studied at home. Father did not learn Russian at school, since he did not attend it; he studied it at home with a teacher. They were rather well off, able to hire a melamed for him. The teacher taught him various subjects, and besides, he taught him all prayers properly. He was capable of learning, grasping things fast. He learned Russian and wrote correctly. I keep an album of my sister’s from when she was but a schoolgirl. Father wrote verses for her and put them down in her album himself.

As soon as my father moved to Saratov, he began to look for work at once. They found a place in a house next to a synagogue. There were two synagogues in town. One synagogue was big, with a dome and a magen david, all properly built. On the same site of land, leased from a bankrupt nobleman [Jews were not allowed to buy land], another two-storied house was built, and after internal restructuring the second floor accommodated another synagogue. There was one reformist synagogue for well-off people and an Orthodox one for others.

There was a small, two-storied wooden house near this synagogue, and it had a basement. So Father and Grandfather asked, ‘Can we have a store here?’ ‘Yes, you can.’ They wrote the ‘Grocery store’ sign-board themselves. Mother was both the manager and the salesperson. They started to trade little by little, before they could collect some capital. Gradually, with the increase of the turn-over, the store extended to two inter-connected apartments. In one apartment was the salesroom, and the warehouse was in the other. They sold mostly household commodities.

My parents moved to Saratov in 1898, before they had children. Both my sister and I were born in Saratov. I had two younger brothers, who died very young. There was a children’s scarlet fever epidemic, and they died at the age of five and one-and-a-half, respectively. My sister Sofia and I survived. She was born in 1905, was older than me, I was born in 1908.

When the store was ready, one apartment was turned into the sales premises, another into the warehouse, and we all lived in the third apartment, a basement. Then my aunt arrived, my mother’s half-sister from their mother’s second marriage. When she arrived in Saratov, she opened a workshop, with a sign-board, in the same house, on the ground floor. We actually lived in this apartment by then, not in the basement any more, but on the ground floor. But everything that indicated a living room was taken away during the day, when rich and even elite customers came.

My aunt took an active part in bringing up my sister and me. She lived with us for many years. Then she got married, left for Astrakhan, then returned to Saratov. She had another surname then, she became Schwarz.

There were eight apartments in our yard. The neighbors were Russian orthodox people. One of the apartments was occupied by the leader of the Union of Russian People, that is, the Black Hundred 4, he lived in our yard. And, when there was a pogrom in 1905 5, before my birth, two weeks after my sister Sonya was born, he said to his men in the yard, ‘Don’t touch these Judes [Jews],’ and left to plunder the town. This leader Vaska, as father called him, was a kind of protection for us. My grandfather came running to us, Grandmother remained at home, and he came to us because they mainly hunted for men. We tried to think of where to hide him, there were two sheds by the entry to our apartment, with cellars. He climbed down into the cellar, followed by my father and his brother, my uncle Michael.

Mother had a two-week-old daughter, Sonya. She did not know what to do, to go down to the cellar with the baby would have been difficult. She was thinking and thinking, and right then shouting was heard in the synagogue, which was in the next building. Many Jews wanted to hide in the synagogue, which had big cellars. Mother grabbed the two-week-old girl, some of her clothes and a bottle of baby food and decided to run towards the center.

The center was three short blocks away. We lived near the center, but the place was already considered a suburb. She ran and ran, and didn’t meet any policeman in the suburbs, where only poor Jewish people lived. Police mainly patrolled the central streets, guarding rich Jews, who calmly stayed there, although some of them were robbed as well. But the police were concentrated there. Mother ran, and there was not a single policeman, just deserted streets. She reached the central street, it was called German Street. She passed two more houses, until she came to a smaller street crossing – Groshovaya. She turned into that dark street, and soon came across an old woman. ‘Where are you running to?’‘Well, you know, we are in trouble down there.’ ‘Oh, you are Jewish, let’s go.’ And that Russian woman took her to her home. And the baby cried, needed swaddling. The woman even helped to change the diapers. And then the daughter of this old lady appears. ‘Mother, what have you done, brought a Jude home?! Kick her out immediately!’

Before World War I, there was the Russian-Japanese war. Father was of call-up age then. And he had to go to the recruitment office. The rules then were that Jews, and not only Jews, but Jews in particular, were to be called up, and in times of war they had to be drafted in the location where they had been registered as subject to the draft for the first time.

My father was born in Smolensk, completely by accident, because the family lived in Belarus all the time. When his mother was pregnant, she had to go to Smolensk, in Russia, from Belarus, to arrange a delivery of a grain consignment to Belarus. They traded in grain and other goods. Her husband could not go. So my grandmother went to Smolensk, found workers there, invited them to the warehouse, they loaded the grain, she paid them off, went to the post-office to send a telegram saying that the grain was being sent by railway, and suddenly felt, that it was time to give birth. There were private midwives in Smolensk. She went to one, and a day or two later gave birth to my father. She came home, and although he was born in Smolensk, his birth was registered in Mstislavl, to avoid any investigation as to why a Jewish woman had left to go somewhere.

And when my father was called up to the Russian-Japanese war and was summoned to the enlistment office, he said, ‘Why should I be drafted, I have just recently got married and brought my family here, what should I do?’ And they answered, ‘Find a substitute from among your relatives.’ The family council gathered, and his younger uncle Noi said, ‘I’ll go.’ He had not yet been called up for some reason. And the Russian-Japanese war began, and Noi was sent to the East and was besieged in some town. This town was blockaded for a long time and he died there like a hero and was awarded posthumously for his courage.

Back then medals and orders were sent to relatives. And because my father or grandfather had been registered as his closest relative, I cannot remember which precisely, the medal was brought to us. But, unfortunately, I showed it to one of my pals, our neighbor, a German boy. We were kids and were fighting street against street then, and he was older and promised me something for it, maybe a higher rank. For we also divided ourselves up into commanders and private soldiers. I was a private soldier. I was six years old, it was in 1914. He never gave that medal back to me.

The moment World War I started I was in the synagogue yard, we were playing. And suddenly the son of the synagogue servant, the shammash Kostya Levin, runs in with a newspaper in his hands and shouts: ‘War has broken out, war has broken out!’ Being a six-year-old boy, I could not understand, what war meant, who was fighting against who, etc. I ran with him to his apartment and to his father. The latter put on his glasses, started to read, Kostya helping him. ‘The Tsar’s manifesto. War has broken out.’

There was a big waste ground opposite our house, over the street. In a few days the recruits started to march there, because there was not enough space in the streets of the settlement. I took advantage of the situation and quickly learned all the intricacies of this square-bashing. Turn right, turn left, attention! – all this front-line service I mastered perfectly when I was seven. None of our relatives had been called up then. Jews were somehow not drafted then at all.

All Jews were divided into two groups in the town. One consisted of mainly prosperous Jews with their feet firmly on the ground – the Mistnagdim 6. It was the bigger Jewish group. The second, fewer in number, was called the Hasidim 7 in Yiddish and Khoseds in Russian. My father used to say with pride, that we were in this group – he called it ‘sect’ in Russian, Jews do not like the term. The rich men, as they were called, had everything well organized. They had chazzanim, singers, who sang during the service, and often acted as civil singers. And we, Hasidim, Father said, were a philosophical sect, and he was proud that in the 18th century and later many philosophers were born to this smaller section of the Jews.

Father frequently took me to the synagogue, or I just ran up to the second floor, where it was. Public worship is frequently interrupted by blessings. Everyone who bears the surname Kogan [Kogan is the Russian version of Cohen], steps forward, to where the Torah is, in a special big cabinet, the tabernacle. They turn to all of us, who are not Kogans, and bless us, even the Kogans, who had just reached the age of 13, that is, had just had their bar mitzvah. All the others stand, with their eyes closed or looking downwards, and the Kogans fold their arms like this: hold their arms above our heads, including the thirteen-year-old boys, they look at us, and we have no right to look at them. So they are holding their arms like this and reading the prayer of blessing. And even the 90-95-year-old men are standing with their heads bowed.

My father was a gabbai – a representative. The word gabbaim means the administration of a synagogue. My father and grandfather were elected to it. We occupied honorary seats in the synagogue, in the first row. All seats were bought out. Father had chosen a seat next to a window for himself, it was permanently his. The chair had a seat that could be lifted up, and it was possible to keep the tallit there. It could be locked, too.

There was one funny incident. Once I am sitting on Father’s chair, he’s standing nearby, and an old man – our neighbor Levit, a god-fearing old man, of whom I was very afraid because he was so strict – slapped me on the knee and said, ‘So, do you know, how they bless us?’ – it was right after the Kogans had blessed us. I said, ‘How? – Like this.’ – and I bent my head and closed my eyes. ‘But did you know, that if you look at them first, you will go blind? And if you look up a second time, you will die.’ I was really scared to death, and blinked at him. And he waited a little bit and said, ‘Shame on you, little boy, you didn’t even hear or understand what I said.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He answered, ‘How can you possibly look a second time if you go blind after the first? My grandson guessed it, but you are not so bright.’ I took great offence at him.

Father read prayers in the morning. He used to wrap a belt around his arm [Mr. Tseitlin refers to the tefillin], so tight, that he could hardly bend it and I read a prayer, too. We observed Sabbath, lit candles. Mother lit the furnace every Friday, made dinner for Saturday, because on Saturday one was not allowed to work. On Friday she baked challot in the Russian stove, and as my grandmother was already old, she baked challot for us and for her, too. Each time the challot were laid out in a certain order, a prayer was said, this was on Friday night, and on Saturday, too, and only after that were you allowed to eat this plaited white bread.

When I grew up a little bit, I used to go to Grandfather and Grandmother’s place, they lived nearby when they came to Saratov. I always took two or three challot to Grandfather and Grandmother. Even after the revolution, during the lean years, when famine  struck the Volga region and people were dying in the streets – I remember, it was in 1919-1921 – I still took two challot in a clean, ironed napkin to Grandmother, so that she, too, could read a prayer. [Editor’s note: The famine of 1920-1921 was mostly in Povolzhye and connected with disastrous lack of crop. This famine had nothing to do with the famine in Ukraine of 1931-1933, inspired deliberately by Stalin.]

I learned to read all by myself. I like to tell people how I learned to read. There was a big market place two blocks from our house. It was called the lower market, a big square with huge stock facilities, and a lot of trading from camp-beds. There were many shops, and all shops had signboards. Signboards were not typed then, but painted with oil paint on tin, with big letters. I used to ask, ‘What is this letter? And what is that letter? What is written here?’ ‘Krestovnikov Brothers, Kazan,’ ‘Soap and Candles.’ That’s how I got to know all letters. Another sign said: ‘Bread,’ and the name of the shopkeeper, the merchant. A drugstore, a bakery, and so on. I learned all letters and started to read little by little. I learned to read from signboards very fluently, understood how words were made. Then I went to the next street, Moskovskaya, also a central street, there were some stores there, too, with inscriptions in large letters.

I liked working very much, and my favorite toy was a hammer. I hammered in nails, small nails into the floor, or, after Grandfather brought me a log, I hammered nails into that. After I would drive in a nail, I would always say, ‘Nailed.’ All my family began to call me ‘Nailed.’ ‘Nailed, come here, mother is calling, stop knocking.’ That was my nickname.

Once I was sitting with Father in our store. There were no customers in. Father was reading a newspaper, I was playing with my hammer. I looked up and saw the name of the newspaper, ‘Mail,’ written in big letters, this newspaper was published in our town. Another newspaper was called ‘Kopeck,’ the cheapest one. And the third one was called ‘The Saratov News.’ I read all the titles aloud. Father put his newspaper aside, took off his glasses and said, ‘What did you say?’ I repeated: ‘It says: “Mail,” the one you just held, the other one is “Kopeck”.’ ‘How do you know? You what, learned to read?’ My father had no idea that I could read. ‘Did you learn to read?’ ‘Yes, I did.’ And I read another headline in the newspaper. And I had not yet turned six years old.

• Growing up

I was admitted to school. There was a Jewish school in the main street. It was founded by Jews. They rented a building, because Jews were not allowed to buy real estate. They made an agreement with the owner that the building would be completely refurbished inside. Thus, they had a school building in the main street. The Mitnagdim, the rich, wanted the school to be close to their houses, all of them lived in the main street. It was prestigious to live in the main street and to have your family signboard in it. I remember, when I walked there, I read: Mitsvakher, or some other Jewish surname. All of them were concentrated in one quarter.

Inside the rented building they made two classrooms out of one apartment, two out of another and there were one or two classrooms on the ground floor. So the Jewish school was organized. Teaching was in Russian, but sometimes in Yiddish, too. I went to that school, in the first grade. The teacher was surprised: ‘The smallest boy, and he can already read?’ I went to that school in 1917. I studied for two weeks and fell ill, I was very weak. I was admitted, but they were still studying letters, and I could read already, it did not interest me at all.

The following year the school was closed, it was after the February Revolution  and I went on to an ordinary Russian grammar school. [Editor’s note: The February Revolution was a democratic revolution in Russia in February of 1917, which led to the overthrow of autocracy: Tsar Nicholas II abdicated the crown. This specific revolution, not the October one, as many think, lifted the Jewish Pale of Settlement.] It was a private grammar school named after a teacher, Dobrovolsky.

Close to it was another school, the First Saratov grammar school, from which N. G. Chernyshevsky 8 had graduated in his time. I was going to enter that grammar school, the senior preparatory class. But I was ill for a very long time with various diseases. And I was too late for the entrance examinations because of my illness. Father agreed that I should be examined with those pupils who were lagging behind and failed to complete the previous grade. There were about 8-12 of them.

I went with my father, and it was a huge building with wide corridors, a rarity for those times. We went up to the teacher. ‘We received permission from the director of this grammar school for him to take the examinations.’ He said, ‘The first examination is mathematics, is he ready?’ Father said, ‘Yes, he is ready.’ ‘He will take it with a group of pupils who had bad marks in the subject.’ They showed me into a classroom. Father waited in the corridor. There were three teachers there, dressed in uniform with shining copper buttons, and dirks – that was the kind of uniform teachers wore then. And high-school students also had special uniforms. My parents bought me some inexpensive uniform – a cap, an overcoat, everything as it should be.

A teacher had stood up and written the conditions of a mathematical problem on the blackboard. In great detail. Then he ordered us to start solving it. I solved the problem straight off without any problems. While I was solving it, I heard a noise and looked back. It was our neighbor Volod’ka, a son of a christened Jew, who was baptized in order to finish the medical faculty of our Saratov Institute. Volod’ka had frequently beaten me, he was stout, three years older than me, and I was small. He usually bullied all Jewish boys, and frequently thrashed them hard. And suddenly this Volodka waves his arms at me, asking for a crib. And I had no idea what a crib was. I turned to him once or twice, but he was only moving his lips, trying to say something.

One of the teachers noticed and came up to me: ‘Why are you fidgeting?’ ‘It’s nothing.’ ‘You have to stand up when a teacher addresses you.’ I stood up, and the school desks had such folding tops, on hinges, and the folding part had fallen, when I stood up, with a big noise. He instructs me again: ‘You should hold the folder, you don’t have to make such a noise.’ At last I am standing up, and he says, ‘When an older person talks to you, it is necessary to turn to him.’ I turned to the man, already grown red from embarrassment, not knowing what he wanted from me. ‘So why did you fidget?’ I say, ‘I do not know.’ ‘And who will know?’ I thought: ‘Now he will expel me.’ At that moment he looked into my notebook: ‘What, are you finished?’ I answered, ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘All solved? Well, give it to me.’ And, without saying another word, he approached the other two teachers and showed them my paper. They were greatly surprised.

Nobody had completed the task yet, and here comes the green boy, small and shabby, and solves everything almost instantly. It turned out, as I learned later, that they admired the fact that I, having read the question, had decided at once what I needed in the end. The teacher noticed this. I still remember the maths problem today. The teacher came up to me, smiling for some reason. He approached me and took me by the shoulder: ‘Let’s go.’ I was frightened. How is this, all the guys sitting, and I must go somewhere. We went out of the classroom and behind the door were my father and a priest, who had come to wait for his son. Father rushed towards me at once, ‘What’s the matter? Were you confused?’ And the teacher slapped him on the shoulder, ‘Don’t worry, everything is all right, take your son home.’ And he shut the door.

Father continued to worry, because it was only me alone who had been let out. We decided to wait. One and a half hours, two hours – it seemed like ages to me. The priest took me by the hand and asked, ‘Listen, boy, was the problem the same for everyone?’ – ‘Yes.’ – ‘Was everyone solving it?’ – ‘Everyone.’ – ‘And, you were the first to accomplish it?’ – ‘Yes, I was the first, and the others are still working on it.’ ‘Can you tell me the problem?’ I told him. ‘And how did you solve it?’ I began to show him the solution to the problem right there on the window-sill. Father was standing nearby, he saw that I had solved it correctly, and clapped me on the shoulder: ‘Good fellow.’

We were standing and waiting for what seemed ages, but still the other guys had not finished. One of the teachers came out and Father asked him, ‘Shall we wait longer?’ – ‘No, everything is all right, you can go, and, by the way, he does not have to take the Russian exam.’ Father said, ‘How come, the day after tomorrow they are supposed to take a Russian examination?’ – ‘He’s fine; he has put down all commas and semicolons perfectly, exactly where necessary, don’t bring him.’ This was the way I entered grammar school.

The Dobrovolsky Russian private grammar school was a three-storied building. We were all the time competing with the First grammar school. Mainly Russian children studied there. Many Germans lived in Saratov. The Volga Republic was across the river. Two bridges were built over to the town of Engels, now it is a part of Saratov, but earlier it was Pokrovskaya village. [Before 1931 the town was named Pokrovsk and after that up to now it is called Engels]. Germans studied in our grammar school, too. We had a Singer, a Miller, etc.

During the famine in the Volga region it was hard to survive. It is enough to say that not only was bread short, but salt was, too, and it was miserable managing without salt. Salt was brought from Astrakhan, in sacks, it was dirty, and one had to dissolve it in water and pour the dirty water off, to purify it. АRА 9, the American mission to help the starving people in the Volga region, arrived in our grammar school. They brought aluminum bowls and spoons, which were an innovation to us. They had just become fashionable then, but were very costly, one kilo of aluminum cost 50 rubles in the beginning. At home we ate with metal spoons, some were of pure iron, some covered with nickel, and chromium plating superseded nickel plating.

The Americans provided us with very good food. Lenin had a meeting with the famous Jew Armand Hammer 10, who bought valuables and pictures. He bought artworks, sold by the Soviet government from the museums almost for nothing, and Lenin asked him to help. He asked, ‘What can I do?’ – ‘Can you organize a pencil plant?” – ‘Yes, I can.’ And a pencil plant was launched by Hammer.

I was very weak. I started off well in the first year, but then I fell ill. When I came to enter the second grade, I was interviewed, and I knew everything. I studied Sonya’s textbook at home while I was ill. Sometimes Sonya helped me, otherwise I did everything myself. Sonya went to the private girls’ grammar school owned by Mrs. Kufeld, who was a German, and very severe. Sonya completed this grammar school.

From the very beginning, I can say, I was the best pupil in the grammar school. In the class I enjoyed some authority, although I was very small. And I even earned my first kiss from a teacher. Teachers kissed me twice in my life. In the fourth grade we had a teacher called Lydia Vasilievna Maltseva. Her father was the head of the municipal council. He had planted the second Lipki, as we used to say. Lipki was a big garden in the city center, surrounded by a metal fence, near the theaters and the new cathedral. A huge and very beautiful garden, overlooking the Volga River. The father of our teacher had planted a second Lipki near our house: a whole street of chestnut trees. And she bragged about it.

She had been under pressure at times, she had no teacher training. She was hired through contacts, people said. She could teach all right in the first grade, in the second, too … but at the beginning of the fourth grade the problems began. She was not too good at geography, poor at natural sciences. There were subjects that she could hardly teach. She was an expert in German and French, but with other subjects she had problems. And I used to help her.

Once she came into the classroom, turned red in the face, because the director had summoned her and warned her that representatives from the town party committee were going to come and make a survey of our school. She was literally shaking. It was already in Soviet times. Suddenly three men came in, and you could tell at once that they were not very competent at science. ‘Can we attend your lesson?’ What could she do, who to call to the blackboard? Tseitlin, of course. She asked me, first in geography, what continents I knew, what islands, and what an island was, what peninsulas I knew, which peninsulas were in Asia, America, Africa. I promptly answered, I loved geography very much. She was sure I would answer all questions. The teachers kissed me as a sign of appreciation, as I rescued them with the help of my knowledge in front of the inspectors.

By the end of school I had developed a certain inclination for linguistics. I planned to enter the literature department of the teacher training faculty of Saratov University. I completed the school – it was not called grammar school any more. Grammar schools were done away with in 1918. It became an ordinary Soviet school. I ended the ninth grade in 1926, that was the last grade then. I wrote my composition perfectly well. There was no ‘excellent’ mark then, only ‘good,’ ‘satisfactory’ and ‘not satisfactory.’ This was introduced by the Bolsheviks 11, they thought it was quite enough.

I started to take examinations to enter Saratov University, when one of my friends told me, ‘You will be a poor teacher, getting only 75 rubles a month. And I will graduate from technical school – 125 rubles right away, as a junior technician, and as a senior – up to 200-225. You see the difference?’ Eventually, I entered and started to successfully study at the Construction Engineering College. I happened to listen to A. V. Lunacharsky's lectures and communicate with him. [A. V. Lunacharsky (1875-1933): - a political and public figure, a writer and the first Soviet people’s commissar of education.] But even during that period I attended literary circles.

After the revolution we didn’t live well, although we had enough food, otherwise it was not a grand-style life. And the family, especially Father, had been used to living well. In fact, he grew up in a wealthy family. Because people were starving and food was distributed by ration cards, literate people, who could count well, were in demand. Cards were marked for a quarter pound, half a pound, one pound and so on. So Father was appointed a superintendent in the bureau for distribution of food and other products. Cards were typed on whatever paper was at hand, because of the lack of good paper. For example, big sheets of labels had been prepared, say, for sweets, and the sweets came to an end, but the paper remained. And cards were typed on the reverse side of these labels.

Father was the superintendent of this bureau for two or three years. Later, in the days of the NEP 12, he became the manager of a cooperative shop, organized by Jews. It is interesting that the name of this cooperative society was Jewish, but in Russian letters. It was called ‘Mitsva,’ which means ‘a gift.’ Father was the manager of this shop for several years. First they got permission to open some old shop deserted a long time ago, did it up and traded there. And the members of that cooperative society, all of them Jewish, received a discount any time they purchased anything; the total sum was counted and then 2 percent was deducted, just a little bit cheaper. He ordered all necessary products and goods, and sold them himself. For a period there were two more salesmen, also Jews.

Once Father had been sent to the Tambov region, to act as a storekeeper during the construction of a grain elevator. At that time the well-known Antonov gang was active in the Tambov region. [A. S. Antonov (1888-1922), member of the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, leader of the peasant’s rebellion against Bolshevik power in Tambov and Voronezh region in 1922.]

Later Father was a cashier at the Saratov boiler factory. It was in the 1930s. He paid out wages to workers, brought money from the bank, issued bonds. He died in 1939 in Saratov. His funeral was attended by the entire factory. We lived in the same street as the boiler factory. And the funeral procession went past the factory and on to the cemetery, the cemetery was just right ahead. And when people were passing the factory, someone there decided to blow the factory hooter, and all the workers were asked to come out and bid farewell to Efim Yakovlevich. He was buried with honors.

I went to Saratov in 1979 to bury his daughter, my sister Sonya. I did not find his tomb. During the war Saratov was bombed by the Germans and two or three bombs fell on the Jewish cemetery. I searched there for the graves of my mother and father, but to no avail. I found two or three holes, and some destroyed tombstones down there.

Father was not a communist in Soviet times and Mother did not enter the Communist Party either. Mother survived the war, and she was very active both during and after it. In spite of lack of education, she could read Russian texts perfectly and quickly, and throughout the war she was a propagandist, every evening she read the newspapers aloud to neighbors who came out on the porch. She used to put on her glasses and read the Soviet Information Bureau reports to a dozen people sitting in a circle under a big shed that protected them in rainy weather.

My sister Sonya’s fate wasn’t a very happy one. She did not get married, although there were suitors. She lived with our mother, unwilling to leave her. She worked as a teacher at school, teaching Russian. Then she was a teacher of Russian language and literature in the Library College. She liked her job very much, sitting late in the evenings checking the homework of her students. She never went out anywhere.

Teaching in the Library College, she made friends with a librarian who also worked there. They were such close friends that when the woman became fatally ill, she made Mother promise that Sonya would marry her husband when she dies. And Mother was as good as her word. They officially registered, but in fact did not live together, he lived in one room and she in another. He told everybody that she was his wife, but actually this was not true. Sonya died in 1979. She was buried in Saratov.

I completed the Construction Engineering College in 1931. There were two departments: civil construction and highway engineering. Later a hydraulic engineering department was organized, which I entered. All of us graduated as construction engineers, in other words we became foremen in charge of construction.

When I entered the college, it was a three-year school, admitting people with secondary education, after completing nine or seven years of secondary school. I was the only one to have come after the ninth grade, so I lost two years, but it was easy for me to study general subjects in the technical school. I did almost nothing, I knew everything pretty well. And I was not bad at special construction disciplines, either.

It is enough to say that we published the lectures of one of our professors and my abstract of lectures was used as the basis for this brochure, lectures on hydraulics. It was the most difficult subject for my comrades. The professor’s surname was on the cover, with mine below it, saying that the publication was based upon abstracts by Tseitlin, a student of the technical school. I copied and printed all the materials. The circulation was very small, only 50 or 75 copies, just for the students and for the library of the technical school. It was the first of its sort in school.

When I was a first-year student, I negotiated work in the Ryazan Regional Land Administration. I was also offered trips to the Far East and Far North, with very good grants. But I was advised against going there, due to my poor health and I went to the Ryazan region and worked there for a few years. I had to build a water pipeline from the farmyards to the water tower and from the farmyards to a pond in a manor that had once belonged to the builder of the Moscow-Ryazan railway, von Mekk. There was a peasant saying [This was not a rumor or a saying – they really said so]: ‘There was a water pipeline here, made of wood; and the master who drilled these pipes out of logs is still alive, and the pipeline worked all right, only it delivered mash to a vodka distillery rather than water.’

I became interested, found this old timer Stepan, who drilled wood pipes [metal pipes were difficult to get then]. With the agreement of the state farm I went to Moscow to see Professor Gineev, the author of a textbook on water supplies. He says, ‘Please, find out how they did it and what drills they used.’ It appeared the drills were all hand-made by the smith. When this Stepan came to me, he said, ‘Grandfather and I did it in 1908-1909. See this stone barn, measure out two sazhens [Sazhen is a Russian measure of length, equal to 7 feet, i.e., 2,13 m] from it and dig, you will find a pipe.’ We dug and we eventually found that pipe. We wanted to see how it had survived so many years. We struck it with an axe, and the axe rebounded off it as if from metal – this was how alcoholized it had become from transporting mash to the vodka factory. It didn’t decay in the least.

I wrote about it to Professor Nikolay Nikolaevich Gineev, and I was hired right away as a scientific employee at their institute. I went there several times for consultations and they came to me as well to look and to take photographs. Finally I built that water pipeline, not completely though, because I was summoned to Moscow by Professor Gineev, who appointed me as a scientific researcher and even issued a license to order foreign literature worth 10 gold rubles every year. I received some books from Germany for that money.

So I worked a few years in Ryazan as a trainee, in the second, third and fourth years of technical school, and then after graduation. Inspectors from the Moscow Land Administration came to survey my work, and finally I was employed by the design organization of a construction trust, Mosmeliostroi – a state company dealing with meliorative hydraulic engineering. I began to work in Moscow and was promoted very fast. I was soon elected a member of the Employees Board, and then its vice-president.

I got married in 1936. My wife, Fanny Mikhailovna Epstein, was a member of the Employees Board too. I became acquainted with her on March 3, 1933. She came to my office and said, ‘I was advised to approach you. You are a member of the Employees Board, so will you please sign here to confirm that you do not object to hiring this new employee.’ She worked at ‘The Sickle and Hammer’ factory as a secretary to the head of the trade-union organization. She worked at the ‘The Sickle and Hammer’ factory before she came to work in our organization.

My wife came to Moscow from Simferopol where she lived and studied and completed grammar school. Then she finished a music school and moved to Moscow hoping to enter the conservatory, she played piano. They had a piano at home, so she had a lot of practice. Her parents were religious people and observed all traditions at home. However, after her arrival in Moscow she lost all her religious upbringing. As a matter of fact, it was almost impossible for a young person at that time, especially in a big city, working or studying in a public institution – and there were no other – to remain religious. This concerned not only Jews, but people of other religions as well. It was simply not safe. A religious wedding was absolutely out of the question. In 1938 our daughter Stella was born.

In the late 1930s, my life took a sharp turn in a new direction in which, as it happened, I have been moving ever since. I came across a newspaper article saying that the first Municipal House of Pioneers had opened in Moscow, and it also said what circles were organized and what specialists were invited to work with children. It looked interesting to me and I organized an architectural studio there, and a construction laboratory, which subsequently trained a lot of well-known specialists. Simultaneously, I was a correspondence student at the Timiryazyev Academy, the famous Agricultural Academy in Moscow, named after K. A. Timiryazyev [(1843-1920), an important Russian scientist naturalist]. I passed my last examination on June 20, 1941. I only had to defend my diploma. And suddenly the war broke out 13.

• During the war

When the war with Germany began, I worked as the head of the science and technology department of the Moscow Municipal House of Pioneers. I learned about the outbreak of the war from a radio broadcast of the speech by V. М. Molotov 14. ‘Hitlerite Germany has unilaterally broken the agreement with the Soviet Union, and without a declaration of war has started military aggression on a broad front line from the southern to the northern part of our boundary line.’

I hurried to work and when the entire collective had gathered we had a meeting. I warned the director that I was prepared to apply as a volunteer to the army. After the meeting we dismissed all the kids, and on the next working day, which was Tuesday, I came to work with a filled in enlistment form and handed it over to the secretary of the party organization. She said, ‘I did not expect that you would be the first.’ I was not subject to the draft. I still hold a passport from that period, which states, ‘Not subject to the draft, has not undergone any military training,’ right under my surname. It was because I was born with a very serious disease, I had heart problems.

I learned that all 27 men, who worked in our department, had filled out similar forms, and we were enlisted in a squad of the National Guard. On July 2 I received a message saying that I should go to school no. 313 15, close to our House of Pioneers. I came with an ordinary sack, because I did not have any military kit-bag. Just a sack, with things packed by my wife. We were lodged in that school, desks were removed and beds installed, and some guys were sleeping on the floor.

Our military training began. We were endlessly marching in the schoolyard, engaged in square-bashing. We spent the nights there, too, using our sacks as pillows. On July 9 we were raised by an alarm, when we were already asleep, given our military uniforms and ordered to fall in. We went out, we were counted, because some people had earlier received a compensatory holiday to visit relatives. Almost all 27 men were there. A truck drove into the yard, we got in, not knowing where we were going. On the outskirts of Moscow we got off and went to a bathhouse, washed ourselves, changed our clothes into military uniforms, returned to school and put all our civilian clothes and shoes into kit-bags.

The next day our column was bombed. We went by truck to Bryansk. On the way we passed through Kulikovo Field. I remember that the Germans had just bombed the road ahead of us. Then we rode another 150-180 kilometers by bus. We stopped close to the front and walked in a column further on. On the road we were given rifles and 5 cartridges each and were told that it was ‘for the time being.’ This ‘for the time being’ lasted for quite a long while. We had already reached the front line, and we still had only 5 cartridges per person. And there was a strict routine: a daily check-up of the state of the ammunition. And every morning everyone had to show his 5 cartridges and the rifle, and the first sergeant went around and inspected.

I remember well that it was the village of Mitino, 7 kilometers from the town of Gzhatsk [subsequently named after the first cosmonaut Gagarin], where we first met the Germans. We entered Mitino late at night. When we approached, the Germans opened fire. I did not see or hear if anyone was wounded or cried out. The day before, we were sent a commander for the platoon, a young boy, in a clean and completely new uniform; he didn’t even have a revolver, not even those 5 cartridges or a rifle. So he broke a branch from a tree as a weapon. This first skirmish I remember very well. We spent two hours there. I remember a haystack burning. Afterwards we retreated for several days. We retreated trying to hold out. The Germans approached, firing in a disorderly manner.

We fell back to the Moscow region. We entered Volokolamsk, a big regional center in the west of this region, under bombardment. At that moment a bread truck came into town. We approached it: ‘Give us some bread.’ ‘No.’ One of our soldiers jumped into the truck without asking, grabbed a loaf of bread, and was hit by a bottle. He literally howled and threw away the loaf. They had bread, but they wouldn’t give us any, they were to deliver it to their own unit.

So we drew off to Moscow, until the well-known order was issued: ‘Not a single step back. Moscow is behind us.’

I found two of my friends at the station of Golitsyno, a railroad station to the west of Moscow. The forces were retreating to the east to Moscow. One of them was Farid Yarullin, the Tatar composer, known throughout the Soviet Union as the author of the ballet ‘Shurale.’ [Editor’s note: Born in 1914, Yarullin was killed in action in 1943.]

During one of the numerous shelling, which we suffered, I was hit by several bullets, luckily my jacket was unbuttoned, and the bullets went through it, not hitting my three hand grenades. The thing is that while we were retreating, if I found rifle cartridges or grenades, I picked them up. I had 24 cartridges in my pockets. I thought that there was no point in surrendering, that if I was captured by the Germans, they would immediately recognize a Jew, and would inevitably shoot me, so I would rather fight back. And I filled two pockets with ammunition.

One bullet entered my leg. I was thinking to myself, ‘What shall I do, I am bleeding, there are a lot of blood vessels here.’ As I had puttees on my feet, they bothered me a lot. And Yarullin was nearby, and I told him, ‘Take this just in case.’ I gave him one grenade. I went on, walking was difficult, I clamped the wound and felt blood. But I could still walk. I went in the opposite direction and turned to that section of the woods, which we had recently left. I went out to the edge of the forest, and, without meeting anybody, reached our unit and got into the medical and sanitary battalion.

The wound healed, but I developed boils on both legs, first on the lower legs, but then higher and higher until my entire legs were covered with abscesses all over. Probably, the reason was that I had to sleep on bare ground for many nights; in fact we only had light jackets, and there weren’t even overcoats. The doctor came, and I asked, ‘What shall I do?’ ‘And what can one do? In such cases it is necessary to eat garlic, and to apply special ointment, and I have no ointments with me.’ So the female doctor replied, which she accompanied with helpless shrugs. When I came to the hospital for bandaging, they asked, ‘What happened to you?’ and I said, ‘It is what you earn at the front nowadays.’ It would have helped if they had anointed the skin with something, but there were no liniments available in the hospital. That is why I was kept in the hospital for a long time.

This was at the beginning of 1942. When I was sent to the group of recovering patients, I was appointed commander of a unit of hospital attendants. And we, though it was hard, carried the wounded, took them from the trains that came from the front, helped them to get into buses and streetcars. Streetcars worked round the clock. It was in Moscow; I was assigned there. We went at nights, mainly to the Kazan passenger depot, sometimes to the Leningrad terminal. We were shelled several times.

By that time I was already a sergeant. We were put on trains and we went to the front. It was the spring of 1942, the snow had already started to melt. My legs had almost healed, but the scabs remained. So I found myself in the 22nd shooting division, then the 82nd Red Banner Division. It fought in the central front, and I spent most of the war in this area, the Smolensk region. We liberated the Smolensk region. In September we liberated Smolensk. I remember very clearly how we passed through Smolensk at night. Explosions everywhere. The Germans mined many buildings in Smolensk and while we were going through Smolensk, we heard endless explosions.

We moved farther and farther to the west. We reached Belarus. Our division was concentrated in the so-called Red Pine Forest. Its southern part was our last outpost to advance to Belarus. It was already the end of September. Our regiment advanced even earlier, approaching the spot where Yarullin was later wounded. The relief was as follows: a narrow strip of land extended 17-20 kilometers, the Dnieper River flowing west from the left, and some huge marshes on the right.

Once a commander called me, and ordered me to take documents to the opposite side of the Dnieper River, and I went at night on a ferry, accompanied by our signalman. This ferry consisted of 4-5 logs up against each other. You sat on top squatting, or with your legs down in the water so that the Germans, whose planes flew around and regularly bombed, could not see us. We crossed the river, I received a folder with papers for the chief of staff and we needed to go back. The signalman, who was with me, remained on the other side. And I had to get back alone. He had canvas mittens, and I had none.

I should have asked the commander to send somebody else with me, but I didn’t. I went there and had to ferry over by myself. In the middle of the river I had a lot of trouble throwing the braid through the connected ropes. And the ropes were not only tied together, but for strength they were wrapped round in several places with a telephone cable, and the loose ends stuck out everywhere. I could not do the job at all, my legs almost froze in the water. I vaguely remember how I reached the bank.

When I was on the bank, I could hardly make out what the guards were asking me about. I had no right to give the documents to anyone except for the chief of staff. I asked, ‘Where is Major this and that?’ ‘He is here in the blindage [ dugout] you can see him.’ They showed me to the blindage, and suddenly everyone shouted, ‘Air, air!’ I was on my way to this blindage where the chief of reconnaissance and the chief of staff were sitting. Everyone hails me, ‘Down! Down!’ It was an open spot. I came back.

Near the crossing someone had started to dig a trench, but then there was nobody there, only a spade. I started to dig a hole, when a raid began. I am standing near this pit and see an airplane making a circle and starting to dive. While it’s diving, I am looking at it, and it turns directly to where I am. And suddenly I see a black pinpoint falling from it, and I realize it is a bomb, and it flies at me. I jumped in the pit.

This was my second wound, and there were more contusions later. We failed to break through the German defense then, they held onto that spot for a few more months. We burst through in another direction only the following year, the Germans had been compelled to retreat, threatened by encirclement.

Our division was awarded the order of Kutuzov, it is normally an order given to military leaders, military units are rarely granted this award. We tore off of the enemy defenses and went to the rear for reinforcements, and fresh forces entered in our stead. Then we broke through in another location. We liberated the Belovezhskaya Puscha [also known as Bialowieza Forest, a national park in Belarus and Poland, a UNESCO World Heritage Site]. I walked through it two times, a very good place, and I saw live bisons. There is a museum in Belovezhskaya Puscha, which I visited. The Germans did not touch it.

I went to Nicholas II’s small hunting lodge, I was even in his apartments, I passed through all the rooms of this two-storied building. On the second floor were the apartments of the tsar and his court, and the servants lived downstairs. When I was on the second floor, one of the attendants told me, ‘These are Nicholas’s private rooms, and this is his lavatory.’ Upon which I said, ‘I will take advantage of this lavatory.’ And I used that imperial lavatory.

Let me also tell you about my correspondence with the writer Ilya Ehrenburg 16. For some time at the front I was in charge of informing soldiers of political issues. Many of my brothers-in-arms liked bright journalistic articles, including those by Erenburg. They frequently asked me to re-read them, so once I decided to write to the well-known author. Imagine my surprise when on June 7, 1943 the field post-office brought me an answer from the writer and his book ‘Exasperation’ with a dedicative inscription. Needless to say, the letter and the book became very popular among our scouts.

We fought both at the Baltic front, and at the First Belarus front. We were endlessly transferred from place to place, without a chance for a rest. After a week or two for reinforcements, we were again ordered to tear at the enemy defense. At the end of the war we entered Berlin. We finished the war on the Elba, where we met American troops. I finished the war as a sergeant. In 1944, at the front, I joined the Communist Party. I was demobilized in November 1945.

• After the war

Having returned home, I, without a day for rest, went to the place where I had worked before the war. I was received with open arms, and I immediately resumed my favorite job. Gradually I became not simply a teacher in circles, but also a propagandist of manual labor at secondary schools. At that time I supervised the department of science and technology in the Moscow Municipal House of Pioneers, directed the club of young craftsmen, I was the initiator of the first ‘Skilful hands’ hobby groups in this country, for which I created the program and the first methodical recommendations.

At the end of the 1940s, the campaign against the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ 17 – i.e. Jews working mainly in science, art and culture – was launched in the country, and finally in January 1953 the Doctors’ Plot 18 was fabricated. Though, thank God, our family was not affected by the repressions – neither those of the 1930s [the interviewee is referring to the so-called Great Terror] 19, nor the post-war ones.

I was nevertheless summoned to the authorities and suggested to remove my last name from the list of the compilers of the professional collections. Thus, in books or articles, beside my last name – and sometimes instead of it – much more favorable last names would appear. Apart from the moral harm, this caused a material one as well: I did not get the author’s fee. Of course we were ‘short-sighted’ then and did not link all the negative things going on in the country with the name of Stalin. Stalin’s death in 1953 was a national tragedy, and all my family members were questioning themselves in terror: ‘What will happen now to all the country and to us, Jews?’

From 1954 I worked as a scientific employee in the research institute of general and polytechnic education at the Academy of Teaching Sciences, and from 1962 until retirement I worked in the Moscow State Teaching Institute as senior lecturer.

With co-authors I have published more than 100 works devoted to methodological issues, including more than 20 monographs. I wrote many articles. Some books had more than ten publications, have been translated into the languages of the peoples of the USSR, and were even issued in some countries of the then National Democracy [countries of Eastern Europe: Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Eastern Germany, which together with the USSR formed the Warsaw Treaty countries] under the patronage of UNESCO. Copyrights didn’t exist in the USSR then, and I got nothing for the translated books. Only for my first monograph, published in Russian in 1948, I was paid quite a good fee, and we could buy furniture for our apartment and clothes after the war, because, in fact, I returned from the war without a thing.

Apart from my main work, I had been involved in a lot of public activities: I was a member of the Scientific and Methodical Council of the Ministry of Public Education of the USSR, an associate editor of the journal ‘Elementary School,’ a member of the Academic Council of the Institute of Polytechnical Labor Education, the vice-president of Council of Veterans of the 82nd Yartsevo division. I keep a file of names and addresses of the surviving veterans at home.

I was always very enthusiastic about my job and social activities, and I was never in opposition to the system. When at the beginning of the 1970s the process of emigration to Israel started, we never censured those people leaving, but for our family it was out of the question.

I retired only after the second heart attack, a little more than 20 years ago. But I only abstain from paid jobs, and go on with my public activities. I continued working with the veterans until I left Moscow. In 1998, after my wife died, I moved from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, where I live now with the family of my daughter Stella. She is a doctor of sciences, professor, the head of a department at the Teaching University, so teaching continues in our family.

• Glossary:

Maria Mordukhovna Lipovskaya is a short, gray-haired elderly woman. She is wearing loose clothes – dressing gowns, warm jackets – and a head kerchief.
Maria Mordukhovna walks leaning on a walking stick. She lives in a small room of a two-room apartment, which she shares with her daughter and son-in-law.

Her room is very clean and orderly; everything is in its right place. A big ottoman is covered with a beautiful motley blanket;
photos of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren are standing on her bedside table and hanging on the wall above her bed.

At the foot of the bed there is an enormous antique sunduk [chest] where young Maria’s attires were kept a long time ago.
An old writing-table is standing by the window: medicines are kept on it, and old photos
and documents of Maria Mordukhovna and her relatives inside its drawers.

At the age of 93, she still takes a keen interest in world events, watching news,
reading papers and magazines and sharing her impressions on all that with her children, grandchildren and acquaintances.
She has a strong, clear voice and her speech is vivid and emotional. She carries away her audience with her stories.
Many events of her life and the life of her relatives are preserved in her memory.

She is very open and sincere in her reasoning and evaluations.
Maria is capable of displaying her feelings which makes her story all the more interesting.

My family history

My childhood in Belarus

Life during the Soviet Power

My school years

Observance of Jewish traditions and holidays

Studying in Leningrad

My first marriage

Evacuation during the Great Patriotic War

Returning to Leningrad

My second marriage and raising my children

Anti-Semitism in the 1950s

Life after perestroika

Glossary

My family history

I believe my family settled down in Belarus a very long time ago. I know nothing about my great-grandparents, but I know a little about my grandparents both on my mother and father’s side. My paternal grandfather’s name was Girsha Lipovski; unfortunately, I don’t know the name of his wife, my paternal grandmother. I only know that she was a very kind person, while my grandfather’s character was somewhat worse.
My maternal grandfather’s first name was Meer; as for my maternal grandmother, I don’t know anything about her. They both died at an early age – Grandfather Meer died of liver insufficiency, the reason of my maternal grandmother’s death I don’t know. My mother became an orphan at the age of 15.

My father’s name was Mordukh Girshevich Lipovski. I don’t know the exact date of his birth. Father was very good-looking, even handsome; he wore a small beard. He wore secular clothes. I don’t remember if my father wore a kippah. But I remember that he had a tallit. Everybody in the village respected my father. He was noble and delicate. He was very kind and polite, kind of intellectual. I show some resemblance to him. I think he was even naïve, but clever. He liked to joke. He and his brother Isroel had two turpentine plants – one 6 kilometers away from the town of Bykhov [a town in the eastern part of Belarus, on the Dnepr river], the other one 4 kilometers away from the village of Sledyuki.

My father had three brothers and one sister. His brothers’ names were Isaac, Isroel and Shender; his sister’s name was Seina or Sonya. Shender left for America yet before the [October] Revolution 1, but I don’t know the year exactly. His brother Isroel, the co-owner of the turpentine plants, didn’t work very much, he often complained about feeling unwell. Therefore his son Lev worked at the plants together with my father and his brother Isaac, who was called Iche at home.

Father pitied poor workers and always paid them more than had been agreed. His brother Isroel sometimes scolded him, ‘You will have no money, you give away everything! You have four girls. Who will marry them without dowry?!’ And Father would reply, ‘I have good girls. My girls will be all snatched away without any dowry.’ And so it happened: all of us were ‘snatched away’ without any money.
My father and his brothers Isaac and Isroel had inherited a house in Bykhov. The house was very big: my father and his two brothers had two rooms each.

My father’s sister Seina was married to Kalman Ginsburg, a joiner. They were very poor. They had 12 children. All their children were very gifted; they were able to educate themselves in any field they wanted. So they educated themselves to be bookkeepers, tailors… Their whole family was very fond of music. Each of them played some musical instrument or sang. They had no money to buy the instruments. My father brought them some instruments sometimes or gave them as presents for holidays. My father loved children and he tried to ‘catch up’ with his sister in this respect.

Long before the [October] Revolution, father was a soldier. He served in the Tsar’s Army. At the times of Nikolai II, Jews were recruited to the army, if there was more than one son in the family. Though, to tell the truth, a Jew was not entrusted with a rifle – they thought that a Jew could not shoot. He was a cook; he cooked food for the soldiers. He worked with civilian peasant men. Nevertheless, my father learned to fire. But he wasn’t at any war, I believe.

My mother’s name was Tsire Meerovna Lipovskaya. I don’t remember her maiden name. She was born in Rogachev, a town not far from Bykhov, in the 1870s. My mother became an orphan at the age of 15. After the death of her parents, she lived in her brother Ariveliul’s house. Her brother married a rich woman; she was the daughter of a timber merchant, but I don’t remember her name. Mother’s brother and his wife treated her well, but made her work a lot. Mother got used to working so hard that sometimes she saw it in her dream that she was working, so she rose without waking up really, and tried to carry firewood or do something else in her sleep. My mother was a housewife. She kept the house and brought up children.

My mother had three brothers: Ariveliul, Nokhem and an elder brother, whose name I don’t remember. She also had a sister, Rosa, whom she loved very much. Rosa died in circa 1910, when I was born already. Rosa died at a young age, leaving behind four kids: Boris, Sarah, Gnesya and Basya. My mother grieved for her so much that she lost the use of her right hand. Then my father’s friend, the village doctor Ratner, prescribed her drinking five liters of milk daily. And owing to this milk, my mother got well soon.

My parents got to know each other with the help of the Jewish community. They married in a synagogue, of course – it happened long before the [October] Revolution, and synagogues were still operating then.
My parents had five children: my elder sister Basya, Jewish name: Berta, brother Lev, Jewish name: Leibe, later on I was born – Maria, Jewish name: Mirra, then my sisters Zinaida, Jewish name: Zysya, and Rosa, Jewish name: Reizel. So I was born in 1910 in the village of Sledyuki, Bykhovsky district of Mogilev province [eastern part of Belarus], into the family of a merchant of the Guild I 2.

My childhood in Belarus

Our village was 12 kilometers away from Bykhov. We had a big house in the village – there were five rooms in it. The water was taken from a well, and the house was lit with kerosene lamps. We had an icehouse in our village house. When I and my sisters and brother grew up a little, we made ice cream ourselves. The house was heated with stoves, some of which had stove-benches, and some resembled German fireplaces.
We had a vegetable garden near the house. We also kept cattle: two cows and a few calves. We kept the whole household ourselves; we had no servants.
It was very nice in the village of Sledyuki. Father and I would often go to Bykhov in a cart or riding a horse. The road to town was a good one – a surfaced road. We would pass very beautiful places. There were so many berries there! Sometimes when we were riding to his plant, Father would take me to a glade rich with berries and leave me there for a couple of hours. I would eat berries to my fill and gather them in something. When Father came back, we would eat them together. The air was very fresh and pleasant. We had a very nice horse. I remember horseflies twining around her and her brushing them off with her tail.
As a child, I often played with my cousin who was the same age as me. Near our house in the town we had a ‘zavalinka’ [mound of earth round a Russian peasant house used for sitting out, and in former times – also as protection from weather] and a hillock of sand. We would play in this sand, making different ‘food’ from it.
We, children, were showered with love. Our parents loved us very much. They taught us to labor. And the most important was that we were polite and good to people. And if someone did us good, we always thanked them.

Mother always worked a lot. My sister Rosa loved her very much. Rosa always told her how she would be building bridges when she would grow up. My sister Rosa was named after Mom’s sister. Mother was a kind person, but we, children, thought that our father was a little more kind. My parents had friends, of course, but I remember them very poorly.
Father often went to Mogilev, sent wagons of turpentine for sale and brought Jewish sausage, challah and different presents from there. He gave mother shawls, material for dresses. I will never forget how tasty that Jewish sausage and challah was! We even did not sleep at night, waiting for Father to come from Mogilev. It was a holiday for us. Father bought almost everything himself. Mother hardly ever left the village, only on major Jewish holidays. She took care of the children and household.

Our parents strived to give us education. They had almost no education themselves. Father could write, and Mother could only sign: she was an orphan, nobody taught her.
When I turned seven or eight years old, I went to school in Bykhov, the first preparatory grade. This happened at the same time as the October Revolution.

My parents took me to Bykhov, to our family house. All the children of my father’s brother Isroel lived there: Ruvim, Naum, Lev, Iasi, Efim, Grigory. The two rooms that belonged to my father were occupied by me, my sister Berta, my brother Lev, and there was also my sister Berta’s friend living with us – Nadezhda Senkevich. Her mother was Russian and her father was Polish.

Mother and Father stayed in the village. Father came to visit us in Bykhov once or twice a week, and Mother remained in the village with our younger sisters, Zinaida and Rosa; she could not leave the household. During all the time we studied we lived in Bykhov, we only went to the village for holidays. We had a garden around our house in the town with all kinds of fruit trees – pears, apples…

When we lived in Bykhov, there was a whole library in Uncle Isaac’s room. There were secular books in Russian and Yiddish. I would get absorbed in reading. I liked books by Pisemsky [Aleksey (1821-1881): a famous Russian novelist and dramatist] very much. But I don’t know if my uncle read those books.

In the village, we had everything we needed. Father laid in a lot of stores of provisions, so we did not go to the market very often in Bykhov. When we stayed alone in our town house, it was our elder sister Berta who would go to the market and store. Father agreed about it with the butcher that he would give us meat, and later he came from the village and paid the butcher. All the food was kosher. We were given all the products we needed on credit. Father came to visit us once or twice a week. When he came, he would cook food. Father worried about us very much.
The air in Bykhov was fresh. There were few cars. The houses were one-storied, some were two-storied. There were gardens around some houses.
There was a synagogue in Bykhov. My parents went to the synagogue on high Jewish holidays like Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Chanukkah and Pesach. I would also go there with my mother to pray. There was a men’s section and a women’s section in the synagogue.

In Bykhov, Jews lived in the main streets. Well, there was also Bannaya Street: there was a banya 3 where the Jewish community was situated. I cannot remember how many Jewish families lived in the town at that time. The poorest Jews lived in this street. Our home was near the market, in the main street, where prosperous Jews lived.

In Belarus, Jews were generally engaged in buying-and-selling. You could also come across Jewish beggars. They would go beg around the houses. They were swearing like hell. If someone did not give them alms, they swore terribly. At seeing a beggar, mother would immediately take some bread and ask us to carry it to that person. Mother could not stand swearing. We [children] were never scolded.
We did not face anti-Semitism then. Mother said that anti-Semitism existed in Ukraine, but in the village and in Bykhov we didn’t feel it.

Life during the Soviet Power

When the Soviet power came, my father was deprived of his right to vote. He became a ‘lyshenetz’ [‘deprived’: lyshentzy are those who were disfranchised and incapacitated from their civil rights, in particular, when entering higher and secondary educational institutions.] The local authorities also wanted to deport my father from the village together with the whole family, but the whole village rose to protect him. Fellow villagers went to the ‘selsovet’ [village council: the primary organ of the Soviet power in the villages], and representatives of the ‘selsovet’ went to Bykhov to tell the authorities that Father and all his relatives worked themselves every day, that they had no farm-laborers or workers.

Father gave peasants an opportunity to earn some money – he ordered to carry stumps of wood, which were used for producing turpentine. Volunteer peasants took orders and brought as many stumps as they could, and he paid them for this. Father was a specialist and not just an owner of a business. He controlled the technological process himself. We had only one hired worker at the plant – a watchman.

After the October Revolution of 1917 father was deprived of his plants. Father remained a chief engineer at one plant. There were several turpentine plants in Belarus, but Father had the best ones. They supplied these goods to Mogilev and Mogilev region, and from there it was supplied further – to Moscow, Leningrad. After the [October] Revolution, a former shoemaker became the director of the plant. We had ordered shoes from him before the Revolution, had given him the opportunity to earn money. When the shoemaker became the director, he sometimes mocked at my father being so mild, delicate and polite. Father got very upset because of his boorishness.

After the [October] Revolution, in the lean years, when I was already a kid, we saw people starving. Father would come home, cut half a loaf of bread and carry it to the starving. He would tell Mother, ‘You have half the loaf left, and tomorrow you bake skovorodniki. I will bring you flour.’ Mother baked skovorodniki, mixing dough and water like the one for pancakes, only thicker, as a skovorodnik was very thick. People respected Father so much that they always gave him flour, even on credit. Mother did not scold him very much for giving away bread to the starving, but still she got upset.

My cousin Ekhiel, Uncle Isaac’s son, wanted to leave for America. Uncle Shender sent him an invitation; he did not have children himself. Then all of a sudden, my cousin got acquainted with a girl. Her name was Gita. She was an orphan and lived together with her sister. Ekhiel fell in love with her. Sometimes he called me to go for a walk with him and Gita. I was fourteen then; he must have felt more confident in my company. Ekhiel wanted to marry her and didn’t go to America; he stayed in Russia. He lived together with his father on a small farm, where Latvians were living. They were farmers, so they weren’t ‘lyshentzy’ and were not threatened with deportation. After the [October] Revolution, he was taken to work at a plant. He also helped my brother Lev to get a job at that plant because Lev could not find any job then, as a son of a ‘lyshenetz.’ Our cousin helped us very much then. Soon he died of typhus. It is such a pity.

My father used to read the papers. He seldom said bad things, but the Soviet power deprived him of his plants and destroyed him. He had been a proprietor, and after the [October] Revolution, though he was a chief engineer, he was reproached for his merchant origin.

Of course, Father liked his life before the [October] Revolution better. He tried to speak about it with Mother or his close friends in intimate talks, but mother would stop him from doing it. When the authorities started organizing kolkhozes 4, some neighbors came to Father for advice, if they needed to join the kolkhoz or not. Father told them that they should not hurry with it. And Mother got scared and started to scold him for his straightforwardness. She was afraid that Father would be arrested. But in spite of this, Mother was loyal to the Soviet power. She said the reason for it was that with the Soviet power Jewish pogroms 5 ceased, and there was no more persecution of Jews.

I remember my parents’ friends very poorly. I only remember the village doctor, Ratner, who had cured my mother from paralysis, and his son Eugeniy. In hungry times, they came to us to the village sometimes to get some food.

My school years

In 1917 my parents didn’t know where to bring me to study. I could not get admitted to the school in Bykhov because of my merchant origin, so my father wanted to fix me in a village school where a priest was teaching. I was afraid that the priest would make me pray to the Orthodox God and started crying. And father said that a person cannot afford not studying at all.

When my parents brought me to Bykhov to study, my sister Berta, my brother Lev and I studied at school. Lev studied in another school, so I know nothing about his school years. After the death of Lenin 6 [in 1924], oppression of Jews and ‘the former’ ones [former proprietors, merchants, landlords, noblemen were called ‘the former’] started. They started forcing me and my sisters, both the younger and the elder one, out of the Soviet school as ‘merchant children.’ But I went to school anyway, and I was the third sitting at the desk, together with my two friends. Teachers were good to me. They did not send us away from lessons. So I attended school ‘unofficially.’

We had one teacher, Anna Nikolaevna, who was very beautiful and loved me very much. But her bridegroom came for her and took her to Leningrad. We, pupils, bought her an inkpot as a souvenir. I cried bitterly. Finally, the school staff started sending me away from lessons. But I continued going to school, because I had friends there.

In two years after the [October] Revolution, owing to the efforts of our fellow villagers, Father resumed his rights. We could take part in the elections of the Soviet power, we were not threatened with exile in Siberia, and we were officially admitted to the school. I finished seven grades.

I had a friend at school – she was Russian, a Komsomol 7 member. Her name was Evdokiya Selitskaya. She wrote poems. She was respected at school. She was one year older than I, and guys – Komsomol members – already courted her. They would tell her, ‘Take your friend with you, bring her to our organization as well.’ But still, I was a ‘lyshenka,’ though a former one. And she got married to a military man, already at seventeen.
I did not have any favorite subject at school. I was not a very hard-working pupil. My parents did not control my studies. If I didn’t do some homework, I just would not go to that lesson: I did not want to get a bad mark. And Rosa, unlike me, was a diligent pupil.

One day, after school, pupils were listed for music lessons. I went to get listed. The teacher looked at my hands and said that I have good hands and she would teach me. But she had no vacant time left during the day. And for evening lessons, I had to bring kerosene with me. But I was silly and did not take music lessons. Now I regret it. At home, I did not do anything special. Sometimes I was just fooling around. Once I took a glass and started blowing into it. The glass got broken and cut my lip.

Mother taught us to wash the floors. We tried to wriggle out of it and delayed washing the floors till the very evening. Mother would remind us, ‘It is Sabbath soon! Go wash the floors now!’ We realized that evening was approaching, and then we started washing the floors. It was clean in our house – well, there were four of us, girls! It is a shame to live in a house with dirty floors.

Sometimes after school we met our friends, girls and boys, and went to the bridge across the Dnepr River. Boys made declarations of love to us on the bridge. I was courted by Stankevich – a tall, handsome guy. I was in the fifth grade, and he was in the seventh grade. In the evenings, we used to sit on the porch, but we did not kiss. I was very shy, and he was shy as well. He taught me to ski. Guys organized parties, but we did not go to those parties with him. And I wasn’t a member of any youth or sport organization.

My sister Zinaida studied in cheder, not in an ordinary school. There was one very strict teacher there. Sometimes he slapped pupils on their hands, if something was wrong. He didn’t beat my sister; she was a diligent pupil. But in general, beating pupils was normal in cheder. Pupils were punished for everything. They were taught to read and write [in Hebrew] there. Zinaida didn’t study in cheder for a long time. I believe she could read and write in Hebrew. No one else in our family could. My sister Berta studied in a gymnasium before the October Revolution, and after that she studied in a Soviet school. My parents spoke both Yiddish and Russian to each other and to us. We understood everything.

Father prayed every day, although he wasn’t very religious. It was Mother who reminded him to pray. Father and Mother observed Sabbath. On Friday, the stove was heated twice in our house, and on Saturday it wasn’t heated. A lot of food was cooked for Sabbath. On Friday my mother lit candles. On Saturdays, Father didn’t go to the plants, and Mother would rest on this day. She often had a headache, so she would lie down and ask everybody not to disturb her. But we did not obey and bothered her with different questions.

Observance of Jewish traditions and holidays

There was no synagogue in our village. Three Jewish families would gather, about ten persons all in all, and we prayed together every Saturday. We gathered in the big hall of our village house. There was one Afro-American Jewess living 10 kilometers away from us, and she came to pray with us too. Sometimes her husband came with her; he was also somewhat dark.

We only ate kosher food. And we celebrated all Jewish holidays: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Simchat Torah, Chanukkah, Purim, Pesach and some others as well. On high holidays, Father and Mother came to Bykhov. We had relatives there, and we visited each other. I liked Jewish holidays very much. Such tasty dishes were cooked then! Different ‘nuts’ made of dough and honey; gefilte fish was cooked on Sabbath. We ate milk products the whole week, and on Saturday we ate meat.

Our parents did not teach us to pray and observe Jewish traditions. We saw Mother and Father doing it and learned ourselves. Then the Soviet power came, and it became more difficult to observe traditions. Many synagogues were closed. Of Jewish holidays, I remember Pesach and Sukkot best of all. A small hut [sukkah] was built in our yard, and we would dine in it.

Studying in Leningrad

After Vladimir Lenin’s death, Jews started getting oppressed. My elder brother Lev wanted to become a military man very much. After he had finished school in Bykhov, nobody wanted to hire him for any job. That was all because of his ‘merchant origin,’ and anyway, Stalin didn’t like Jews. Lev managed to get a job at some plant as a worker, thanks to our cousin Ekhiel. Lev suffered from a heart disease. He died at a very young age, in 1932; he was only 25 then. There is one story connected with his illness.

In 1927, my parents were called to the NKVD 8 for a ‘talk.’ I was 17 then, and my brother Lev was 20. My parents were afraid to go there themselves, and they sent two kids instead: my brother Lev and our cousin, Uncle Isroel’s son, whose name was also Lev. Those who talked with them yelled fiercely and threatened them. Lev took it so hard that he fell ill and, lying unconscious, was screaming all the time, ‘Don’t bang with your fist! Don’t shout!’ When Lev fell ill, our father sent him to Leningrad to a very good cardiologist. It was father’s good friend, Doctor Ratner, who advised him to send Lev to that specialist. The doctor said that Lev had endocarditis. This illness was incurable at that time.

There is one more family story connected with the NKVD. In about the same year my parents and my uncle Isroel were arrested as potential enemies of the revolution. I was already studying in Leningrad at that time. My mother’s elder brother, whose name I don’t remember, kept watch over our house and household. My parents spent almost two months in prison. My uncle Isroel’s son-in-law had influence in the NKVD. This was the only reason why they all were freed.

I finished seven grades, as did my brother and sisters. We wanted to go on studying. But we were not admitted to any technical school neither in Bykhov nor in Mogilev. We were ‘lyshentzy,’ though former ones, and many people there knew us. We had to go to Leningrad and try to enter somewhere there.

Father was given a document at the ‘selsovet’ certifying that we had a hectare of land and were farmers; and they kind of ‘forgot’ that we also had plants. Later, when my sister Rosa went to Leningrad as well, the ‘selsovet’ also issued a certificate for her saying that she was the daughter of a tar-extraction plant worker, and nobody recalled who had been the owner of this plant before. People loved and respected my father very much; this is why they helped us.

We went to Leningrad with these forged certificates. First my sister Basya left. Then I did. Basya already worked as a bookkeeper at that time. Later she came back home to her fiancé and married him. Her husband was a Jew originating from a family of prosperous traders, and he was engaged in trading as well. His name was Mikhail Ivanovich Zlatkin.
I entered a technical school. I was fifteen when I came to Leningrad, and I entered the technical school at sixteen. First I entered preliminary courses; this was where I met Sonya and Fira. They were also Jewish. They also came to Leningrad from Belarus, they were from Lepel [a town 140 kilometers to the north-east of Minsk].

Sofia, I and three other girls, whose names I do not remember, rented a small room in an apartment at that time. We paid rent, though money was constantly lacking. One of my friends lived in a room in another woman’s apartment for free, because this room was taken away from that woman – nationalized. Then Sofia, I and one more girl moved to another apartment. We started living in two rooms in the apartment of Sofia Mikhailovna and Daniil Markovich. They were a Jewish family; he was an engineer. Their apartment was situated on Mira Street, on Petrogradskaya side.

We had a teacher of Russian at the preliminary courses. You see, we came from Belarus and didn’t know Russian so well as to pass an entrance examination in a technical school. The teacher’s name was Nikolai Ivanovich; he was a young man. His mother was a common peasant woman, and his father was a landlord. Nikolai Ivanovich taught at preliminary courses and also gave private lessons. I went to him and asked him to help us prepare for entering the technical school. He agreed at once. He lived together with his mother somewhere in the upper stories. We came to his place to study, and about twelve or fifteen guys at once were sitting in his room. Everybody paid him money. Our father also sent us money. That was the period of the NEP 9, and he worked as a chief engineer at the plant. But he only sent a little money and not regularly. We often had no money at all.

Our teacher did not take money for lessons from me and Sonya. He would tell other pupils, ‘Guys, it’s time to pay.’ Sonya and I blushed and got upset, because we didn’t have money. I went up to teacher and said we would pay when our parents would send us money from the village. And he replied, ‘This doesn’t concern you.’ Such a kind man he was, he pitied us. He had a bride, though for some time it seemed to me that he tried to court me. Once Sonya and I rode in a tram without paying for a ticket – we had no money for tickets. Suddenly, our teacher came up to us and asked us if we had money to ride in the tram. We started worrying, and he laughed and paid for us.

Later, in 1928, Sonya, Fira and I entered the technical school. We were actually starving. We worked at factories as students of the technical school, cleaning the machines. The factories produced different manufactured goods. We cleaned the machines at night. I was healthy and strong, and I worked a lot. And Sonya was weak; she would work for some time and then lie down under the machine. Sometimes we were paid for our work, and sometimes we were not. In the evenings we studied in the technical school, and during the day we took a rest.

My first marriage

I met my first husband, Serafim Ivanovich Bogoyavlensky, in our technical school. Our technical school admitted those who had not been admitted to the economical department of some institute – ‘lyshenzy,’ ‘former ones’ [former noblemen – landowners, etc.] and so on. In our technical school, the staff didn’t pay a lot of attention to their documents. The guys who studied with us were all handsome, tall and slim. They were not admitted to any institute because of their origin. They entered our technical school with forged documents.

Then suddenly a checkup started in our technical school. A guy from a senior course came to us; his name was Volchanski, he was the son of a diplomat. He gathered all of us and said, that the technical school partkom 10 suggests everyone who studies with forged documents confess it. Then everybody would be left to study. And if somebody does not confess, everybody will be expelled. There was a German guy studying with us; he spoke hardly any Russian. And suddenly he says to one guy in Russian, ‘You have a ram at home, confess it.’ My future husband confessed then that he was the son of a priest. And before that he had been hiding from everyone, who his parents were.

When he courted me, I also didn’t know that he was Russian and the son of a priest. Jews had very strict rules about it at that time: we could marry only ‘each other.’ Serafim Ivanovich looked like a Jew. He was brought up in such a way that I thought he was from a Jewish family. He knew when Jewish holidays were celebrated. Many people took him for a Jew. We never spoke to each other about our nationality.

Formerly, his father Ivan had a common Russian last name, something like ‘Kopeikin.’ He was a teacher at school and he was married to the daughter of a priest. But soon his father-in-law got too old and couldn’t perform his duties properly. Then Serafim’s father was forced to become a priest; otherwise his wife’s family could have been deprived of their estate. This was how he became a priest and got the last name Bogoyavlensky.

Serafim Ivanovich had an elder brother, Sergey. His fate is tragic indeed. In Soviet times, he was teaching at some institute in Moscow. I don’t remember at which one exactly. Then he became a ‘dissident’ [nonconformist]. He was arrested by the KGB 11 and was put in a mental hospital. I don’t know what became of him later and I don’t want to speak about it.

My husband had another brother called Ivan, who was older than him as well, and two sisters, Maria and Klavdiya. Ivan was a veterinary surgeon. He fought in World War II, but I don’t know where, and after the war he did not live in Leningrad, but in some other city. He died around 1960. Maria was a biologist; she worked as a teacher at some school in Leningrad. She also died after the war, but I don’t remember when exactly. Klavdiya graduated from an agricultural institute in Moscow, she worked at some kolkhoz in Moscow region. She also died a long time ago, after World War II.

I finished technical school in 1930 and married Serafim Ivanovich Bogoyavlensky. We registered our marriage in ZAGS [Civil Status Registry Office, an institution where birth, death, marriage and divorce are registered]. My husband took my last name, because his own last name betrayed his ecclesiastic origin, and he didn’t want it. It could hinder him from finding a job.

At first, my parents didn’t know that my husband was Russian. He wrote a letter to them saying he wanted to propose to me. The letter was very nice. In his letter he called me gently Mirra and Busya. When my parents read the letter, they couldn’t understand anything: who was Serafim Ivanovich going to marry, their daughter Mirra or some Busya? I had a cousin called Lev, the son of Uncle Isroel. He lived in Belarus then. He was handsome and very smart. My parents invited him, gave him the letter to read and asked, which way he understood it. But Lev didn’t understand anything either. When he came to Leningrad and came to visit me, he asked me, ‘Mirra, who is your husband going to marry? What does ‘Busya’ mean?’ I was very surprised that my parents and my brother did not understand what ‘Busya’ meant. Calling me by this name, Serafim Ivanovich expressed his love to me. And my parents, as it turned out, did not guess it.

In 1931, I gave birth to my daughter. I named her Lyubov. In the same year, my brother Lev came to Leningrad to consult the cardiologist and stayed with us at our place. My husband and I told Lev that Serafim Ivanovich was Russian. My brother didn’t say anything bad about it. He liked my husband. But we didn’t tell my father anything about it then.

Next year, in 1932, my brother Lev died. My husband and I went to my parents, to attend my brother’s funeral. They knew about my husband already, because Lev had already told them everything. My parents liked my husband very much. They didn’t say a bad thing about him; they treated him very well. He was a highly cultured man; he had very cultured parents. My husband offered an adventure to my parents and me. Our relatives started visiting us, and my husband suggested not telling anyone that he was Russian, but telling everybody that he was Jewish. He wanted to please my parents. Once Aunt Sonya, my father’s sister, came to us and started speaking Yiddish to my husband. And Serafim Ivanovich knew German, so he could understand Yiddish. He told my aunt that in his family they only spoke Russian, though they understood Yiddish, and therefore he understood Yiddish but didn’t speak it. Such an adventure he invented. My parents loved him very much anyway. He sent them parcels from Leningrad, wrote them nice letters. My parents used to say that he was even better than me.

My husband’s brothers and sisters also loved me and treated me very well. My husband cared about Jews, he was a friend of many Jews. He even wanted me to teach him Yiddish. He had the soul of a Jew.
Before my daughter Lyubov was born, I had worked as an economist at the Leningrad ‘Nevgvozd’ [‘Neva Nail’] plant. My husband worked as a deputy director of the military shooting range at the ‘Economizer’ plant. He was a very good employee. If my husband had agreed to join the Communist Party, he would have become the director of the military field. His director was a member of the Party, but he had a serious drinking problem. Therefore my husband did almost his entire job. 

After my daughter was born, I went on working at the Leningrad ‘Nevgvozd’ plant. My husband would fix me up with a position as an economist for the winter period,
and then I rested for the whole summer and the beginning of autumn. He took good care of our daughter and me. 
In Soviet times, it was difficult to observe Jewish traditions.
Therefore I didn’t try to teach my daughter Lyubov to do that. But we celebrated Pesach and bought matzah. Matzot were baked by Jews at home. 

Evacuation during the Great Patriotic War

When the Great Patriotic War 12 started, we, members of Lipovski family, found ourselves in different places.
In 1941 I evacuated together with my sister Rosa to the Urals, to the village of Chisto-perevoloka, Chernovskoy district of Perm region. In evacuation, I gave birth to daughter Margarita. I worked for a year in the kolkhoz, and I took my daughter to a day nursery. When my daughter turned one, I managed to get a job as the manager of the Chisto-perevoloka post office. I was responsible for serving about five to seven villages. Each village was about 5-6 kilometers away from the other. In each village there was a kolkhoz postman who came to me. I gave the postmen money; they delivered it to the houses and then reported back to me.
There was a savings bank department at our post office. Money was brought to us from Chernovskoy district, and it was about 40 or 50 kilometers from our village. There was a man responsible for bringing the money to us, but he often sent his 18-year-old daughter instead. I was anxious every time that she might be robbed, because it was me who was responsible for the money. I often had to walk that distance in order to be present at the meetings, though I didn’t know the way very well and was afraid to get lost. It was very seldom that I managed to get a horse to ride there.

My younger sister Rosa was a smart girl. She was appointed the secretary of ‘selsovet.’ She had to endure conflicts with a very nasty woman, the secretary of ‘partkom.’ The head of ‘selsovet’ was a weak-spirited man, and Rosa was a very just person. She did a very important and noble thing. There were seven people in the village who were in terrible need, they didn’t get the ration and starved. And the head of selsovet was also a very poor man; he had twelve kids. There was also a priest’s wife, whose husband died and nobody helped her, so she was starving. So Rosa went to Kukushkin, the head of the NKVD, and fixed all these seven people up with a ration, 300 gram of bread per each.

Rosa was in poor health. Sometimes she felt really ill, but she endured it very courageously and did her job very well. She was greatly appreciated both by the new kolkhoz chairman and by the district authorities. She could harness a horse, she went to different villages to mow the grass… She proved to everybody in the village that she was able to do everything herself and gained respect this way.
One year, the river overflew its banks considerably. The flood lasted for a long time, and it was impossible to bring our bread rations to our village. All evacuated people were starving, and so were Rosa and I. Rosa was the secretary of the ‘selsovet’ and could have asked the chairman to give us bread, but she never did. We went to the field, just like everybody else, and picked the grain that was left after winter. And this grain could be poisonous sometimes. Many people in our village died from it. We survived because I had a goat, and we drank the goat’s milk and also boiled the grain in it. In two weeks, when the flood sank, people brought us food and told us that if we had a dry throat, we had to come to the hospital immediately, because in case of a poisoning a person could be saved in the period of two days. For the next two days, my sister and I were trying to recognize if we had a dry throat or not.

When I was pregnant, I was once in ‘sel’po’ [village consumers’ society; a village shop] for some business. I heard one man slandering the Soviet power there. When I gave birth to my daughter and was in hospital, suddenly Kukushkin [the head of the NKVD] came to me and started interrogating me about what I heard that man saying. I answered him that it was no concern of mine, my elder daughter and all my relatives were on occupied territory in Belarus and I knew nothing about them, and my husband was at the front, so I walked around without noticing or hearing anything. Kukushkin went away, and then came back again another time. I asked him not to torture me with interrogations and not to come again. He really didn’t come anymore. I think this Kukushkin was not a real chekist 13, but was a ‘former one.’ Otherwise he would neither have given me rations nor left me alone.
In evacuation, we lived at a local woman’s apartment. She had a son, a very delicate boy. They were starving. I shared my ration with them, but still the child died. Rosa fixed her up with a job at a bakery. But the woman was too weak. She was a very honest person and didn’t take a single piece of bread from the bakery.
At the very beginning of the war, my daughter Lyubov found herself in occupation in Belarus together with my parents, my sisters and their families. Shortly before World War II I was bringing up my elder sister Berta’s daughter, whose name was also Lyubov. Berta had difficult times then, her husband was arrested for illegal business activity and put into prison. And on 20th June, 1941 my relatives took both girls, my daughter and my niece, to Belarus for vacation. They took them from Leningrad to Bykhov. Lyubov wrote me a letter in a couple of days saying that they all went to the village [Sledyuki] from Bykhov. They found themselves in the ghetto there. She wrote, ‘Mother, don’t worry for me, though I miss you a little.’ She was ten years old. These words from her letter still hurt me. Lyubov was interested in politics at the age of ten already. She knew about fascists and said that they could attack us.

My husband was at war; he wrote letters to me to the Urals. He was also mourning for our elder daughter and all our relatives when he learned about it.
Eleven of my relatives died during the Great Patriotic War. My father could have saved all of them. People had been hiding him all that time. He sent peasants to the ghetto to give food to his family. I think he could have hid everyone, because everybody in the village treated him well. Of course, it is hard to hide eleven persons… My father didn’t find himself in ghetto. Lyubov was together with him in the village. She had fair hair and she didn’t look Jewish. My mother wrote to Father from the ghetto saying that the Germans are sending all people from the ghetto to settle down in another place. The Germans deceived them, of course. But a mother or a father will never leave their children. My father came to the ghetto and also got into that massacre. My parents were somewhat naïve.

My father was hid in the village by our neighbor. This man told the Germans that Mordukh was not in the village. The neighbor was Russian. He was a poor man, had many children, but he lived in a ‘rich’ street. And the rich ones mocked him, and he used to steal from them in revenge. But he didn’t steal anything from us. Mother would leave somewhere and tell him, ‘Sergey, let everything be in order, all right?’ And when she came back, all our stuff was safe. Sergey hid my father from the Germans. I wrote to him after the war, and he wrote me back telling me how he had been hiding father and how terribly sorry he was that he still perished.

Father’s sister Sonya was killed too. She lived at her son’s in Belarus, and her husband was in Baku. He survived, and Aunt Sonya perished. Uncle Isroel lost his wife Frada. Uncle Isroel also perished later, around 1941 or 1942.

Only those who were the children of communists were saved. They were scared. And my parents were not party members, so they thought that they wouldn’t be hurt. And all our communist relatives survived. For example, the wife and children of Matvey, my father’s nephew. As soon as they heard about Hitler approaching, they left Belarus.

Of our close relatives, only my sister Rosa and I survived World War II. And of the families of my parents’ brothers and sisters, about 12 persons survived. This is a half of all our relatives. When the war ended, my sister Rosa and I were going to leave from Chisto-perevoloka. People didn’t want to let Rosa go. They were afraid that as soon as she would leave they would be deprived of their rations. But Rosa comforted them. She said, ‘The war is over, your husbands will come back and life will get easier, you won’t get lost.’

Returning to Leningrad

After the war, I came back to Leningrad with Rosa and Margarita. I received a ‘call-up’ 17 from my husband. [‘Call-up’: during World War II and shortly after it, people could move to other places only if they had special permits issued on the basis of official invitations.] My husband was already demobilized. But while I was on my way there, my husband went to visit this one woman; they had been at the front together. My husband was contused on the front, but he didn’t want to go to hospital and leave his fellow soldiers. And then that woman, a civilian from Leningrad, took care of him at her home. Owing to her, he was able to recover without staying at a hospital. After he was demobilized, he decided to call on her. And she fell ill with hepatitis at that time. My husband couldn’t leave her alone and stayed to take care of her.
When I came to Leningrad, I learned that my husband lived with that woman. He wanted to come back to me, but I didn’t forgive him. Though I should have done so. I did not let him come back to me. However, 20 years later, when my second husband died, we got married again and lived together for nine years. We would have lived our whole life together, had he not died of cancer.
It seems to me that after the war, anti-Semitism intensified in the Soviet Union. I was a witness to a few incidents myself. One of our friends helped Rosa and me. Her name was Veronica Leonidovna, she was Russian; she had been with us in evacuation. Her husband served in Air Defense Forces during World War II. When she asked to issue a ‘call-up’ for us, the director told her, ‘Why do you take the trouble – they are Jews!’ When Rosa wanted to get a job in the Textile Institute, the head of the staff department did not accept her because of her nationality, though she had vacancies. So Rosa found a job at the ‘Electronica’ plant where her husband was working.

Once I heard some man shout in the street that Jews didn’t fight during the war, they only hid and sat on the fence. I went up to him and asked his address. He got scared and ran away.
There was another incident at the beginning of the 1970s. I went shopping. There was a long line in the shop, and I had my small granddaughter Nadezhda in my arms and also heavy bags with food products. I asked people standing in line to let me in front of them. But suddenly one man shouted, ‘You are a Jew! To let you go first, and with a Jewish child? Never!’ But the line moved, pushed the man aside and let me forward.
After the war, anti-Semitism started showing more in Leningrad. I think it was connected with rumors spreading, that Jews didn’t fight at war. And I heard Stepashin, former prime minister of Russia, saying in a TV-program that there are more Jews among the Heroes of the Soviet Union 14 than representatives of any other nation.
After the war, I came back to the Baltic plant to work as an economist.

Then in 1947 I married for the second time; my second husband was Mikhail Ivanovich Zlatkin. He was a Jew, and he had been married to my elder sister Berta before the war. In 1941, both his family and mine perished in Belarus. After the war, he worked in the field of restaurant service.

My second marriage and raising my children

In 1949 our son Alexander was born. He grew up a very tender and obedient boy. He always tried to help me about the house. He studied well at school. My daughter Margarita helped him to do his homework. At the age of eighteen, Alexander went to serve in the Soviet Army, in the navy. They served in the navy for three years then. After the army, in 1970, Alexander wanted to enter the historical department of Leningrad State University. But he was not admitted. My son studied at a technical school, and then found a job at a plant producing telephones. He married a Russian woman; her name is Natalya. They have two daughters – Natalya and Maria. They are a very nice and harmonious family.

It was already dangerous to bring up Margarita and Alexander according to Jewish traditions, and Margarita even didn’t like talking about Jews. We didn’t celebrate Jewish holidays; we just ate matzah. Once, when Rosa was still alive, I went to the synagogue and ordered a Kaddish to remember my dear relatives. Rosa praised me a lot for this.

Stalin’s death provoked my tears of joy. I knew he was a monster; I just didn’t talk to anybody about it. I was afraid to let little Alexander go to a kindergarden – he could have said something incautiously. I knew one Jewish woman with a little child; we would go for walks together. One day somebody heard her saying something about Jews and Russians. She was arrested. She barely got out of this scrape. I knew that Stalin hated Jews. Everybody was crying when Stalin died; you had to cry. It’s just that people had different reasons for it. It’s good that he died. Otherwise he would have killed all Jews with some poison.

Anti-Semitism in the 1950s

I remember the ‘Doctors’ Plot’ 15. Many of us, Jews, knew it was a set-up. But we saw famous, talented people change their Jewish surnames for Russian ones – for example, Mikhail Svetlov [(1903-1964), a famous Soviet poet and dramatist. His poems about the Civil War were well known; some of them were set to the music of the famous composer Isaac Dunaevski and became popular songs]. People cannot hide their Jewish origin, no matter how hard they try. But they did it for the sake of their career.

When I was young, I didn’t face any obstacles in getting education or a job because of my nationality. I did not have any special talents; I have a different talent – to settle in this life. Margarita also wasn’t hindered by anybody in her career or studies. She is registered as Russian, and she doesn’t look Jewish. But Alexander has suffered from this. He passed the entrance exams to the Historical Department of St. Petersburg State University, got the necessary mark, but didn’t find himself in the list of the admitted. He went to the dean. The dean asked him about his marks and went to clear up the situation. He found out that Alexander is Jewish and couldn’t do anything. Elderly communists and aspirants with bad marks did enter the university. And Alexander did not.
 
We do not have any connection with our relatives in America, with Uncle Shender. In Soviet times, from 1917 till 1985, it was dangerous to have relatives abroad. When relatives of my son’s wife Natalya came to visit her from Germany, I was against meeting them. I was anxious for Alexander and for all of us.

When Israel and the Soviet Union had bad relationships, I worried so much about Jews both here and in Israel. I am for Jews and Russians communicating with each other. There are good and bad people among Jews, as in any other nation. But bad ones do not count. Jews are very kind people; they bring up their children very well. Russians could learn it from Jews, too. I couldn’t emigrate to Israel, and actually I didn’t really want it. I was a loner already, so where could I have gone alone. Besides, the climate is too hot there. And after all, it has become dangerous to live in Israel now. This is why I worry about Jews.

Life after perestroika

When Mikhail Gorbachev came to power and perestroika 16 started, I was very happy. Both Margarita and I hurried to turn on the TV-set every evening to listen to Gorbachev’s 17 speech. First we liked him very much. But then he started speaking in such a way that we couldn’t understand anything. But still he is a nice man. He released Andrey Dmitrievich Sakharov 18, our academician and lawyer, from under arrest.
My first husband, Serafim Ivanovich, died in 1975; my second husband, Mikhail Ivanovich, died in 1965. Now that both my husbands are dead and my children are not so young and healthy as before, the St. Petersburg Jewish Community helps me very much. Hesed 19 has helped me a lot. They send me meals for the whole week. This is a great help for me, because I cannot cook for myself. Before, a nurse also visited me. But now she doesn’t visit me anymore, and I need it so much. When I broke my leg, Hesed gave me a wheel chair, a special mattress preventing bedsores and crutches. I had a course of massage as well. I am very grateful to Hesed and the people who work there.

Unfortunately, almost all my relatives from my generation have already died. My friends of Jewish origin must also have died already. I broke my leg three years ago, in 2000, and I have not gone out since that, so I know nothing about my friends.

Glossary:

Irina Aizenberg
Odessa
Ukraine
Interviewer: Alexandr Tonkonogiy
Date of the interview: January 2003

Irina Aizenberg is an old, gray-haired, short woman. She is friendly and neat. She lives in a two-room apartment. She has furniture in this apartment bought in the 1960s. There is a sign of her loving care on everything in her apartment: the parquet floors gleam of polish, not a speck of dust anywhere and the shining crystal ware in the cupboard. Irina belongs to that category of women who can make any modest lodging a snug place. She lives alone. Her only son died tragically. Irina always waits for her grandson Victor’s calls. He lives in Israel and tries to convince his grandmother to move there. Irina does all the housework herself.

My family

Childhood

During the war

Stay in Central Europe

After returning to Odessa

Glossary

My family

My paternal grandmother, Ethel Gurovich, was born in Kherson in 1877. I don’t know her maiden name. I never met my grandmother and we had no photographs of her. My grandmother got education at home. In 1894 the family moved to the village of Matusov, Kiev region [today Matusov town, Cherkassy region] where my grandmother met my grandfather Israel.

My paternal grandfather, Israel Gurovich, was born in Matusovo in 1870. He studied at cheder. He spoke fluent Yiddish and knew prayers in Hebrew. My father told me that my grandfather was an estate manager in Matusov, but I don’t know any details about it. My grandparents got married that same year they met. They both came from religious families and had a traditional wedding with a chuppah. Grandmother Ethel was a housewife. My grandparents had six children.

In 1912 my grandparents and their children moved to Odessa, but I don’t know for what reason. They settled down in Meschanskaya Street and in 1923 they moved to a house in Bazarnaya Street in the center of the town. Their children and grandchildren also lived in this house. Their other three children were born there. Grandfather Israel was a very kind and nice man. He got up very early each morning to make the round of his children and grandchildren asking them if they needed his help.

In 1922, during a typhoid epidemic in Odessa, my grandmother fell ill and died. She was buried at the 1st Jewish cemetery. There was a Jewish funeral. After Grandmother Ethel died my grandfather remarried in approximately 1923. His second wife’s name was Polia. From when I remember my grandfather – the middle of the 1930s – he worked as an electrician at the buttery. My grandfather was a self-educated man. He was very handy and could do many things.

On Jewish holidays the whole family got together at Grandfather Israel and my father’s stepmother Polia’s apartment. They taught us all rules to be followed to observe Jewish holidays accordingly. During seder at Pesach my cousins and I repeated traditional questions after Ms. Polia. We always ate matzah at Pesach. I don’t know where they got it in those years. At Purim Ms. Polia made hamantashen with poppy seed filling and treated all children to those pies. She and Grandfather Israel went to synagogue on all holidays and fasted at Yom Kippur. Other members of the family didn’t quite observe all rules. This is all I remember about their religiosity.

I remember the family gathering on my grandfather’s 70th birthday in 1940. All his children and grandchildren came to greet him and it was a noisy and merry celebration. We all loved Grandfather dearly.

During the Great Patriotic War 1 Grandfather Israel and his second wife Polia evacuated to the village of Borovoye in Kokchetav region [2,400 km northeast of Odessa in Northern Kazakhstan]. All my grandfather’s children and their families, but his older son Abram were in Borovoye. When Israel and Polia were on their way back home from evacuation in 1944 Grandfather had an infarction and there was nothing they could do to help him. Polia buried him in Nezhyn, Chernigov region. No Jewish traditions were observed at his funeral.

Grandfather Israel and Grandmother Ethel had nine children. All of them, but the three younger children, were born in Matusov village. My grandfather and his second wife Polia didn’t have children of their own.

My father’s older brother Abram was born in 1895. Uncle Abram lived in Odessa. He was an accountant. Uncle Abram had a Jewish wife. Her name was Ania. They had two children: daughter Inna and son Valeri. During the war they were in evacuation. I guess, they were in Tashkent. After Odessa was liberated Abram’s family returned home. Uncle Abram’s daughter graduated from Polytechnic College after the war and his son graduated from Moscow College of Steel and Alloys. They worked as engineers at plants in Odessa. Uncle Abram’s wife Ania died in Odessa in 1955. Uncle Abram never remarried. He died in Odessa in 1983 and was buried at the Jewish cemetery. His son Valeri, his wife and their two children live in the US and Inna, her husband and daughter live in Odessa.

My father’s second brother Efim was born in 1897. Uncle Efim lived in Kherson. He worked as an accountant. He was married to a Jewish woman. His wife’s name was Asia. They had two sons. Efim died in Kherson in 1991 and his wife died in 1992. One of his sons lives in Israel and another one in St. Petersburg.

My father’s third brother Yakov was born in 1899. I have no information about him, except that after the revolution 2 Yakov moved to America in 1918 and there was no more contact with him.

My father’s older sister Sara was born in 1903. Aunt Sara lived in Odessa. She was married to a Jewish man. Her husband’s name was Ilia Koltun. Aunt Sara was a housewife. They had three children: two daughters and a son, born shortly before the war in 1941. Aunt Sara and her children were in evacuation in Kazakhstan. After the war they returned to Odessa. Sara died in Odessa in 1964 and her husband died in Odessa in 1991.

Their older daughter Lora finished a musical college. She married a Georgian man. After finishing the college she got a job assignment 3 in Uzhhorod, Subcarpathia 4. She had two sons. Lora died in 1990s. Sara’s second daughter Valia has a Jewish husband. They have two children. They live in the US, only Valia’s younger son Volodia lives here, in Odessa.

My father’s sister Fira was born in 1905. She had a secondary education and worked as a typist. She was married to a Jewish man. His name was Yasha Shpiekulant. They had a daughter. Her name was Lina. Uncle Yasha died in Odessa in 1976 and Aunt Fira died in 1998. Their daughter Lina lives in Germany.

My father’s youngest brother Boris was born in 1912 after the family moved from Matusovo to Odessa. Boris finished a secondary school and a military college in Odessa. Before the Great Patriotic War he was an officer in the NKVD 5. During the Great Patriotic War he went to the front and perished in 1941. Boris was married. His wife’s name was Riva. She was a Jew. They had a daughter, but after Boris perished we lost contact with his family and I have no information about his wife and daughter.

My father’s younger sister Shura was born in Odessa in 1915. Aunt Shura finished a secondary school in Odessa and an accounting course. She was chief accountant on passenger ships on the Black Sea Fleet 6. She was married to a Jewish man named Misha Maslekh. Her husband died in Odessa in 1959. Her son Boris works in Gmilus Hesed 7. Aunt Shura lives in Odessa.

My father’s youngest sister Nina was born in Odessa in 1917. She finished a secondary school and worked as a typist. She was married. Her husband’s name was Grisha Konakhevich. Aunt Nina’s husband died in 1957. They had two sons: one son is a scientist in the space medicine field. He lives in Moscow. Their other son graduated from the Conservatory in Odessa. He lives in St. Petersburg where he works as art director of the Lenconcert organization [central concert agency in St. Petersburg]. Aunt Nina lives in Odessa.

My father, Victor Gurovich, was born in Matusov, Cherkassy region, in 1907. He moved to Odessa with his parents in 1912. He finished seven years of a Russian secondary school and an accounting course. He worked as an accountant at the shoe factory. My father liked to tell me the story of his and my mother’s acquaintance in a joking manner. He said that her landlady provided miserable meals to my mother: whenever he came on a visit she was having buckwheat and broth. My father used to say that he felt so sorry for my mother that he decided to marry her.

I know very little about my mother’s parents. All I know is that my maternal grandfather, Isaac Maidannik, was born in Zhmerinka, Vinnitsa region, in 1882. Grandfather Isaac went to synagogue on Saturday and on Jewish holidays and observed all Jewish traditions. My aunt Rosa, my grandfather’s older daughter, told me about it. My maternal grandmother, Eta Maidannik, whose maiden name I don’t know, was born in the same town in 1882. My grandfather Isaac and grandmother Eta met in 1898. They got married in 1899. They were both 17 when they got married.

My grandfather Isaac and grandmother Eta died from influenza within three days in 1917. They were both 35 years old. They were buried in accordance with the Jewish traditions in Zhmerinka. My aunt Rosa, who was 17 years old at the time, made all the arrangements for the funeral. She told us that there was the Kaddish recited at the cemetery.

My grandfather Isaac and grandmother Eta had four children. My mother’s older sister Rosa was born in Zhmerinka in 1900. After her parents died she had to raise the younger children. The youngest boy was only three years old. Rosa married Isaac Krunker. He worked as a painter. He did the finishing of the railway station in Zhmerinka, known for its architectural design. Their only son finished Medical College in Kiev before the Great Patriotic War. During the war he was summoned to the front and perished in the first days. Rosa’s husband Isaac also perished at the front.

Aunt Rosa was the only member of our family who knew Jewish traditions and observed some of them, for example the kashrut. She went to synagogue when the memorial prayer was recited at Yom Kippur. I remember, when we lived in Zhmerinka in 1944/45, Aunt Rosa lit candles on Friday evenings. Aunt Rosa died in Kiev in 1985.

My mother’s second sister Polia was born in Zhmerinka in 1904. She finished seven years of secondary school in Zhmerinka and after she moved to Odessa she began to work as an attendant at a hospital. She was single. I don’t know why she remained single since I always found her attractive. Before the war Polia finished a course for medical nurses. When the Great Patriotic War began Polia was mobilized to the army. She worked in a hospital at the front. She perished in 1942.

My mother’s younger brother Leonid was born in Zhmerinka in 1914. He studied seven years at school and moved to Odessa in the late 1920s. I don’t know how he made a career, but before the Great Patriotic War he was the director of a store in Odessa. Leonid was married. His wife’s name was Lusia. She was a Jewish woman. They had three children, but I only knew the name of their son Izia. During the war their family was in evacuation in Kzyl-Orda [2,800 km from Odessa in Southern Kazakhstan]. After the war they lived in Kishinev, Moldova, where Uncle Leonid was the director of a store. Leonid died in Kishinev in 1970. His wife died in Kishinev in 1975. Their children reside in the US.

My mother Sara Maidannik was born in Zhmerinka, Vinnitsa region, in 1910. Her parents died when my mother was seven years old. My mother was raised by her older sister Rosa and her husband Isaac. My mother finished seven years at school in Zhmerinka and in 1925 she moved to Odessa where it was easier to find a job and get a profession. My mother went to work as a leather cutter at the shoe factory. She also studied at a ‘fabzavuch’ school. [Fabzavuch schools are factory or plant vocational schools.] My mother rented a room and also paid for her meals to the owner of the apartment. She met my future father at the factory.

My parents got married in 1927. They had a civil ceremony. My mother said they couldn’t afford a wedding party. My father was against my mother’s going to work after they got married. My mother quit work and became a housewife. My parents never told me in what apartment they lived before I was born. I think they either rented a room or lived with some of their relatives.

Childhood

I, Irina, was born on 3rd January 1929, two years after my parents got married. My parents were not religious. We only spoke Russian in the family. My father was a member of the Communist Party. When he joined the Party or for what reason was never discussed in our family. Shortly after I was born my father went to work as an accountant at the Headquarters of Odessa Railroad. 

In 1933, my father got an assignment to go to a village near Odessa to work on the improvement of agriculture. My mother and I followed him there. We had a small house and kept livestock in that village. We kept a pig and a German breed cow with black spots. It gave 22 liters of milk per day. We left some for the family and gave the rest to the sovkhoz 8. My mother also kept geese, ducks and chickens, so we also had eggs. My parents told me that this livestock helped us to live through the period of famine in Ukraine in 1933 9. My father worked as an accountant in the sovkhoz and he also received food products for his work.

We moved back to Odessa in 1936. My mother was pregnant and this same year she gave birth to my younger brother Georgi. In Odessa my father continued working as an accountant at the railroad headquarters. We received two rooms in a big communal apartment 10 with many tenants. Our two rooms were located rather disadvantageously: we could only come to the kitchen through our neighbor’s room. I don’t think anyone else in Odessa experienced any similar discomfort.

We got along well with our co-tenants. There was a common kitchen, but we had a stove in our room that we stoked with sunflower seed husk that we purchased at the oil factory. There were special containers for seed husk in the stove. My younger brother’s bed was near the stove and once it almost caught fire, but the baby-sitter didn’t lose control and put down the fire quickly. The baby-sitter, a Ukrainian girl, came in the morning to look after my younger brother and help Mother with the housework. We did not observe the kashrut or any Jewish holidays in the family because my father was a member of the Communist Party.

In 1936 I went to Ukrainian school #118 11 near the Privoz market [a big market in Odessa]. I studied in this school before the Great Patriotic War. That this was a Ukrainian school helped me to learn Ukrainian. Children and teachers were of various nationalities. We took no notice of anybody’s nationality. I can remember one Jewish teacher. His last name was Urman. He taught the Russian literature. He was a brilliant teacher and schoolchildren liked him a lot.

I remember the ceremony of admission to pioneers 12 in the gym at school: unfortunately, my stocking slipped down and I was trying to fix it before anybody noticed it. It sounds funny now, but it was so serious when it happened. There were many clubs in our school. I liked singing and led the chorus at school. We sang pioneer and Komsomol 13 songs. We also had military training at school. We were trained to disassemble and assemble a rifle and put on gas masks.

I had many friends of various nationalities. We didn’t bother about the subject of nationality in our family. I didn’t face any anti-Semitism in Odessa. I remember little about arrests of 1937 [during the so-called Great Terror] 14 since I was only nine years old. I only remember that Aunt Sara’s co-tenant in the communal apartment was arrested for unknown reasons, but that later she was rehabilitated 15.

During the war

In spring 1941 my father got another job assignment: he was to take the position of chief accountant at the sovkhoz called Peremoga in Razdelnaya district near Odessa. The director of this sovkhoz was Nord, a German man. He became a friend of our family almost immediately after we moved to the village. In the morning of 22nd June 1941 we were sitting at his home and the radio constantly repeated: ‘Listen to an important announcement at 12 o’clock.’ Then the radio announced that a war with Germany had begun. The director of the sovkhoz was taken away on that same day since he was German. My father received his summons to the front.

My mother, my brother Georgi and I moved to Odessa. When air raids in Odessa began in July 1941 we were evacuated by a special train for railroad employees. Our mother had little luggage with her believing that we were going to be back home soon. We went to Stalingrad and there was food on this train: tinned food and water for free. We didn’t stay long in Stalingrad since the war reached there in a short while.

We moved to Engels, Saratov region, Russia, where my father’s brother Efim evacuated with his family. When the front line came close to the town we all moved to the village of Borovoye in Kokchetav region in Northern Kazakhstan. There we shared one room with three families. Local residents had never seen Jews before. They used to say to us, ‘Some Jews are coming – different from what we are like.’ It did not have a negative meaning. They were friendly.

The climate in Northern Kazakhstan was very hard – the temperatures dropped to minus forty and a person didn’t feel when he got frostbitten. People used to shout, ‘Rub your cheeks and nose!’ to one another in the streets when they saw pale white complexion. I suffered from such frosts. At first I wore galoshes since this was all I had available. I got my feet swollen in those boots and my mother bought me 41 size valenki boots at the market. I pulled them on, but then couldn’t take them off and they had to be cut. Since then I’ve had rheumatism, heart problems and feet and hands sensitive to cold weather.

In summer 1942 my mother’s younger brother Leonid took us to Kzyl-Orda [2,800 km from Odessa in Southern Kazakhstan] where he was in evacuation with his family. There were strong winds and oppressive heat in summer in Southern Kazakhstan, and there was sand biting on one’s face and eyes. My uncle Leonid helped my mother to get a job at a baker’s store in the town. I helped my mother to glue bread coupons to submit them to the accounting office. We received some bread coupons as well.

At first we stayed with Uncle Leonid in a two-room apartment, but since there was too little space, our mother rented a room. She went to work at the sulfur plant producing hydrate of sodium. Once someone left a valve on the hydrate of sodium pipe open. Perhaps, at first there was no hydrate of sodium coming from the pipe, but later it began leaking and somebody had to stop this. My mother ran to turn on the valve and got right into the jet of hydrate of sodium. She got a first grade burn and couldn’t continue working. She had burns all over her.

We received a little money by my father’s certificate, but it was too little. I went to work at the canteen at the railway station. I peeled potatoes and washed dishes. I received two luncheons; one for me and another for my mother. We shared this meal with my brother Georgi.

I don’t remember whether there were many or few Jews in evacuation since we didn’t really care about nationality. I didn’t have close friends there, but I got along well with all people. We didn’t observe any Jewish holidays in our family in evacuation either. But I remember a distant relative who lived with us for some time – I don’t remember his name – and who prayed constantly at home. I remember that my cousins, the children of Uncle Leonid, and I laughed at him. I still feel ashamed for such conduct. We found it funny since we didn’t get the appropriate education.

We stayed in Kzyl-Orda until 1944. We needed an invitation letter to go back to Ukraine. There was nobody to sign such a letter in Odessa. Mother’s sister Rosa sent us an invitation letter and we went to Zhmerinka where she resided then. We received an apartment with all comforts in an officer apartment house in Zhmerinka as a family of a front line officer. We kept in touch with Father by mail. My brother Georgi and I went to school. There were many officers’ children in our school.

On 9th May 1945 16 we heard an announcement about the capitulation of Germany on the radio. It happened late at night and I knocked on the doors of all other apartments to bring them the news since we were the only family who had a radio. There was a Party office next door to our apartment. There was a map where they marked the advance of our army with flags. On Victory Day our neighbor boys and I tore down this map and threw it outside feeling happy that the war was over at last.

I didn’t know whether there were Jewish children at school or if there was a synagogue in Zhmerinka or any demonstration of the Jewish life. Later on it turned out that there was a Zionist organization in the town. I didn’t even know what Zionism was about. Aunt Rosa told us that after we moved, some officers came asking for me to interrogate me about that organization.

Stay in Central Europe

My father was financial officer of a division. The war ended for him in Vienna. He was in the rank of lieutenant colonel when the war ended. He was awarded an Order of the Red Star. In 1945 my father worked in the maintenance battalion at an aerodrome, 18 kilometers from Vienna. We joined him there. We went by train. We lived at this location from 1945 to 1947.

There was a Russian secondary school for officers’ children in Vienna. I had finished the ninth and went to the tenth grade and my brother went to the fourth grade. My brother and I were driven to school. I got along well with my classmates. There was no issue of nationality at school. My mother arranged a big party on my 18th birthday. My classmates and teachers came to the party from Vienna. My friend Sasha was a daughter of the Soviet Consul in Austria.

My family didn’t observe any Jewish holidays when we lived in Austria. Since we lived in the Soviet community I don’t know anything about the Jewish life in Austrian towns. We were taken on tours in Vienna. I saw the ruins of the Opera Theater in Vienna. It was burnt down. I didn’t take much interest in any places of interest in Vienna. I looked forward to going back to Odessa.

I visited the famous cemetery in Vienna where Strauss was buried. [Johann Strauss (1825–1899), famous Austrian composer, buried in Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof] It was a tragic accident that brought me to the cemetery. My classmate’s father died in a bus accident. He wanted to jump into a bus, but slipped and fell under its wheels. We went to his funeral. The casket was brought across the city. People lined along the streets raising their hands in the ‘rot front’ greeting [a fist of the right hand that German communists raised bent in the elbow as a traditional sign of solidarity.]

I was at a fancy dress ball in the palace of the Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph 17. My father’s division got an invitation there. I remember the beautiful palace, but regardless of all pleasure of living in Austria I was missing Odessa.

Then my father was transferred to a village near Budapest in Hungary. I don’t remember its name. I admired the clean towns and villages in Austria and Hungary. We lived in the houses that had formerly belonged to German fascists. I remember one of them: there were two rooms, a kitchen and an attic in it. There was a laundry room in the basement and an orchard in the yard. There were many different fruit trees in it. There was also a small kitchen garden and all paths in the garden were asphalted. There was a lovely alley crossing the garden and a nice wooden pavilion at its end. Everything was well groomed.

After returning to Odessa

In late 1947 my father was demobilized. We returned to Odessa. When we came back there I heard that one of my school friends, Bertha, and her family perished in the ghetto in Odessa. When we returned to Odessa we lived with my cousin Inna, Abram’s daughter, and then with Aunt Nina, my father’s younger sister. In 1948 we received a two-room apartment on the first floor in Kuznechnaya Street. There was a stove in the kitchen that was also used to heat the apartment.

My father went to work as an auditor and accountant at the railroad logistics office. Then he went to work as an accountant at the emergency office where he worked until 1966. My mother didn’t go to work. We didn’t observe any Jewish holidays at this period. I didn’t hear people speaking Yiddish in the streets in Odessa. I knew that there was one synagogue after the war. Like everywhere else in the country there was a terrible lack of food in Odessa.

In 1948 I entered the College of Foreign Languages. This college later became the Department of Roman and German languages of Odessa University. The admission commission was very please with my conduct of German at the entrance exam. I studied English in college. I don’t think Jews were having any problems with entering a college. There were not many Jewish students in the college. As for Jewish lecturers, I only remember Lourie, who taught Russian literature. I joined the Komsomol in college. I liked to study and I had many friends in college. We celebrated Soviet holidays and birthdays, went to parades and to the cinema.

In 1951 I married my distant relative Michael Aizenberg, who I met when we were in evacuation in Kzyl-Orda. My husband was born in Odessa in 1927. Michael’s father, Shulem Aizenberg, was a very decent man. He went to the front on the first days of the Great Patriotic War. He was captured near Sevastopol. All captives lined up and fascists ordered, ‘Commissars and Jews, step forward!’ He was the first to step forward. He was shot. I don’t know how my husband got to know these details of his father’s death, but that’s what Michael said about how his father died. Michael had a brother. His name was Yuri. Their mother Rosa ignored her children’s needs when they were in evacuation. They were starving. She didn’t go to work. After the war they returned to Odessa.

Michael finished an evening school and entered the Automechanic College in Odessa. After finishing this college he worked as an electrician at the Kozhzamenitel plant where he became the manager of a mechanic shop. Michael’s family was not religious and he didn’t observe any Jewish traditions. He was a member of the Communist Party.

We had a civil ceremony at the district registry office and had a wedding party where our families and relatives got together. We had a wedding party in my uncle Abram’s apartment since my parents’ apartment was very small. My husband and I lived with my parents at first.

In 1952 I finished the college with honors and got a job assignment at the Golaya Pristan district town in Kherson region. I was an English teacher at a local school. Golaya Pristan was a small town on the bank of the Dnieper tributary. It was a mud cure resort at that time. We rented a one-room apartment in a small house where our landlady resided, too. The school paid our monthly rental fee and provided coal to us.

We lived in Golaya Pristan for two years. Michael couldn’t find a job and we decided to go back to Odessa. I couldn’t find a teacher’s job in Odessa. My father helped me to get a controller’s job in the shoe factory. Then I got ill: there was something wrong with a joint in my right hand. After I recovered I went to work as an English teacher at the engineer training course at Technician House where I worked for nine years.

In 1952 I heard about the Doctors’ Plot 18, but since I was raised as a patriot I believed that what the government said to be true. It would have never occurred to me that something could be wrong in the Soviet country. Stalin was my idol. When he died in 1953 I was in such sorrow that I even got some gray hair. Khrushchev’s speech 19 was a discovery and actually a shock for me. Since that time I did not put all my trust into what Soviet newspapers published.

My brother Georgi finished his secondary school with honors in 1953. After finishing school he wanted to enter the Odessa Construction College, but he faced anti-Semitism there: the commission lowered his mark at an entrance exam. Our acquaintances told us that the rector of this college couldn’t stand Jews. All our attempts to prove that Georgi was right failed. Georgi was so shocked by this injustice that he was on the verge of committing suicide.

However, he went to the preparatory training course at the Polytechnic College and after finishing this course he entered the Mechanic Faculty of this college that he finished with honors. Georgi was a design engineer at the special design office. He had innovative developments and patent certificates. He became manager of a big design office.

In 1961 Georgi married Dina, a Russian girl. She was an engineer in the same design office where my brother worked. My parents liked Dina and didn’t have any objections to their marriage. In 1962 their daughter Nelia was born. Later they divorced. My brother’s wife left my brother for the chief engineer of their design office. Their daughter lives in America now. Dina died of stomach cancer.

My brother remarried in 1973. His second wife Tatiana is also Russian. Their son Michael moved to the US in the late 1990s. Georgi and Tatiana live in Odessa. They are pensioners. The design office where my brother used to work was closed. Georgi works as a guard at a parking lot. He is very unhappy about not being able to find a job to his liking.

My son Sasha was born in 1955. He was a weak and sickly child. In his infancy he had all diseases one could imagine and stayed in all hospitals in the town. He had rheumatic heart disease and at times he couldn’t even walk. My father loved Sasha dearly. He took him to kindergarten in the morning before he went to work. When Sasha turned seven years of age his health condition didn’t allow him to walk to school. We bought him everything he needed and on 1st September we carried him to school. We enviously watched other children walking to school with bouquets of flowers. Sasha studied at home. Schoolteachers came to teach him. Sasha wasn’t that good at his studies. His disease took away much of his energy. After finishing the seventh grade in 1969 he entered the Automechanic Technical School.

In 1956 my husband and I received a room in a communal apartment in Havannaya Street in the very center of the town. It was a very small 14 square meter room, but I kept it always tidy and clean and our friends asked me how I managed to keep it so orderly. There was even a children’s corner for Sasha in this room. My son had a desk, a bed and a sideboard. In 1960 we exchanged this room for a room in a communal apartment in Olgievskaya Street in the center of the town. This was a 42 square meter room, but it was very cold since there was stove heating in it. We divided this huge room into two and had gas heating installed. This is the apartment I still live in.   

In 1964 I went to work at the Vorovskogo factory. The director of this factory and most of the shop managers were Jews. I was senior engineer dispatcher. To get this position I finished a special mechanization of records course. It was hard work and I worked in shifts. It included seven night shifts per month. In 1966 my father died of cancer of his urinary bladder. He was 58. He was buried in the town cemetery. My mother went to work after he died. In 1970 I divorced my husband after living together for 19 years. He left me for another woman.

When Jews began to move to Israel in the 1970s I was surprised and annoyed since I was raised to believe in different things. Even my boss, who used to tell us at political classes that everything would be fine in this country, left. I was chief of a department at that period and I couldn’t even see my relatives off to the airport since I was afraid that people would blame me for this. However, they understood me and didn’t blame me for this. I am still in contact with them.

In 1972 my son finished his technical school and went to work at the Kozhzamenitel plant. Sasha was promoted to the position of foreman at a shop. He worked in shifts. In 1973 Sasha went to the army. He had three or four medical check-ups in hospital, but was proved to be fit for military service. In three months he suffered from an acute attack of rheumatic heart disease and was taken to hospital. My brother went to Zagorsk, met with Sasha’s managers and repaid them for paying attention to Sasha’s problems. Sasha was released from the army after several weeks in hospital. He returned to Odessa and got married in a month.

He married Ludmila Safronova, a Russian girl. She was only 17 when they got married. In 1974 their son Victor was born. Ludmila entered a medical school and finished it. Her parents and I helped her to raise their boy. After the wedding the newlyweds lived with me. Then they moved to Ludmila parents’ three-room apartment. Shortly afterward Sasha and Ludmila decided to divorce. Ludmila remarried in 1985. She lives in Germany with her second husband now.

I retired in 1984. I continued to do some work though, until our office closed down due to lack of financing. I worked as a packing operator in a shop. When construction of a new factory building was completed I quit my job since it was too far away from where I lived. Then I went to work as an operator at the Scientific Research Communications Institute. I worked there for four years and then was dismissed when I turned 65. I haven’t worked ever since.

In 1985 my son was murdered. Once in summer he showed up neither at home, nor at his ex-wife’s home. Sasha had a Zaporozhets car and I thought there was something wrong with the car. I called traffic police and they told me that he had left his car on the outskirts of the town and disappeared. Sasha’s body was found in seven days on the grass. He was murdered in his car and then dropped beside the road.

His murderers were found and they confessed, but still the motives of this crime are unclear. One of them was sentenced to death and the others were sentenced to various terms in prison. The prosecutor said in court that one of Sasha’s murderers wrote in a letter that the court had got ‘I have no regrets about killing this zhydovskaya morda’ [a Jewish mug]. One zhyd [abusive word for a Jew] less in this world.’ At the funeral Sasha’s doctor approached me at the cemetery. She said, ‘We took so much effort to help him grow and after all we see such a tragic death.’

In 1987 my ex-husband died of cancer at the age of 60. He grieved after our son and this grief had a negative impact on his health condition. Michael was buried in the international town cemetery. I was at his funeral. His colleagues expressed their condolences to me.

In 1989 my grandson Victor finished school and entered the Automechanic Technical School and finished it. He also got a driver’s license and became a driver. In 1994 my grandson moved to Israel. He lives in a town near Netanya with the family of Yuri, my husband Michael’s brother. Yuri loves Victor dearly and treats him like his own son. Victor works as a driver for the director of a firm. Victor wanted me to go with him. He said, ‘Granny, just imagine – I shall be alone there and you will be alone here. I’ll worry about you.’ I refused. He calls me and asks, ‘Will you change your mind? Will you?’ I am so worried about my grandson. The situation is so worrying in Israel. I wish there was piece in the country.

In the late 1980s my mother became sickly. She had a disease of the blood vessel in her cerebrum. I made some arrangements at work to be able to work half a day to spend another half day with my mother. My nephew Michael helped me to look after my mother. Mother always tried to get up from her bed and fell down. I couldn’t lift her to put her back on the bed. I had to ask my neighbors to help me. Mother died in 1990. She was buried at the international cemetery beside my father’s grave.

In the 1990s the Jewish life began to revive in Odessa. There are two synagogues in Odessa now. There is a Jewish charity center, Gmilus Hesed, a kosher butchery and a kosher store. There is one of these so-called ‘warm houses’ funded by Gmilus Hesed near my house. It’s an apartment. The owner of the apartment opens its door to guests during meetings or on holidays, cooks food from products that Gmilus Hesed provides.

I went there on Jewish holidays. Older people get together there to spend time. I was there to observe Sabbath some time. I met interesting people there. Now this ‘warm house’ is far from my house, because it moved. I cannot walk that far and they send a volunteer from Gmilus Hesed to drive me there on Jewish holidays: Rosh Hashanah and Pesach. My relative Boris Maslekh always buys matzah for me at the synagogue. Gmilus Hesed also delivers a kilo of matzah for Pesach. Thanks to this I feel more Jewish than I did when I was young.

Glossary

Életrajz

Én nagyon későn ismertem meg az apai nagyapámat, Hochberger Lipótot [1870-es évek – 1930-as évek második fele] – nagyanyám már nem élt, nevére sem emlékszem –, mert anyámék, mikor én egy éves voltam, elváltak, és akkor megszakadt minden kapcsolat. Lehettem olyan 12 éves, amikor apám egyszer Miskolcon megjelent, és kérte anyámat, hogy szeretne magával felhozni Pestre, hogy a nagyapámat és a még élő nagybátyáimat megismerjem. És anyám hezitált, én meg azt mondtam, hogy igen. És akkor ismertem meg a nagyapámat és a még élő nagybátyáimat. A Nagymező utcában laktak. Gangos ház volt. A lakásukat inkább nevezem nagypolgári lakásnak. Amikor bementünk, az első blikk egy kicsit megdöbbentő volt, mert az első szoba teljesen nagyanyámról szólt. Ott volt egy vitrin, amiben az utolsó dolgok voltak, amikhez hozzányúlt: a szemüvege, a könyv, amit olvasott, minden, ami az élete utolsó napjaiban volt, mind ott volt, és az egész fal telis-tele volt az ő képeivel. Nagyapám egy nagyon bűbájos idős ember volt. Nekem akkor nagyon öregnek tűnt. Emlékezetem szerint zongorahangoló volt. Tudomásom szerint nagyapám vallásos volt. Azt is onnan tudtam meg, hogy vallásos, hogy én mint fiatal lány vacsora után akartam segíteni leszedni meg elmosogatni azt az egy-két tányért, és volt valami bejárónőjük, aki másnap mondta, hogy nem szólunk a nagypapának, de nem jól csináltam, mert én a tejest a húsossal összemosogattam – mert énnekem fogalmam nem volt, hogy azt hogyan kell –, és innen tudtam, hogy kóser valószínűleg [lásd: étkezési törvények]. A fiúk – legalábbis tudtommal – nem voltak vallásosak. Apám biztos, hogy nem, nem is úgy nézett ki.

Hat fiú volt apáméknál. Abból egy öngyilkos lett, ha jól emlékszem, Józsinak hívták. Volt a Náci. Annak volt két fia: a Rudi és az Ernő. A Rudival [Hochberger Rudolf, Izrael] lényegesen jobb kapcsolatom volt. Náci kiment családostul 1945-ben Izraelbe. Aztán volt az Ernő, a Dezső és a Tibi nagybátyám, akikkel utána tartottam is a kapcsolatot. Dezső volt a legkedvesebb nagybátyám. Ő is bőrös volt, bőrkereskedő. Gyakorlatilag a családnak az a része majdnem mind bőrös volt. Neki nem volt családja. Mauthausenban halt meg. Ők együtt voltak az Ernővel, és annyit tudott ő is róla, hogy nem sokkal a felszabadulás előtt tífuszt kapott, bevitték a kórházba, és soha többet nem találkoztak.

Az Hochberger Ernőék itt éltek Pesten. A felesége zsidó volt. Jól éltek végeredményben. Udvarolt a későbbi feleségének, és amikor a  mamája haldoklott, a halálos ágyán megkérte a nagybátyámat, hogy ne hagyja el a lányát, és vegye feleségül. És mert tisztességes ember volt, feleségül vette. Volt két gyerekük. Nagyon sikerült gyerekek voltak. És meghalt mind a két gyerek: a fiút munkaszolgálatosnak vitték, nem került haza, a kislány pedig bujkált itt Pesten a németek elől, együtt a vőlegényével, és ott, ahol bujkáltak, hallották, hogy kiabálnak, hogy jönnek az utca végéről az oroszok. És nagyon boldogok voltak, hogy felszabadultak. És kézen fogva szaladtak az oroszok elé. És az utca végén mentek ki a németek, megfordultak, legéppuskázták őket, és ott haltak meg – a felszabadulás napján. Az Ernő deportált volt, és arra jött haza, hogy egyik gyereke sincsen. És 1956-ban voltak ezek a zűrök [lásd: 1956-os forradalom] – a Manne Bőrgyárban volt ő a nyersbőrosztály vezetője. Nagyon közkedvelt ember volt a bőrgyárban, és valaki jóindulatúan figyelmeztette, hogy Hochberger úr, most egy darabig jó lenne, hogyha eltűnne. S akkor elszakadt nála a cérna, és azt mondta, hogy ő egy ilyen országban nem akar élni, és úgy döntött, hogy kivándorol Izraelbe, ahol Náci nevű nagybátyám élt a családjával. És rettenetesen agitált bennünket, hogy menjünk. Nevelőapám hajlamosnak mutatkozott. Én semmiképpen nem akartam menni. Mi abban az időben már különváltan éltünk a gyerekeim apjától. És mondom, hogy én nem vállalok fel három gyereket úgy, hogy elmenjek idegenbe egy rossz házassággal. De nagyon akartak menni, és én azon meggondolás alapján, hogy úgysem kapjuk meg a kivándorló útlevelet, mondtam, hogy jó, adjátok be. Na mit tesz Isten, megkaptuk. Akkor én határozott nemet mondtam, mert nekem már akkor honvágyam volt, mielőtt elmentem volna. Mondtam, hogy én nem megyek anyukámék nélkül. Mert mi mehetnénk, ők pedig nem. Úgyhogy a nagybátyámék elmentek megbántva, mert nehezen emésztette meg, hogy mi nem akartunk elmenni. Ha jól emlékszem, úgy hívták a helyet, ahol laktak, hogy Petach Tikva. A nagybátyám bőrgyárban helyezkedett el. Viszonylag korán meghalt, a nagynénémmel semmilyen kapcsolatunk utána már nem volt.

Apám, Hochberger Miksa [1890-es évek – 1944], ha jól emlékszem, talán a harmadik fiú volt. Eredetileg zongorista volt. Az egész család zenélt, lévén nagyapám zongorához való kötődése. Kereskedőt akartak volna nevelni belőle, de hát a zene. És azt hiszem, hogy anyámék házassága is ezért ment tönkre – ők egy évig voltak házasok, akkor váltak el, amikor én megszülettem. Anyukám 18 éves volt, mikor férjhez ment. És ő nem szerette ezt a bohémnak nevezett életet, hogy hol itt dolgozik, hol ott dolgozik. Később aztán azt hiszem, kereskedő lett, de nem esküszöm rá. Borzasztó kevés az emlékem róla. Találkoztam még vele talán egyszer vagy kétszer. Felvidékre költözött, ha jól emlékszem, Eperjesre, ott elvette egy rabbinak a lányát. Abból a házasságból tudomásom szerint született két fia. Az egyiket ismertem, azt elhozta Pestre, hogy megismerjen. Nagyon aranyos gyerek volt, borzasztóan ragaszkodott hozzám. Aztán gondolom, 1944-ben az egész családot elvitték és kiirtották.

A nagypapámat úgy hívták, hogy Alsó Ferenc. A mondások szerint az egész család anyai részről erdélyi, és állítólag a nagypapámat egy erdélyi köznemesi család fogadta örökbe. Az Alsó neki nem magyarosított neve, eredetileg ezt kapta. Nagyapám 40 évig főtörzs foglár volt, katonai börtönben, a legmagasabb beosztásban. Nem tudom, mikor keveredtek ők Debrecenbe – mert Erdélyből aztán átkerültek Debrecenbe –, és még Debrecenben is azt hiszem, azt csinálhatta. Nagy népszerűségnek örvendett, fegyvert soha nem használt. Ahogy hallottam, voltak még az első világháború utántól olasz foglyok meg mindenféle náció, és amikor lázadás volt, fegyver nélkül lement a rabok közé, és mindig rendet tudott csinálni. A nagyapámnak van Ferenc József kitüntetése, amire nagyon büszke volt. Ő vallásos zsidó volt. Ez azt jelentette nekem, hogy soha nem reggelizett úgy, hogy előtte táleszben-tfilinben  ne imádkozott volna. Nagyapám tartotta az ünnepeket. Ő, gondolom, így nevelkedett, és ahogy anyámtól tudtam, ő ugyanezt csinálta végig, amíg a katonaságnál szolgált. Tehát ott is betartotta ezeket, hogy reggel ima előtt nem evett. Az ünnepeket aztán mi is megtartottuk, már annyiban, hogy például hosszúnapot, hogy addig nem ültünk le vacsorázni, amíg nagypapa nem jött haza. 1944-ben halt meg, gázban. Deportálásban. Bár könyörögtünk neki, mert volt papírja [Azaz voltak hamis papírjai – A szerk.], és a kinézete után  nyugodtan feljöhettek volna Pestre, talán lett volna mód, hogy valahol elbújtassák őket. Nem volt hajlandó, mindig azt mondta, hogy mit ér az én életem, ha nem tudom, hogy veletek mi lesz.

A nagymama lánykori neve Grünstein Zseni volt. A nagymama csak annyira volt vallásos, hogy elment a nagyünnepeken  a templomba. Az anyai nagyszülők részéről senkit sem ismertem. Hallomásból tudtam, hogy nagyanyámnak volt valami unokahúga, ha jól tudom, Marosvásárhelyen. Az anyai ág Marosvásárhelyről származott, anyám is marosvásárhelyi volt. Hogy mikor települhettek át, fogalmam sincs róla. Azt tudom, hogy anyám – mert apám pesti volt – 18 évesen ment férjhez. Tehát ők akkor már Magyarországon lehettek 1923-ban. Debrecenben éltek. Három gyerek volt nagyanyáméknál. Anyám, Margit született 1905-ben, és ő volt a legkisebb. Valamivel idősebb volt a nagybátyám, őt Gyulának hívták. És a legidősebb volt a nagynéném, azt Teréznek hívták. Gondolom, ő 1900 körül születhetett.

A családnak evvel a részével jó volt a kapcsolat. Nagybátyám, mióta visszaemlékszem rá, Bécsben élt. Nem találta meg itthon a számításait, és kiment Bécsbe. Kirakatrendező volt, Bécs legelső kirakatrendezője. Volt rá elképzelés, hogy majd kint fogok élni náluk egy darabig, mert én olyan pályára szerettem volna menni, ami csak Bécsben lehetett volna. Mozdulatművészeti főiskolára akartam menni. Közbeszólt a történelem. A nagybátyám elvett egy osztrák nőt. Még az Anschluss előtt úgy gondolta, hogy jobb, ha elmegy. Ki akart vándorolni. Ha jól emlékszem, Chilébe ment az utolsó hajóval. Akarta, hogy a felesége vele menjen, de ő nem akart vele menni. A későbbiekben állítólag kiderült, hogy fasiszta volt. Amikor vége volt a háborúnak, ha jól tudom, a nő valahol megtalálta a nagybátyámat, azzal, hogy szeretne utánamenni, de mondta, hogy köszöni szépen, ő ezt a részét lezárta az életének, és ott valakivel együtt él.  Mi nem is láttuk azóta, hogy kiment. Terézék Pesten éltek sokáig, neki volt egy lánya. Aztán mikor befejeződött a háború, akkor előkerült a nevelőapám – ők bujkáltak itt-ott-amott, és valahogy megtalálták egymást. Apám rögtön nyitott egy optikai üzletet Miskolcon, és ők jobbnak látták, ha leköltöznek Miskolcra. Úgyhogy mikor anyámmal hazakeveredtünk a deportálásból, akkor ők már lent éltek Miskolcon apámmal. Aztán visszaköltöztek Pestre, és aztán utolsó éveikre leköltöztek Kecskemétre, és ott is haltak meg. Anyámnak nem volt szakmája. De mindenhez értett, mert borzasztó kézügyessége volt. Mi nagyon csórók voltunk, úgyhogy a ruhákat mindig ő varrta nekem, és mindenki csodálkozott, hogy én mitől vagyok olyan elegáns. Attól, hogy anyám nagyon ügyesen varrt. Minden, amihez nyúlt, arannyá vált a kezében.

Tehát én Pesten születtem. 1924-ben. Aztán anyám elvált, még nem is voltam egy éves, akkor – gondolom – visszaköltözhetett Debrecenbe, és együtt laktunk az anyai nagyszülőkkel. S ha jól tudom, a nevelőapámmal Debrecenben ismerkedett meg. Nekem a nevelőapám olyan volt, mintha az apám lenne. Lőwinger Lászlónak hívták, utána Ladányi lett belőle [lásd: névmagyarosítás]. Ő 1905-ben született, egyidős volt anyámmal. Fogalmam sincs róla, milyen végzettsége volt. A nevelőapám apja órás volt, lehet, hogy kitanulta a szakmát, de arra nem esküszöm meg. Mindennel foglalkozott, hogy meg tudjon élni.

Az ő szüleivel nagyon jó viszonyban voltunk. Ők Miskolcon éltek. Átköltöztünk Debrecenből Miskolcra, de fogalmam sincs, miért. Miskolcon teljesen vegyes környéken laktunk. Egy kis telken volt négy kis földszintes ház, ott volt egy házinéni, és rajta kívül volt három lakó. Amiben mi laktunk, anyámék, a nagyanyámék és én, az egy kétszoba-konyhás lakás volt és a WC az udvaron. A nagyszülők meg én az egyik szobában, a másikban meg anyámék. Könyvek voltak otthon. Nem volt könyvtár, mert nem volt rá lehetőség, de azért naprakészen volt, amit én is megkaptam. Én nagyon sokat olvastam. Nagymosásra volt, hogy hívtak valakit, aki azt megcsinálta, de különben nem volt háztartási alkalmazott.

Én Miskolcon kezdtem az iskolákat. A zsidó elemiben kezdtem el az iskolát. Onnan kerültem át a zsidó polgári iskolába, ami azt hiszem, az életem egyik legmeghatározóbb része volt. Mert szerintem az ottani tanári kar magasan felülmúlná a mostani egyetemi tanárokét. Csak jót és szépet lehetett tanulni abban az iskolában, és magas szinten. Az iskolába nagyon sok keresztény lány is járt, mert iskolán belül működött egy tanítónőképző, ahova nagyon sokan jártak az ország különböző részéről, keresztény lányok is. Szóval nem volt egy bigott iskola. Én jó tanuló voltam. Abban az időben – legalábbis nálunk a családban – mindenki beszélt németül. A németet külön tanultuk. A lehetőségekhez képest jártam különórára. Akkor még tudtam héberül olvasni. Borzasztóan szerettem a hittantanárt, ha jól emlékszem, Büchler bácsinak hívták. Egy tüneményes öregúr volt, mindenki hülyének vette. De hát akkor megtanultam héberül olvasni. Zenét nem tanultam, énekkarra jártam az iskolába. Torna volt a kedvenc tárgyam. Jártam különtornára. Az iskolában tanított egy fiatal tornatanárnő, akinek volt egy privát mozdulatművészeti iskolája, s ahhoz jártam. Ez inkább a művészet felé hajlott, mint a sport felé. Szerettem csinálni, és ő is, meg volt, hogy jártam máshoz is, aki egy-egy előadásra vagy valamire felkészített, és mindenki azt mondta, hogy igen nagy tehetséget látnak bennem. És én szerettem, és gondoltam, ez egy nagyon szép pálya, és ezt kéne csinálni. Nem, mert beleszóltak a németek. Én soha nem voltam egy nagy barátkozó. Voltak persze olyan barátok, akik meghatározók voltak az életemben, de nagyon kevés. Fiatalabb években, mikor a nagynénémék még Pesten voltak, sokat voltam fent, Pesten a szünidőben. Emlékszem, anyámék voltak síelni, de úgy komplett nagy nyaralások nem voltak. Egyszer voltam bálban életemben, akkor lehettem 17-18 éves. Én már nem is tudom, kinek a rendezvénye volt, de egy nagyszabású bál volt. Anyám kísért, és akkor volt egy nagy szerelem, és az. Szép volt, emlékezetes volt.

Templomba akkor mentem, ha látogatóban voltam, hogyha nagyünnepek voltak, akkor elmentem, mert nagyünnepekkor elment nagyanyám is. Meg hát az volt egy ilyen találkozóhely. Nem szerettem, mert nem arról szólt, amiről kellett volna. A vallás mint olyan, se a zsidó, se más vallás nem vonz igazából. Mert én bigottnak tartom. De hát ezt mindenkinek a szíve joga úgy gyakorolni, ahogy ő szereti. Miskolcon én két templomra emlékszem. Volt egy a Palóci utcán, nem messze tőlünk, nagypapám oda járt, és volt a Kazinczy templom, ami a legnagyobb zsidó templom volt. Nagyünnepekre készültek a szép, divatos ruhák, és akkor kiöltözködött mindenki, és rázta a rongyot. A templomban is ha felmentem a női részre, akkor nem az imádkozás volt a fő, hanem a beszélgetés meg a pletyka. És ez nekem igazából nem tetszett.

Cionizmusról akkor hallottam, mikor már nagyobb lány voltam. Már a polgári után. Mert volt néhány kassai barátom, nagyon jó haverok, fiúk, és az egyik nagyon nagy cionista volt. Erdőkitermeléssel foglalkoztak, és nagyon sok zsidót segített át, gondolom, Magyarországon keresztül aliákban, hogy ki tudjanak menni. Vele jóban voltam, de a cionizmussal nem igazán foglalkoztam.

Mivel nem volt tehetős a család, amikor elvégeztem a négy polgárit, tovább akartam tanulni, de gimnáziumra nem volt pénz, úgyhogy beírattak engem a női ipariskolába, ahol amellett, hogy magas szinten a művészettörténettől kezdve mindent tanítottak, tantárgy volt a szabás-varrás. Azt hiszem, nem tévedek, én voltam az egyetlen zsidó az iskolában. Sokáig nem éreztem megkülönböztetést igazából. Feltűnő volt, hogy a katolikusok és a keresztények [azaz a protestánsok] sokkal nagyobb ellenségek voltak egymással szemben – valószínű, én egyedül kiestem ebből a szórásból. De arra emlékszem, hogy ott kicsit mindig rá kellett hajtanom a jó jegyekért. Tehát valahogy bizonyítani kellett, hogy azokat a jó jegyeket megérdemlem. Aztán a későbbiekben voltak antiszemita megnyilvánulások. Az egyik legjobb barátnőmnek nevezett nagyon helyes keresztény lány egy bírónak volt a lánya, nagyon jóban voltunk. Ő volt az egyetlen, akivel én – már akkor nagyon szélsőséges hangok voltak – színházba, koncertre el tudtam menni, ő volt az egyetlen, aki szívesen jött velem.

Ez három év volt, és nem érettségit, hanem képesítőt kaptunk. És megkaptam a segédlevelet is, női és lánykaruha-készítő segédlevelet. És ha egy fél évet rátanult valaki, akkor le lehetett tenni a mestervizsgát. Úgyhogy én ezt elvégeztem. Ott is vizsgázni kellett, és a város legjobb szabói adták ki a feladatokat, hogy annak alapján bírálják el, hogy megkapom-e. Emlékszem rá, hogy kaptam egy ruhát, ami egy borzasztóan kacifántos darab volt. Ebédszünetben hazaengedtek, nagyon el voltam keseredve, és mondtam az anyámnak, hogy ezt képtelen leszek megcsinálni. Anyám azt mondta, hát hogyne tudnád, és akkor elmagyarázta. Megcsináltam. És aki vizsgáztatott, az a szabó, abban volt legalább annyi tisztesség, hogy azt mondta, hogy kifogástalanul sikerült, pedig tudja, az volt a szándékom, hogy megbuktatom. De az iskola befejezése után már nem is igazán lehetett mit csinálni, mert ez már 1942-1943 körül volt. Nem tudtam már elhelyezkedni.

Mikor bejöttek a németek, nekem emlékezetes maradt, hogy mentem egyszer hazafelé, és két egészen fiatal, nagyon jóképű német katona leszólított az utcán – rajtam sárga csillag volt természetesen –, és beszélgettünk. És az lett a vége, hogy meghívtam őket magunkhoz. Kicsit tágra meredt a szemük anyáméknak, mikor én két SS-katonával megjelentem a lakásban. S akkor leült a család, és beszélgettünk. Két nagyon értelmes, maximális empátiával rendelkező fiatal srác volt. Elmondták a háború összes rémségeit, és mindent elmondtak, hogy mire vigyázzunk, és higgyük el, ők nem tehetnek róla, hogy ez van. Őket hozzák, tőlük ez idegen, ezt kell csinálniuk.

Gondolom olyan – nem emlékszem rá pontosan –, olyan április körül lehetett, amikor jöttek a csendőrök, hogy elvisznek minket a gettóba. Az Arany János utcában volt a gettó. Annyit lehetett vinni, amit a kezünkben el tudtunk vinni. Apám már akkor nem volt otthon. Munkaszolgálatos volt. Akkor még lehetett lapokat kapni. És akkor ott összepakoltak. Ugyanakkor vitték el a házinénit is, aki szintén zsidó volt, a másik két lakó az nem. És a szomszédok jöttek át, és mindenki megnézte, hogy mit szeretne nekünk megmenteni, és ölszámra cipelték ki a holmit a lakásból. Beköltöztünk a gettóba. Engem elvittek onnan minden reggel dolgozni – aki akart mehetett, és én akartam menni, és jártam egy ilyen kertészetbe dolgozni, ahol katonák voltak a felvigyázók, és rendesek voltak. Palántázni kellett, meg mit tudom én, mit kellett csinálni. Fegyveres kísérettel vittek reggel, aztán este visszahoztak. Aztán nem sokkal utána, május végén, júniusban, összeszedték a gettóban lévőket, és vittek bennünket a téglagyárba. Ott aztán egymás hegyén-hátán, rettenetes körülmények között voltunk. Ott már csendőrök voltak, és ott is vagoníroztak bennünket, és onnan vittek Auschwitzba. Marhavagonokban vittek minket összezsúfolva. Én együtt voltam a nagyszülőkkel és anyámmal. Ha jól emlékszem, beiglit vittünk magunkkal, és nagyon kellett spórolni a kajával.

Na és amikor megérkeztünk Birkenauba, ott kiszállítottak, és mindent ott kellett hagyni: kaját, amivel spóroltunk, a világon mindent ott kellett hagyni. És akkor ott volt a Mengele, ő szelektált minket, és csak így intett: jobbra, balra. Először a nagyapámat küldték el jobbra. Az róla az utolsó képem, hogy visszafordult, és annyit mondott, hogy vigyázzatok anyátokra. És akkor mi együtt maradtunk anyámmal és nagyanyámmal. Aztán nagyanyámat is elküldte jobbra, és akkor láttam őt utoljára. Akkor betereltek minket egy nagy helyiségbe – ez júniusban volt már, gyönyörűen sütött a nap, emlékszem – és mindenkinek levágták kopaszra a haját, leszőrtelenítettek mindenütt. S emlékszem rá, egymásra néztünk anyámmal, és elkezdtünk nevetni. Kínunkban, mert szörnyen néztünk ki. És akkor le kellett anyaszült meztelenre vetkőzni, és vittek minket a fürdőbe. Akkor még mi azt nem tudtuk, hogy az lehet fürdő, lehet gáz. Akkor speciel fürdő volt. És hát törülköző semmi nem volt. Jött az ember libasorban, volt egy nagy kupac, amiben ruháknak nevezett rongyok voltak, és ami jött, azt vette fel az ember. Mi az auschwitzi lágerbe kerültünk, az megsemmisítő láger, tehát onnan nemigen vittek munkára embereket. Ezért nem vagyok tetoválva.

Végig anyámmal voltam, mindenhol. Ha anyám nincs, akkor én nem kerülök haza. Én borzasztóan élhetetlen voltam. Ez, mondom, megsemmisítő láger volt. Itt nem voltak priccsek. Itt volt a barakk, és olyan 1000–1200 ember volt egy barakkban, és semmi, csak a csupasz föld, se takaró, semmi. És csak úgy lehetett lefeküdni, hogy a szemben lévő sornak a lába az én vállamnál volt, és az én lábam az ő vállánál volt. És ha valaki meg akart fordulni, akkor az egész sornak meg kellett fordulni, mert annyi hely nem volt. Azon a remek helyen töltöttem én el három és fél hónapot június végétől október közepe tájáig. Időnként jöttek szemrevételezni, mert volt olyan hír, hogy a szemrevalóbb fiatal nőket vitték bordélyokba. Amikor jöttek és lehetett látni, hogy most megint valami válogatás lesz, akkor bujkálni kellett, hogy ne lássák az embert. Meg volt azért, amikor munkára is elvittek. És mindig úgy volt, hogy én beálltam a sorba, és anyám mindig legalább négy-öttel hátrább állt, hogyha engem nem választanak be, hogy ő kilógjon, hogyha beválasztanak és őt nem, akkor oda lógjon. És ez volt nekem az utolsó válogatás; nem voltak már akkor rengetegen a táborban. Emlékszem, hogy ez Ros Hásáná első napján volt. És beválasztottak minket. És anyám azt mondta, ez borzasztó rossz, ami itt van, de már ezt megszoktuk. Nem kéne inkább itt maradni? És mondtam, hogy anyukám, idáig soha nem választottak be minket, most beválasztottak, akkor menjünk el. Azok közül, akik ott maradtak, egy sem jött haza.

És akkor elvittek minket Bergen-Belsenbe, ami felüdülés volt az Auschwitzhoz képest, mert itt zell-sátrak voltak, szalma vagy mi a fene volt leszórva a földre, és mindenki kapott két pokrócot. Akkor már nagyon hideg volt. Leterítettünk négyen-öten egy pokrócot, összebújtunk, és a megmaradt pokrócokat rátettük magunkra. Auschwitzban a kaját azt nem lehet kajának mondani, mert az körülbelül olyan volt, mint mikor a rétet lekaszálják, aztán úgy megfőzik minden nélkül. Na most Bergen-Belsenben már azért valami normálisabb volt. És ott is volt egy sorozás, és besoroztak minket és elvittek bennünket Wienerstadtba, ahol egy hatalmas fegyvergyár volt. Ott már emberibbek voltak a körülmények: emeletes priccsek voltak, és mindenkinek megvolt a saját fekhelye. Minket bevittek egy hatalmas nagy hodályba – rengeteg ember dolgozott ott –, és mindenkit valahova leültettek. Én a terem teljesen más felébe kerültem, mint ahol anyám volt. Azon a részen kézigránátfejeket csináltak. És ott volt egy nagyon helyes munkafelügyelőnő. És kitudódott, hogy anyám jól beszél németül, s mondta a nő, hogy neki nem szabad velünk beszélgetni, de azért beszélgettek. És mondja, hogy ott, az előtte lévő sorban olyan nehezen tanulják meg, amit kell csinálni. Erre anyám kapott az alkalmon, és mondta, hogy itt dolgozik a teremben a lánya, akinek nagyon jó a kézügyessége, nem próbálná-e ki. Ó dehogynem, úgyhogy átvittek oda.

Az első időben sok volt a munka, de aztán egyre kevesebb lett. És úgy határozott a vezetőség, hogy kinti munkára visznek, gyomokat irtani. És erre mondta ez a német felügyelőnő, az a nagyon rendes, az SS-nőnek, hogy neki három rabra szüksége van, mert nagyon sok áru van, amit még be kell csomagolni. Mellettem dolgozott egy volt osztálytársam is. És mondta, hogy anyám, én és az a csaj. Úgyhogy mi hosszú időn keresztül azt csináltuk: voltak ezek a kézigránátfejek, amikből egy bakelitdobozba mit tudom én, tizenkettőt kellett egy sorba rakni, és egy fadobozba nem tudom, hány ilyen dobozt berakni. És ő visszatartott nem tudom, hány ládával, és nekünk az volt a dolgunk, hogy minden reggel a ládákat kinyitottuk, kiöntöttük a sok kézigránátfejet, és estére becsomagoltuk. De melegben voltunk, és nem kellett odakint fagyoskodni.

Majd eljött az a nap, amikor mondták, hogy jönnek az angolok, jönnek az amerikaiak, jönnek az oroszok, és el kell vinni a foglyokat. És akkor bevagoníroztak minket, és három hétig utaztunk vagonokban. Ez már március-április körül volt. Valahova megérkeztünk, épphogy csak elhelyeztek, már kellett megint továbbmenni. Volt olyan nap, hogy az volt a napi élelem, hogy búzaszemet adtak így a markunkba, ami belefért, és ezt rágtuk. És végül megérkeztünk Theresienbe, úgyhogy nem tudtuk, hogy hol járunk, mert Theresienstadt a kirakattáborok egyike volt, ahol együtt maradtak a családok, csomagot kaphattak, levelezhettek. Az egy katonai városszerűen kialakított tábor volt, bástyás házak voltak, éltek ott emberek. Minket oda felvittek, és lentről a városból jöttek fel, mindenki kereste, hogy nincs-e hozzátartozója, ismerőse, rokona. És jött egy fiatal fiú, beszélgetünk, és mondja, hogy ők munkaszolgálatosok voltak, és van egy kórház, és ott teljesítenek szolgálatot. Kérdezem tőle, hogy Hochberger nincs véletlenül köztetek? Még most is emlékszem, hogy amikor kimondtam, akkor úgy éreztem, hát ilyen hülyeséget hogy lehet kérdezni ilyen helyen. Azt mondja, de, van, azt mondja, van, a Rudi, a legjobb barátom. Mondom, én meg az unokatestvére vagyok, szóljál már neki. És akkor elment, és úgy egy óra múlva megjelent az unokabátyám, és azt hiszem, az életem egyik legszebb ajándékát kaptam tőle, mert hozott két fogkefét, és ugye egy évig azt sem tudtuk, hogy néz ki. És hozott fel kaját. És egyszer felkeltünk reggel, és volt ott még egy miskolci nő, ha jól emlékszem, akivel nagyon összebarátkoztunk még Auschwitzban, és egy hajdúszoboszlói nő, egy keramikusművész. És anyám, ez a miskolci nő, ez a keramikus meg én fölébredtünk a sátorban, és nem volt egy lélek sem. És mentünk ki, és az egész tábor üres volt. Hát mi lehet? S akkor megtudtuk, hogy az éjjel bejöttek az oroszok.

Átvették az oroszok Theresienben a felügyeletet, és mondták, hogy mivel Theresienstadt Csehszlovákiához tartozik, természetesen először a cseheket viszik haza, és azokat a fiúkat, akik a kórházban dolgoztak, és mindegyik vihet magával két hozzátartozót is. Jött az unokabátyám, és mondta, hogy ő és van egy másik barátja, akinek senkije sincs, elvisznek minket kettőnket, meg ezt a miskolci nőt meg ezt a hajdúszoboszlói nőt, és akkor soron kívül haza lehet menni az oroszok különvonatán. Valamikor június végén, július elején keveredtünk mi haza. És akkor Pestre jöttünk, és mindenki rohant haza, hogy megnézze, hogy ki maradt meg a családból. Mi mentünk a nagybátyámékhoz, ahol csak két nagynéném volt, még akkor a nagybátyám nem keveredett elő. Aztán volt valami zsidó segélyszervezet, valami pénzt vagy valami papírt adtak, már nem emlékszem rá. Csak arra emlékszem, hogy mentem az utcán, és összetalálkoztam egy régi miskolci ismerőssel, és mondta, hogy ad nekem pénzt. Mondom, ne adjál pénzt, hát mire föl. Tudta, hogy mire jöttem haza. És mondta, hogy én csak nyugodtam fogadjam el a pénzt, mert apámnak üzlete van Miskolcon, és van mire. Hát mondtam, köszönöm szépen. És akkor lementünk Miskolcra. Miskolcon állítólag naponta kiírták a zsidó templom falán, hogy kik azok, akiket életben találtak, és állítólag ők már tudtak arról, hogy mi életben vagyunk. Volt egy albérleti lakása akkor már apámnak, már ott volt a nagynéném meg az unokanővérem is, és apámnak már akkor megvolt az üzlete. Apám összetársult egy másikkal, akinek volt egy ékszerüzlete a főutcán. Tehát látszer és ékszer lett, és az egy nagy üzlet volt. A társnak volt egy fia, aki kitanult látszerész volt, és volt egy kis üzlete és egy kis műhely is mögötte. Úgy döntöttek akkor anyámék, hogy ők lesznek a nagy üzletben, és ezt a kis üzletet vezettem én, és a fiú pedig bent dolgozott a műhelyben. Úgyhogy nem volt megélhetési problémám.

A visszaérkezésünk után egy-két napra el kellett menni, hogy valami ruhát vegyünk. Mikor mentünk vásárolni, akkor ismerkedtem meg a férjemmel. Textilkonfekció-üzletük volt, pont a város szívében, úgy hívták, hogy Weinich-udvar, nagy kétportálos üzlet volt. És ott állt valami úriember fajta. Akkor még Weitzenfeldnek hívták. A lányok még Weitzenfeldnek születtek. Ha jól emlékszem, Pesten kaptuk meg a papírt a névmagyarosításról.

A férjeméknél három fiú, három lány volt, és mindegyik másképp magyarosított. Ő 1906-ban született Miskolcon. Kereskedő lett. Ez egy jól szituált család volt. Kiházasították a lányokat és a fiúkat is. Kivételt képezett Pali, aki segédeskedett a szülők üzletében, azzal, hogy amikor ők már nem lesznek, akkor az üzletet ő fogja örökölni. Deportálták a feleségét és a 12 éves fiát. Nem jöttek vissza. A szülők sem maradtak meg, ő egyedül volt.

Az egyik testvérének Pesten szövet-nagykereskedése volt. Volt két gyereke, ők leköltöztek Miskolcra, beköltöztek a szülők lakásába, és nagy meglepetést okozott, mikor Pali beállított. És akkor mondták, hogy ha már a Pista ott volt, akkor csinálja ő az üzletet, úgyhogy akkor együtt csinálták az üzletet. Majd a harmadik testvér, a Gyuszi, aki szintén valami szövetben utazott itt Pesten, úgy döntött, hogy ő is beszállna az üzletbe. És ő is beszállt az üzletbe, úgyhogy ha én az üzletbe bementem, olyan voltam, mint egy előkelő idegen.

Én voltam húsz éves, ő meg negyven. De nagyon jóképű volt, nagyon jó kiállású, nagyon kedves. Anyámék hallani sem akartak róla. És mindig azt mondták, hogy idős hozzám. Annyi kérőm volt, mint égen a csillag. Jöttek haza a zsidó fiúk, akik itt maradtak család, minden nélkül. Én meg szemrevaló lány voltam. Kérő lett volna, de nekem ez kellett, mert nyugodt, kiegyensúlyozott életre vágytam a deportálás után. Ha jól emlékszem, annak az évnek a decemberében esküdtünk. Egyházi esküvőnk volt [lásd: házasság, esküvői szertartás], mert még nem volt meg a felesége holttá nyilvánítása, és ezért nem lehetett polgári. És rá talán egy évre volt a polgári. Én első perctől szerettem volna gyereket, de egy évig nem maradtam teherben. Amikor Zsuzsikával terhes voltam, akkor már nem dolgoztam. Az ikrek 1950-ben születtek. Nem tudtuk, hogy ikrek lesznek. Őket is otthon szültem, és amikor az első kijött álltam volna fel, de mondta az orvos, maradjak csak, jön még egy. Az anyám rengeteget segített a nevelésükben. Én sok munkát el tudtam vállalni, mert tudtam, hogy ő velük lesz.

A lányokat nemcsak azért nem neveltük zsidónak, mert én nem voltam vallásos, hanem mindig az volt az elvem, hogy kétféleképpen egy gyereket nem lehet nevelni, és amikor ők iskolába kezdtek járni, akkor a vallás nem volt téma – ami szerintem nagyon helyes volt. Nekik az első találkozásuk a zsidóságukkal még Miskolcon volt. Ahol laktunk, ott volt egy belső udvar, és az egyik szomszéd testvérének volt egy kislánya, annyi idős, mint az én gyerekeim, játszottak. Egyszer csak beszaladt Zsuzsika sírva. Azt mondta a hogyhívjákocska nekem, hogy én zsidó vagyok. Mondtam, hogy és ezért te miért sírsz? Hát ő azt hitte, hogy ez valami borzalmas sértés. És akkor magyaráztam meg neki, hogy zsidó vagy, zsidó az anyád, zsidó az apád, zsidó az egy vallás, ez nem téma már nálunk, egyik ember olyan, mint a másik, de ezért te ne sírjál, ez nem sértő. Ha azt mondják, hogy te zsidó vagy, akkor mondd nagyon büszkén, hogy igen, én zsidó vagyok. Én azért bementem a szomszédhoz, és mondtam, hogy ezt máskor hanyagolják el, mert ha nem tudnák, a felekezet ellen való izgatást ma már büntetik. És ez a gyerek nem magától találta ezt ki, ezt otthon hallhatta.

Nálunk mindig volt karácsony. Mindig volt plafonig érő fa. Az én gyerekkoromban otthon nem volt. Azt hiszem, nem is volt módunk rá. De már Zsuzsikánál volt, minden gyereknél volt karácsonyfa. Zsuzsikánál is volt, amit a Gyuri, a férje ugyan nehezen tolerált.

12 évi házasság után mentünk szét. 1957. szeptember 5-én. Elég sok huzavona után megállapodtunk abban, hogy ad havi ezer forintot a három gyerek után. Én mindenképp el akartam jönni Miskolcról. Nem szerettem. Tipikus kisváros. Volt egy ingatlanközvetítő a városban, és mondtam, hogy ha tudtok egy cserelakást Pesten, szóljatok. Rendben volt a lakásunk, szép volt és jó helyen. És egyszer csak telefonáltak, hogy volna itt valaki, aki szeretné nagyon sürgősen elcserélni a lakását egy miskolcira. Jött egy fiatal nő, nagyon tetszett a lakás – máris csinálhatjuk a papírokat. Mondtam, hogy azért csak szeretném megnézni, hogy mire cserélek. Apám jött fel velem. És eljöttünk, és volt ez a lakás, és nekem borzasztóan nem tetszett. A miskolci lakásban nagy franciaablakok voltak, nagy szárnyas ajtók, itt meg olyan kicsi volt minden. S azt mondta apám: „Ide figyelj, ez nem egy rossz lakás. Soha nem lesz ilyen alkalmad, hogy ingyen el tudd cserélni. Mert hiába szép a lakásod, a vidéki az vidéki. Pest meg Pest.” Hagytam magam meggyőzni.

Apám 1957-ben halt meg egyik napról a másikra, abban az évben, amikor feljöttünk Pestre. Akkor anyám még velünk maradt. Anyámnak volt özvegyi nyugdíja. És én sokat dolgoztam, éjjel-nappal dolgoztam.

Amikor széjjelmentünk, egy műanyag-szövetkezetben dolgoztam, még csak csoportvezető voltam. Alapító tag is ebben a szövetkezetben, a csínját-bínját tudtam, nagyon sokat dolgoztunk exportra. Az üzemvezető egy ilyen felső szervnek a felesége volt, fogalma sem volt a szakmáról. Nagyon sokat kellett menni külker vállalatokhoz tárgyalni, mindig én mentem vele. Így volt ismeretségem, és tudtam szerezni magamnak másodállást. Elmentem Pilismarótra, mert ott volt egy téesz, és meg kellett szervezni embereket, betanítani őket, szóval egy üzemet csinálni. Az 1970-es évek a téesz-melléküzemágak virágzásának kora. Az Új Gazdasági Mechanizmus 1968-as bevezetésétől kezdődően ugyanis a mezőgazdasági szövetkezetek ipari és építőipari tevékenységet végző csoportokat hozhattak létre, amelyek szabadon vállalkozhattak. – A szerk.] Oda jártam le minden délután munkaidő után. Anyu volt ezalatt a gyerekekkel. Végeredményben ő nevelte fel őket. 1977-ben halt meg.

Aztán nálunk lehetett bedolgozókat foglalkoztatni, és volt egy igen-igen nagy árvíz akkortájt, és hatalmas műanyaglepedőket csináltak a töltésre. Anyámat felvettem a szövetkezetbe bedolgozóként, és szombat-vasárnap csináltam hajnalig ezeket a lepedőket. Aztán még volt valami, ami megmaradt ékszer, gyűrű, kép, ez az, és amíg lehetett, azt eladtuk. És így éltünk meg.

Csoportvezetőként kezdtem, és üzemvezetőként mentem el nyugdíjba. Ha én belépek akkor a pártba, lehet, hogy én vagyok a szövetkezet elnöke. És mindennek ellenére eljutottam oda, hogy én lettem a szövetkezeti bizottság elnöke. Engem akkor jól fizettek. De nagyon sokat dolgoztam, mert kötetlen volt a munkaidő. Üzemvezető voltam, több mint száz ember dolgozott a kezem alatt. Én három üzemet vezettem egyetlen tanyán, kettőt Pesten. És nagyon jól tudták, hogy én a világon mindent, amit értük ki lehet harcolni, azt én kiharcolom. Minden ellenszolgáltatás nélkül.

A pártban soha nem voltam. Volt olyan a szövetkezetben, hogy az akkori párttitkár szólt nekem, hogy Évike, kérje a felvételét a pártba. És mondtam, hogy nagyon megtisztelő, de köszönöm szépen, nem. Nagyon meg volt lepve. Hát de miért nem? Mondtam, mert addig, amíg nekem kell a dolgozóimat megvédenem magukkal szemben, addig nincs szükség a piros könyvecskére. Ezt tudomásul vették. Tudták, hogy zsidó vagyok, tudták, hogy nem voltam hajlandó belépni a pártba.

Tatiana Isaacovna Nemizanskaya
St. Petersburg
Russia
Interviewer: Lyudmila Lyuban
Date of interview: April 2002

Tatiana Isaacovna Nemizanskaya is a slim woman of average height.
She is very active in spite of her age (78);
she is very much interested in political events in this country and abroad,
especially in Israel.
She reads a lot, has a perfect memory and remembers the names of her schoolteachers,
who taught her 60 years ago.
Her speech is very clear and correct, however, speaking in front of a tape-recorder,
she gets very nervous and turns around a lot.
She lives together with her cousin’s daughter.
She is energetic and goes to pick up the Hesed 1 packages herself.

Childhood and family

During the war

My relatives' fates

Later life

Glossary

Childhood and family

I, Tatiana Isaacovna Nemizanskaya, nee Svoiskaya, was born in the town of Nevel in Pskov province in 1924. My paternal grandparents died before the Revolution 2, long before I was born and I know very little of them. They lived in the village of Lobino close to Nevel. There were a lot of Jews in that village with the name of Svoisky.

My grandfather’s name was Borukh, he was a farmer like everyone else in the village. My grandmother’s name was Sterna and her name is translated into Russian as ‘Tatiana’ 3. I was given this name in honor of my paternal grandmother. Grandma kept the household and raised the children. They had five children: my father Isaac, another son called Mendel and three daughters: Golda, Ida and Tsilya. Nothing remained about them in my memory.

My maternal grandparents came from Nevel and lived there all their lives. Grandpa Iosif Gendel – Jewish name Ysef Leisar – was born in 1866. He finished cheder and was a religious and educated man. He prayed a lot, attended the synagogue regularly and observed all Jewish traditions. Mom told me that he always wore tallit and tefillin when he prayed. He also wore a kippah, he had a beard and moustache and he wore a frock coat during holidays. Mom also told me that Grandpa was a very wise man.

His job was not common: he gold-painted Russian Orthodox churches. He also had a business of his own. Such gold-painting experts’ teams were not only involved in gold-painting Russian Orthodox churches and icon frames, but also worked in rich people’s households. A Jewish gold-painter was considered a craftsman; he was hired for fulfilling private orders: gold-painting candlesticks, mirror frames and other expensive household goods in rich homes. When such a gold-painting craftsmen team was hired for the restoration of the Nevel convent, the craftsmen received an order to gold-paint the domes of the convent Cathedral. Fulfillment of the order required a lot of time – several years – since gold painting is a very thorough and laborious operation.

Grandpa died very early, he was a little bit older than 50. He died in his sleep. Mother told me that she had tried to wake him up but he was dead already. It must have been a heart attack. It happened in the 1920s. I have never seen him in my life.

I remember my maternal grandma very well. Her name was Rakhil – Jewish name Rokhl Leya – Gendeleva, nee Tseitlina. She was born in Nevel in 1871 and never left the town. She was as religious as my grandpa, she prayed a lot, attended the synagogue often, kept kosher, observed Sabbath and all Jewish holidays. As children we very often visited her on holidays and thus felt ourselves part of the Jewish community. Grandma also treated us to very delicious Jewish meals.

Grandma’s mother tongue was Yiddish, she spoke this language to all adults. She spoke Russian to us, the children. We knew Yiddish, however, we could not speak it very well, but we could understand everything perfectly. Grandma didn’t wear a wig, but always covered her hair with a headscarf. She wore a black lace shawl on holidays. She was a very beautiful woman, but her clothes were always very modest. 

Grandma lived in a house of her own with three rooms and a large hall. The house had extensions and there was a shed and a vegetable garden near the house. Grandma kept a cow and was busy with the household. Peasants from neighboring villages, her acquaintances who knew her for many years, visited her and stayed in the house. She prepared dinner for them, cooked fish, since Nevel was a ‘fish town.’

Nevel is located in a beautiful place. There is a big lake in the middle of the town, where young people spent a lot of time in summer, swam in the lake and went boating. A forest with a lot of mushrooms and berries surrounds the town, there are a lot of lakes; it is an area rich in lakes and fish. There were a lot of gardens in the town and a wonderful town park with brass band performances and dancing during the weekend.

Nevel, the ‘fish town,’ supplied all surrounding regions and almost all Russian cities with fish. There was a lot of fish in Nevel’s numerous lakes. Merchants arranged deliveries and sales of fish as well as exchange of fish for other goods. Up to ten people or even more visited my grandmother at times. This was her occupation – she had her own business, as they call it now. She had a housemaid, a Russian woman, who did all the housework during Sabbath and on Jewish holidays.

My grandparents had four children: Chaim [1888-1943], my mother Sofia [1893-1976], Isaih [1897-1951] and Mendel [1902-1973]. When Grandpa died all children were grownups.

I remember only Grandma’s sister Tseita, who lived in Nevel, she died before the war 4. Grandma was 70 years old before the war. Though she stooped a little bit, she remained very active and lively.

The town of Nevel, where our family lived, was small; it had a population of approximately 20 thousand people. It was located on the border with Belarus. Nevel was an international town before the war. People of various nationalities lived close to each other: Russians, Jews, Belarusians and Poles. People lived in friendship and helped each other.

There were a lot of Jews in the town. One could hear Yiddish everywhere – in the street, in the marketplace, in stores. There was a single-floor, white-stone synagogue in the town and a Jewish school, which my brother attended. There was certainly a Jewish community, however, in the 1930s only Orthodox Jews attended it openly – mostly old people. Young Jews became public figures, activists and stepped aside from religion. They did not observe Jewish traditions, since the Soviet regime did not welcome it and propagated atheism 5. Right before the war both the synagogue and the Jewish school were closed.

There were a bristle factory, a canned food plant and a milk factory in town. A large number of citizens worked at theses enterprises, including the Jewish population. Houses were mostly wooden and one-story. There were several two-story brick buildings only in the center of the town. Electricity was introduced in Nevel only before the war, everybody used oil lamps. There was no water supply system; we had to get water from the well. There were no cars either and we rode horses both in winter and in summer.

All food products were bought at the marketplace, nothing could be purchased in stores at those times. The marketplace was big, food products and hay were sold there; hay was delivered on carts. Kosher food and meat were sold at this market. There was also a Torgsin store in town 6. I remember quite clearly how we exchanged a silver cigarette-case for walnuts.

There was an amateur Jewish Theater, where plays of Jewish and other writers were staged. Actors from other cities came to our town and very often they were Jewish actors, who performed classical plays, translated into Yiddish. A visit of our famous compatriot, pianist Maria Veniaminovna Yudina [1899-1970], created a real furor. We never missed a performance or concert, trying to be closer to the Jewish culture. This was how Nevel was like during my childhood.

My father, Isaac Borisovich Svoisky, was born in Lobino in Pskov province in 1888. He finished cheder and his mother tongue was Yiddish. He worked as a carpenter in a carpenter’s shop. He was a very handsome man. Later he moved to Nevel alone and met his wife to be, my mother, there.

During World War I my father served as a soldier in the Tsar’s Army. However, after he was wounded he managed to return to Nevel and in 1915 he married my mother. The wedding was with a chuppah, according to Jewish tradition, as my mother told me. But it was done mostly under the influence of my mom and her parents, who were very religious. Father, as I recall, was not religious, really. I don’t remember him praying.

My mother, Sofia Iosifovna Svoiskaya, nee Gendeleva, was born in 1893 in Nevel. She was raised in a religious family that observed all Jewish traditions. She finished four grades of a Jewish school; her mother tongue was Yiddish. However, she spoke Russian with us children. When my brother Boris [1916-1941] was born, he was circumcised. Then three daughters were born: Rosa [1919-1943], Tatiana [1924, the interviewee] and Minna [1926-1943] – everyone in the family called her Minya.

Most of the time my mother worked in day nurseries. Besides, she was a public activist and was elected delegate of the City Soviet [City Council of Working Class Delegates – local executive authority body], where she worked in the women department, responsible for solving women and children’s problems. Public activists were prohibited from going to the synagogue, but Mother sometimes attended it secretly, so that no one would find out. She also took us with her, when we were small. We celebrated only Soviet holidays at home: 7th November 7, 1st May. We visited our grandma on Jewish holidays.

We lived separately from Grandma; we had a three-room apartment in a two-story brick building in the center of the town. There was a Russian stove 8 in the kitchen, three stairs led to a big room, which was called ‘the hall’ and there were two other smaller rooms. We had stove heating. The rooms were furnished very well. We had a grand piano, a huge wall-size mirror in a bronze frame, a card-table, arm-chairs and a big table covered with a beautiful Japanese table-cloth. There were statuettes everywhere, the beds were covered with bedspreads and covers, beautifully embroidered by nuns – there was a convent in town where one could buy all these goods. Pictures and a big tapestry depicting a landscape hung on the walls.

Five more Jewish families lived in our house. We got on well with them. Mom was a tall, slender woman, she was very energetic and active. She could do any work and was a perfect housewife. Everybody loved her. Right before the war she started to work as a matron at the Nevel Municipal Hospital.

My childhood passed in a very warm and benevolent atmosphere. First I attended a kindergarten, then I went to school. The kindergarten was a Jewish-Russian one. The school was turned into a Russian school by that time and was called First General Education School 9.

We all studied well at school, both my sisters and me. We were excellent pupils. Our praise letters were pinned to the walls at home. I loved literature and read books most of my free time. I also loved amateur art activities, especially singing.

We had very good teachers. The amateur singing club was directed by a wonderful woman, Yevgeniya Yevgeniyevna Yuryevskaya, a representative of an ancient noble family. She also worked as a regular teacher of music at school. Other teachers were also brilliant specialists. A lot of teachers were Jews. There was no anti-Semitism either at school or in Nevel at all. I finished school right before the war; I was hardly 17 years old at that time. My closest friends were three Jewish girls: Tanya Romanovskaya, Veta Khanina and Rosa Shulkina.

I went to Leningrad for school holidays, first to visit Mom’s brother Isaih and later to my elder sister Rosa, who studied at an institute there. I remember how we went to the theater with her to watch the ‘Uriel Acosta’ performance. I liked the performance very much. The theater was situated on the Petrogradsky Side in the Cooperation House.

My brother Boris was eight years older than myself. He finished seven grades of the Nevel Jewish school and left for Leningrad to continue his studies. He graduated from the Refrigeration Technical School, came back to Nevel and studied by correspondence at the Leningrad Refrigeration Institute. He served for a fixed period in the Soviet army in the Far East in the city of Blagoveschensk. He was demobilized right before the war and continued to work and study.

My elder sister Rosa finished Nevel high school with honors and entered the Leningrad Institute of Foreign Languages. She lived in the institute dormitory not far from Smolny. In summer 1941 she passed the exams for the fourth year of study ahead of schedule and came to Nevel. My younger sister Minya finished the eighth grade at school by that time. She was 15 years old.

During the war

On 22nd June 1941 our whole family was gathered together. We were happily making plans. Rosa was trying on new shoes. Suddenly we heard on the radio that the war had started. The next day Boris left for the front as a volunteer.

Soon the town was flooded with refugees from Belarus, Poland and Lithuania. They told us that Jews would better escape. Some Jews evacuated, others stayed. My grandma Rakhil was very stubborn and told us flatly that she was not going anywhere. Father supported her. Mother could not get leave from the hospital. However, she understood that it was absolutely necessary to flee so she continued to persuade everybody. Finally we got our belongings loaded onto a cart and tried to leave the city. However, we were forced to go back home because of combats all around Nevel.

On 15th July the Germans entered the town. At first they did not touch the Jews, though we did leave our house and lived in a hut on the outskirts. There was a military camp not far from us. The Germans drove prisoners of war to that camp. Suddenly Mother found out that our Boris was among those prisoners. She rushed to the camp and miraculously managed to bring him home. Boris was taken prisoner near Polotsk town. No one gave him away in prison – no one told the Germans that he was a Jew. Boris told us that when they were delivered to Nevel, he hoped that we had already managed to escape.

On 3rd August Germans drove all Jews together, around 800 people, to the ghetto. Our family was among the prisoners. Old people were placed near the former ‘Blue Summer House’ estate, all the rest were located in old shabby buildings behind the ‘humpbacked bridge.’ Together with us in a room of 25 meters another three families lived and slept on the floor. People under escort were forced to clean the roads and administrative buildings. We were not given any food, we stole from the vegetable gardens, and sometimes our Russian friends brought us something to eat.

By the end of August the prisoners had a foreboding. The Germans reinforced the guarding in the ghetto and became even more brutal. Rosa and I tried to escape. Father cried, ‘Don’t do it, they will kill you!’ But we still took the risk. It happened on 1st September. There was an old German on guard. We told him that we were going to visit our grandma at the ‘Blue Summer House.’ He let us through and turned away from us.

We didn’t know where to go. Mother gave us her friend’s address. He was a hospital employee; his name was Yurinov. He was Russian and lived with his big family in a village not far from the town of Pustoshka, 40 km from Nevel. He had promised to help us. We walked during nights and during daytime we hid in the forest. Yurinov’s family received us very warmly. We hid in the forest at daytime and came to his house at night. In several days Yurinov’s younger son came to our refuge in the forest and cried, ‘Mrs. Svoiskaya has arrived!’ We ran to the house. We found our mother completely tortured, naked, wearing someone’s coat. She sat in the middle of the room and went on, ‘It’s all over now, it’s all over.’ When she came to her senses she told us what had happened.

On 6th September the Germans eliminated the Nevel ghetto. At first they took away all men, most of them were old men, and my father and brother were among them. They were made to dig out three huge pits. Then all of them were shot. After that all women and children were taken away and children were pulled away from their mothers. Everyone was undressed and shot.

When the first burst was fired and they could hear the bullets whining, Mother pushed Minya into the pit and jumped into it too. Dead bodies began to fall on them from above. The Germans did not fill up the pits, they just left. At night Mother managed to get out from under the corpses and crawled out of the grave. She tried to find Minya, called her by the name, but it was useless. My grandma Rakhil also remained in that pit. Mother found a man’s coat, put it on and went to Pustoshka.

Several days passed. The number of Germans increased around Pustoshka. Yurinov told us that he could not continue hiding us, as it was too dangerous. He gave us clothes, food and we left for Pskov. On the way to Pskov we created a legend about ourselves. Rosa and I had blue eyes and did not look like typical Jews. We invented a name and a story for us: we passed ourselves off for the Suvorov family, from Leningrad, who had spent the summer at our grandma’s place in Minsk, got under bombing and lost our documents. Mother, who had a typical Jewish appearance, pretended to be a stranger, whom we met on our way to Pskov. 

We came to Ostrov. Rosa and I settled with a Russian woman separately from Mother in order not to arouse suspicions, though there was no ghetto in the town so far, and Jews walked along the streets freely. We had a happy encounter here: we found our Minya. She also managed to get out of the grave and a German gave her a lift to Ostrov: her Russian appearance helped her. Minya also invented a legend for herself; she had already obtained an ‘Ausweis’ [a new passport] by that time and found a job. Later on Rosa and I also obtained documents at the commandant’s office. We washed German clothes and got bread and soap for this work. We helped our landlady in her vegetable garden and our mother, a wonderful knitter, traveled around villages and knitted cardigans.

Later on we got acquainted with Ostrov underground movement members, the leader of which was Klava Nazarova. Klava promised to take us to the guerillas. In spring of 1942 Shura Kozlovsky, a guerilla messenger, led one of the underground members, Yeva Khaikina and two Red Army men, who escaped from prison, to the guerilla camp. They were ambushed on their way to the camp. Shura and Yeva perished and those, who were taken prisoners, gave away those members of the underground party, whom they knew. Klava Nazarova was hanged.

We continued to seek contact with guerillas. Mother was first to get there. She was knitting a cardigan for a woman, whose husband was a guerilla messenger. He transferred Mother to the troop. Soon we also managed to join the guerillas. We were interrogated in the troop by Special Department Head, Pyatkin. He was trying to find out if we were German spies. We managed to persuade him that it was not true.

We were in different troops. Rosa worked as an interpreter at the headquarters, I worked as a nurse and Minya was a shooter. Soon Mother was sent by plane to the hinterland near Valday. She was accompanying the wounded. We were also offered to join her, but we refused flatly. Mother later got over to Kazan, where her brother Isaih evacuated from Leningrad [St. Petersburg]. We continued to wage war.

Our life at the guerilla troop was very difficult. We were almost starving, lived in earth-houses and moved from one site to another constantly. In May 1943 Germans encircled our troop. We tried to break the siege and lost Minya during the battle. After the combat a boy came running from Klimov’s troop, where Minya served. He told us that she had been wounded in the leg and the Germans had seized her together with other wounded guerillas and had thrown them into a cellar. The boy was also among them, but he managed to escape. Andreyev, our troop commander, told us that we would not be able to rescue them from the Germans. Minya perished.

In one of the combats a shell exploded near me and I pressed my hands against my face instinctively. This saved my eyes, as the splinter got into my hand. The next day Rosa was killed in one of the military operations against the Germans. Andreyev suggested that they sent me to Kazan, where my mother lived. He told me: ‘Your mother has no one except for you, all the rest are dead. She will not endure it if you are also killed.’ But I refused to go to the hinterland. I told him that I wanted to take revenge on the Germans for the death of my relatives.

I stayed in the troop until March 1944, when we joined the active Red Army forces. Most of the guerillas were killed in battles, including the commander of our troop. Our troop was disbanded. We were assembled at Khvoinaya station in Leningrad region for a two-week vacation. We were trying to come to our senses. This station is located not far from Leningrad, a very picturesque place. We spent time there as if in a health center. All guerilla troops from Leningrad region gathered there and our headquarters were situated on Dekabristov Street.

The headquarters issued us certificates and assigned us to different cities. I was assigned to Gatchina, but I did not go there, because I was shown letters from my mother, in which she asked about my sisters and me. Mother’s address in Kazan was written on the envelope, so I decided to go to Kazan. When I found the required street in Kazan, I suddenly saw Mother, who was walking out of the Municipal Party Committee, crying. She was told that two of her daughters were killed in the guerilla troop. So that was how we met. 

My sisters Rosa and Minya were buried in the forest where we were guerillas. My father, grandmother and brother Boris remained in the grave with murdered Jews in Nevel. There are three graves: men’s, women’s and children’s. After the war the Jews collected funds, which were used for erecting a monument on the graves.

My relative's fates

Mother’s and Father’s sisters’ fate appeared to be more successful. I remember only Aunt Golda, Father’s sister, who lived in Nevel with her family. Before the war she was a housewife and her husband, Leiba Treskunov, was a horse-breeder at a stud-farm. When the war began they were on time to evacuate to Tatarstan, so all their family survived. After the war they returned to Nevel. Two of their daughters are alive: Sterna, who is 91 years old now and lives in Leningrad. And Ida, who is 80, lives with her family in Israel. About my father’s other relatives I know only the following: his sister Ida lived in Moscow, Tsilya lived in Tver and his brother Mendel lived in Nizhny Novgorod. I have no other information about them.

We kept closer relations with my mother’s brothers and sisters. Mother’s elder brother Chaim lived in Rybinsk. He died during the war. There were no Germans, so his wife Tesya and daughter Minna survived. Chaim was an Orthodox Jew. When he came to visit us in Nevel he always prayed. At least I always saw him praying. When in 1945 the war ended, Jews were allowed to gather in their apartments to pray there and to celebrate Sabbath and other holidays. However, such gatherings were not advertised. In 1948 when Stalin’s repressions and persecutions of Zionists were resumed, such gatherings in apartments were completely closed down again.

Mom’s brother Isaih lived in Leningrad before the war, we visited him during school holidays. His wife’s name was Zhenya and they had a son, whose name was Sima. During the war they were in evacuation in Kazan, where first my mother found him and later on I joined them. Uncle Isaih came back from the war to Leningrad. He was an agricultural specialist. He died at the age of 54 and was buried at the Jewish cemetery. His son became a geologist, graduated from the Leningrad Institute of Mines. He died 15 years ago. 

Mendel or Mikhail Gendel lived in Nevel before the war, worked as a printer at the printing-house there. At the age of 35 without attending classes he passed exams to the Smolensk Medical Institute. Right before the war, when he was 40 years old, he graduated from this institute and worked as a medical officer, a surgeon, during the war. He came back to Nevel after the war and got married soon. His wife Malka was a physician too. She was much younger than him: Malka was my elder sister Rosa’s friend.

Their daughter Natalia was born in 1950. I separated from my mother after the war. Mother went back to Nevel and continued to work as a matron at the municipal hospital. I left for Leningrad to study. In 1945 I entered the Leningrad Institute of Mines and lived in the dormitory on Maly Prospect on Vassilyevsky Island. I did not feel any anti-Semitism at the institute. There were only two Jews at our faculty.

Later life

After graduation I was sent or assigned, as it was called 10, to the city of Karaganda [today Kazakhstan]. Assignment was a compulsory appointment for young specialists, everyone was supposed to work for two years at the place of destination. I worked at the Giproshakht Institute, which designed mines. My mother came to Karaganda, but couldn’t stand the local climate and left for Leningrad to her brother’s place. She visited the Leningrad Municipal Party Committee and told them about her fate. They allocated a small room for her, with an area of six square meters, in a communal apartment 11. I arrived at this room two years later, when I was transferred to the Lengiproshakht Institute [same Institute as Giproshakht, but in Leningrad]. I worked in this institute between 1952 and 1977, for 25 years. We exchanged this room for a bigger one of 13 square meters later on.

I was married twice. My first husband, Naum Bainstein, was a Jew. He was born in Leningrad in the 1920s and worked at the ‘Vibrator’ plant as an office worker. I got acquainted with him after returning from Karaganda, my relative introduced us. However, we lived together for two years, I think, not longer than that. After that we parted very quietly and peacefully and remained friends. Naum is no longer alive by now, but I don’t know when he died.

In 1958 I married Iosif Lipovich Nemizansky, everybody called him Iosif Lvovich. He was also a Jew. He was born in 1912 in Nevel. His father came from Nevel. His name was Lipa Nemizansky and I don’t know what his occupation was. His mother’s name was Rakhil, she came from a small Latvian town, Vendan. Her father was a local rabbi and her family was very wealthy. When Lipa and Rakhil got married, they lived in Nevel at first and later moved to Leningrad. My husband had a brother, but he died before the war.

My second husband was not a religious Jew either, like many Jews in Leningrad at that time. Iosif graduated from Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, the Faculty of Metallurgy, and had been working for many years at the open-hearth shop of Kirovsky plant. During the war the family stayed in besieged Leningrad. My husband’s father starved to death during the blockade 12 and was buried in a common grave at the Jewish cemetery. Iosif continued to work at Kirovsky plant until it was evacuated to Chelyabinsk. Both he and his mother, completely dystrophic, were taken out of the city. His mother died right after the war.

I didn’t meet my husband’s parents; I saw them only on photographs. According to the photos, they were beautiful people, very elegantly dressed. My husband, their son, was also a very handsome man. He was twelve years older than me; we lived in harmony for 22 years. We adored each other and called each other only by endearing names: Iosinka, Tanechka. He suffered from infectious polyarthritis. He once caught a flu, and this polyarthritis was an aftereffect. Half of our life I dedicated to taking care of my husband. He continued working at Kirovsky plant, already sick. He had a position of the open-hearth shop manager at that plant.

My mother lived together with us and was on very good terms with Iosif. Mother was a real needlewoman, she embroidered beautifully. I keep a lot of her works, mostly various pictures: embroidered landscapes and animals. She also continued to knit very nice cardigans.

There was no anti-Semitism before the war, it started to appear after the war 13 and of course during the war. The Soviet regime propagandized internationalism, thus we never felt any anti-Semitism among the Russian population during the war in areas, which were not occupied by the Germans. During the war we suffered only from the Germans, most of the Russians assisted us very much. I did not feel any anti-Semitism at work, it depended on the team and we had a lot of Jews in our team. Our institute manager, Shvernik, looked for and accepted all smart Jews, who were fired from other places.

I was not disturbed by the Doctors’ Plot 14, but a huge tide of anti-Semitism arose. Our neighbors at home yelled at my mother that it’s a pity that so few Jews had been eliminated by the Germans, that Jews had not even been at war, but had stayed in the hinterland. Mother quarreled with them and even fought with some of them in the yard. She submitted applications to the militia about these cases. A rumor was spread in the city that all Jews would be gathered and sent to Siberia in special trains 15. Certainly we suffered a lot from it, we were happy when Stalin died and the physicians were rehabilitated. No one in our family grieved because of Stalin’s death.

In the 1960s and 1970s, when religion was not persecuted, Mother prayed a lot. My husband and me took her to the synagogue and brought her back regularly every week. Mother died in 1976 of stomach cancer. She was 82 years old by then. The two last weeks of her life were very painful for me; I stayed at her side. Mother was buried at the Jewish cemetery.

In 1977, when I was 53, I had to quit my job ahead of pension schedule, since my husband was a totally helpless man by that time. He died in 1980, four years after my mother had died. He was also buried at the Jewish cemetery near my mom. We did not have children.

Now I would like to say a few words about my friends. I always had Jews as friends, some of the old prewar friends came back from evacuation to Nevel, but many of them left for Israel. They formed a Nevel society there, with which I keep contact by letters and phone. Some of my friends left for Germany and America. There are few Jews in Nevel now: 10-15 families, not more. Our close friends invited us to go to Israel with them, but my husband Iosif was very sick by that time, he was bedridden, and certainly he could not move anywhere. We took our friends’ leave very hard, continued to correspond with them for many years. They have died already, our friends were very old people. Very few of my colleagues are still alive.

I still keep very close relations with my cousin Natalia Mikhailovna, Uncle Mendel’s daughter. Natasha lives now with her husband and her mother in Nevel. She graduated from Pskov Pedagogical Institute and worked as a teacher of English – first at school and now at a college. Her husband, Mikhail Israilevich Zaidman, works at a clothes factory. Her son lives in Germany and studies at the Construction Faculty of Darmstadt University. When he visits our city, he stays with me. Natalia’s daughter Maya lives with me in St. Petersburg. She has just graduated from the Trade Institute as an accountant/auditor. I visit Nevel sometimes. My cousin’s family are my closest relatives now.

Life has become more interesting. I spend all my spare time at the library, read newspapers and magazines and take great interest in everything that’s happening in the world. Certainly I am very much worried about Israel. We were very worried about it in 1967 16, in 1973 17, and of course, we are very worried now. Each terrorist action echoes with pain in my heart.

I support all democratic undertakings in this country: Gorbachev 18, Yeltsin and Putin. I like the RFU faction [Right Forces Union], headed by Nemtsov, but I am mostly happy to see manifestation of good relations between this country and Israel.

My Jewish life changed a lot after in 1993 I became a member of the Society of Former Ghetto and Concentration Camp Prisoners, located on Gatchinskaya Street. Later on I started to visit ‘Yeva’ on Moika and the Jewish Welfare Center ‘Hesed Avraham.’ I made a lot of friends there, we celebrate Jewish holidays together, attend lectures and concerts. We take great interest in Jewish history and traditions. I receive monthly packages and warm clothes in Hesed and use their other services, which are free of charge – order glasses, go to the hairdresser’s, etc.. I also received two grants as a former ghetto prisoner from Switzerland. Germany still transfers me 250 Deutschmarks every month starting from 1995. All this supports me very much and I am very grateful for this assistance as well as for the attention. 

Glossary:

Alexander Isayevich Mussel
St. Petersburg
Russia
Interviewer: Inna Gimila
Date of interview: March 2002

Alexander Isayevich is a very modest and nice person to talk to. He is pretty reserved emotionally, however, he is genuinely sincere and friendly. His school years, which he recalled gladly, seem to be the brightest and most important memories of his life. He also shared his dream with us – to gather all his schoolmates and teacher’s descendants from the Jewish school where he studied. Slightly rolling his ‘Rs,’ Alexander Isayevich quietly and clearly narrates his story, which appears to be full of interesting events, both tragic and happy. Life taught this man to distinguish good from bad since his early childhood, that is why at his present age Alexander Isayevich is treated kindly by fate, has a very friendly and happy family as well as his favorite job, to which he dedicates all his free time.

My family and childhood

The war

Later life

Glossary

My family and childhood

I was born in Leningrad [today St. Petersburg] in 1923. My forefathers both on my father’s and mother’s sides lived in the Baltic Sea region, in Lithuania, in the town of Zarasay [located between lakes Zarasas, Zarasaitis and others, 157 km northeast of Vilnius. Founded in the 15th century, the city is famous for its picturesque surroundings.] In those times the town was named Novoaleksandrovsk, later it was renamed Zarasay. I have never seen any of my grandmothers or grandfathers, as they lived abroad 1 and I was born in the Soviet Union. We had no opportunity to see them, because trips abroad were not allowed 2. For us Lithuania was behind the Iron Curtain’ 3. We received pieces of news very rarely, so we really did not know anything about my grandparents.

I remember very little. However, Father spoke very highly of his parents. His mother Chaya Sarah Mussel died before her husband, before the war 4. She was a very kind woman, cooked national Jewish meals and together with her husband, Tsvi, observed all Jewish traditions. Grandpa Tsvi Girsh worked very hard in order to support his family. I don’t know for sure, if my grandpa died before the war in 1941, or if Fascists murdered him. In any case, he perished in 1941. I found out about the following event from my cousin Moisey. He told me that almost the entire population of Zarasay, about 8,000 people, were told to assemble. They were mostly Jews and mostly old people and children. The Fascists forced them to walk to the forest on foot. The forest was several kilometers away from Zarasay. They dug ditches – they were forced to do it themselves – and after that they were all executed by shooting and dumped into these ditches.

I was at that place in 1960. There is an obelisk now and 100 meters to the left and to the right you can see hillocks, where the victims were buried. This place required special care. When I was there I tidied the territory a little bit. We witnessed a horrible thing happening there: some people tried to dig up these trenches looking for valuables. I had a meeting with the secretary of the Communist Party District Committee, and we agreed that this place had to be covered with concrete. It was done later.

My mother’s name was Hannah Shlemovna Mussel, nee Stolyar. Her parents owned a nice big house in Zarasay. There was a healing water spring nearby. Grandpa Shlomo Stolyar [?-1930s] was a rabbi. My maternal grandmother’s name was Chasya Stolyar [?-1930s]. I have never seen her, only on pictures. She resembled her sister very much, whose photo I still keep. After Grandpa Shlomo died, his children continued to live in his house. They were all murdered by the Germans later. After the war [1945] the parents of a Lithuanian guerilla [Maria Melnikaite, a member of the YCL, was a guerilla in Zarasay. She was caught and executed by a punitive group in the summer of 1943, posthumously awarded the title of ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’] settled in Grandpa’s house. There is a memorial museum in her honor in Zarasay.

My father Isaih or Shaya Girshevich Mussel was born in Zarasay in Lithuania in 1892. Before the Revolution 5 Dad left Zarasay for Arkhangelsk in search of a job. [Arkhangelsk was founded in 1584. It was the first Russian marine port, a center of commercial relations with Western Europe. At present Arkhangelsk is the biggest timber port in the world, a popular traveling center with historical and architectural monuments.] He started to study watch-making there. Later on, before the Revolution [in October 1917] he came back from Arkhangelsk to Petrograd [today St. Petersburg]. He went to elementary school for two years in Zarasay. That school must have been a Jewish one, since he could write and read in Yiddish. Later on he learned to speak and write in Russian.

At first not everything went smoothly, because he didn’t speak Russian. However, later on he learned the language. Father met my mother in Petrograd. It is possible that they somehow met each other in Zarasay or in Saratov, where Mom appeared to be during World War I. From Zarasay Mother went to visit her elder sister Rakhil in Vyborg [a city located 40 km from Leningrad]. Rakhil and her husband owned a lady’s hat atelier and Mother was studying millinery. In 1917 she moved to Petrograd in search for a job and lived separately from her relatives. Later she met my father and they got married in 1919 or in 1920. There was no chuppah, they just registered their marriage at the official agency and Mother took Dad’s last name. My elder sister Chasya was born in Petrograd in the fall of 1920.

Both Mom and Dad weren’t members of any political movements. Dad saw Maxim Gorky 6, heard his speeches and spoke very positively about him. He also told me about other famous people, though he was no political activist. Dad worked as a watchmaker all the time. During the NEP 7 times he owned a workshop and worked there alone. Later on he worked in a watch-making cooperative in Leningrad, which provided services to people. Mom worked as a hat seller at a store, she was a milliner.

We lived all the time on the 2nd Liniya of Vassilyevsky Island. There were five rooms in the apartment on the 4th floor. At first it was a separate apartment. Later on it was turned into a communal apartment 8. After the ‘compression’ our family occupied two big rooms. The rooms were 25-30 square meters each. One was used as a bedroom for everyone and the other one was used as a dining room and a classroom. There was a big communal kitchen in the apartment, around ten square meters. I was born and grew up in that apartment. Later on, in 1926, my younger sister Liya was born in the same apartment. I lived there until 1941, before joining the army. After returning from the army I lived in the apartment only during my studies at the Military Academy.

Our main neighbors were the Brauer family. He was a flutist in the Mariinsky theater orchestra, a German, married to a Jewish woman named Zimmerman. She was a sick woman and a housewife. She had a serious disease and he cared about her very much. They had a daughter, Tamara. During the war the Brauers starved to death in the blockade 9. Their daughter, as a German, was evacuated from Leningrad to Kazakhstan at the end of the war. Later on, after the war she lived in Poltava. She was not allowed to reside permanently in Leningrad 10. Her aunt interceded for her, but failed. Another Jewish family lived in our apartment, the Gutkin family. He worked at the militia. They had a daughter, whose name was Zhenya. We had very good relations with our neighbors, especially with the Brauer family.

In 1930 I entered a Jewish school. I studied at the national Jewish school #14 11. Later it became #11. In 1938 all national schools were abolished. Our school remained as it had been: the staff of teachers and pupils did not change; however, teaching in Yiddish was abandoned. Yiddish remained a separate subject; we also had written Yiddish and literature in Yiddish. The school became a common Russian school #30. We had a very friendly atmosphere at school. There was a preparatory grade and grades from one to seven. Little by little the school became an eight-year school, then a nine-year school. Finally it was turned into a standard ten-year school.

Our teachers were very highly qualified specialists; most of them had university education, some even obtained their education at foreign universities. The headmaster, Zinoviy Aronovich Kisselgof, was a wonderful man, an excellent teacher and a musician. Besides he taught Mathematics very well. He was one of the tutors of Yasha Kheifitz, the famous violinist. His wife, Guta Grigoryevna Kisselgof, also taught Mathematics in elementary school. Kisselgof also managed the children’s home, which was attached to our school.

The construction of the school building was sponsored by Baron Ginsburg before the Revolution. Jewish children’s home was accommodated there. Later a Jewish school was organized in the same building, and the school was attended by children from the children’s home as well as others. Children from Ukraine and Belarus were brought to the children’s home, when the famine 12 started in those countries. Children were brought without their parents, by railroad. Some children came from Leningrad, from poor families or from unwed mothers. The atmosphere at school was very good, the attitude was kind and children were brought up very well. The children from the children’s home were always given priorities, since everything was done in order to somehow raise them. This happened because they were completely lonely and we lived with our parents.

I do remember my teachers: preparatory grade – Rosa Lvovna Soloveychik; first grade – Anna Lazarevna Alperovich. I also remember our class teacher, Yevgeniya Zakharovna Ioffe, our teacher of history, Mark Davydovich Domnich; head of studies Lev Markovich Iokhilchuk. All of them had a wonderful attitude to each of us. We were taught very well. Our school was considered one of the best in the city and always won the first place in the district. Most students after finishing our school entered institutes and universities. Some children, who arrived from Ukraine and Belarus, spoke Russian very poorly. At school they were able to learn the language perfectly. They had a certain advantage over us when it came to foreign languages. They learned the German language very well, since Yiddish and German are very close.

We had a Russian theatrical club at school. We had no Jewish clubs. Children staged a ‘Boris Godunov’ [drama by A. Pushkin] performance. We had very good art directors. Our musical studies were wonderful. The head of the administrative office was a pianist. She taught us music, told us about opera: how an opera was conceived, what an overture was, etc. She played the piano during her lessons. This formed our understanding of music.

I remember Zinoviy Aronovich Kisselgof appearing on stage at our memorable evenings at school. He played the concertino, a small harmonica. He played very well and was a very talented man. He took part in expeditions arranged for the collection of Jewish folklore and recorded Jewish songs during those travels. Those records were kept for a long time on phonograph wax rollers. Later they were forwarded from Leningrad to Kiev [today Ukraine] and were destroyed there. It happened after the war, at the beginning of the 1950s, when bad actions towards Jews started 13. Of course it was a very serious loss for the Jewish culture. It contained a lot of Jewish songs.

Yasha Kheifiz, the violinist, came from America to Leningrad in 1934 to visit his teacher. Maybe the encounter with a foreigner was one of the reasons for the repression, which started against Zinoviy Aronovich. He was arrested in 1939 and tortured in the ‘Kresty’ prison. He did not betray or slander anyone. He was a wonderful person. He died soon after he was released. I was still a student when Zinoviy Aronovich was subjected to repression 14. Alexander Ivanovich Korovyev was appointed to his position. He was an Ossetian by nationality. He taught us Mathematics.

My elder sister started to go to this school and finished it. My younger sister went to a different school, which was not far from home, on Syezdovskaya Liniya of Vassilyevsky Island [former Kadetskaya Liniya]. She didn’t go to our school, maybe because the other one was located closer.

We were brought up at school in the spirit of internationalism. We had a very positive attitude to Birobidzhan 15. Our school corresponded with a school in Birobidzhan and sent cultural parcels and books to this school. [Letter and parcel exchange between schools in different cities was common in the Soviet Union up to the 1990s.] After 1938 when the school became a common one, a few Russian children appeared, however, there was no antagonism between the students. It was even ‘fashionable’ for Russian girls to marry Jewish young men and for Jewish girls to marry Russian young men [in order to demonstrate the internationalist principles in the Soviet Union]. Everything was fine; both at school and in our families the internationalist principles were cultivated.

We did not feel any anti-Semitism. Such attitude came into the world later on. Our school, though it was Jewish, carried out an atheist policy. On the eve of Russian Orthodox, as well as Jewish holidays we were subjected to certain propaganda. We were told that religious holidays and ceremonies are remains, prejudices and superstitions, which we should not participate in.

Our family had a more tolerant attitude to religion and Jewish traditions. I remember how we celebrated Pesach. I remember the major cleaning, the Pesach plates and dishes and certainly, matzah and other Jewish meals. I think that matzah came from the bakery. My aunt Revekka’s husband, Kusiel Abramovich Levin, was an Orthodox Jew. He even worked at the Jewish cemetery for some time. He took me to the synagogue a couple of times and I was present at the religious service. I liked it very much. My sisters and I loved to visit our uncle. Though not our blood relative, he was closer to us than our own aunt. He celebrated all holidays, observed Jewish traditions and all rituals. We saw him pray and we found it very interesting. My aunt’s family liked to receive us as guests very much. They did not have children of their own.

Unfortunately, I have never seen any of my father’s other brothers and sisters. They lived abroad, in Lithuania. I have seen my mother’s brother and her elder sister. I saw my mom’s brother Isaac only once, when he came for a visit. I also saw her sister Rakhil. She lived in Finland and also came to see us. They owned a hat workshop; later on they dealt in fur. She resembled her mother, my grandmother, and was a very nice woman. I don’t think she was an Orthodox Jew. Her last name was Besprozvannaya [the etymology of the name is ‘not given any name’]. She had two children: a son and a daughter. Her son became a very famous Finnish artist. Her husband, Besprozvanny, was a Jew. He came to Leningrad several times on business.

The war

I finished the ten-year school in June 1941, right before the war. I wanted to enter a Higher Military College. I thought that the environment in the army was very good, and that it would help me to get rid of some of my drawbacks as well. I considered myself a bit lazy, though I finished school with excellent marks. However, my capabilities were limited. I was shortsighted, so I could not apply to the Engineering College. I applied to the Military Medical Academy and attached all health certificates. At the beginning of the war I was summoned to the medical commission but I was rejected because of my eyes.

I was summoned on 21st June 1941. We were lectured about the international situation at the recruiting center. The lecturer told us that we had very good relations with Germany. The next day when I was preparing for exams at the Military College together with my friend, we heard that the war had begun. I went to my school and helped to evacuate the small kids. Later we were ordered to dig tank ditches in the Luga district. I was summoned to the military registration and enlistment office in July 1941 and assigned to the Antiaircraft College, though due to my sight problem, I suited the task even less than at the Military Medical Academy.

Our college was evacuated in August 1941. We didn’t even know where we were going. We were loaded onto the train along with the college equipment and departed. We found ourselves in Omsk [Siberia] where I stayed at that Military College until September 1942. After that our course graduated ahead of the study schedule – we were on an accelerated training program – and sent to the Caucasus. The Caucasus was cut off by attacking Germans. We got there through Siberia and Central Asia, crossed the Caspian Sea at night on a tanker. I served in the antiaircraft defense forces for the city of Baku [today Azerbaijan] until the end of the war. Baku was the main source of oil for our country. We were kept in constant alertness up to 9th May 1945 and were always on duty.

There were Jews at the college, in the army, in the antiaircraft defense forces; however, there was no big difference between the Jews and officers/representatives of other nationalities. Our relations were absolutely normal. There was no nationalism. Internationalism prevailed among our subordinates. Those who served were mostly people enlisted in the army in the Caucasus. They were Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, Azeris, Armenians, and Georgians. There was no distinction. Though we did feel some hostility between the Armenians and the Azeris, they never displayed such dislike. There was a huge district in Baku, called Armenikend and there were more Armenians than in Nagorny Karabakh [disputed region of Azerbaijan, inhabited mainly by Armenians]. But there was no antagonism. 

I corresponded with my family that remained in Leningrad. Before the end of the war, the Military Marine College named after Dzerzhinsky, which was evacuated to Baku, was on its way back to Leningrad. I asked them to deliver a small parcel for my family – some canned food, which I saved from my officer’s allowance. The parcel was delivered fine, nothing disappeared. Strangers delivered the parcel absolutely honestly. I sent two such parcels. One was delivered by mail. An Azeri woman posted the parcel without a receipt after the post office closed. And the parcel was delivered.

During the siege my mother, father and sisters were starving, of course. They told me how they ate cats and cooked joining cement. My sisters worked in military organizations as civilians and this saved them, because they received a certain ration 16 there. Father also received a ration as a factory worker though it was much smaller. They divided all food into equal parts. Mother had scurvy and lost almost all of her teeth – absolutely healthy teeth. She was cured only because Father managed to find meat somewhere. She was fed with chicken soup and got well. 

They did not get evacuated because Dad worked at the factory named after Gorky, which was not subject to evacuation, so my parents had no one to evacuate with. They hoped that Leningrad would not be surrendered to the Germans. They continued to live in the communal apartment, in two our rooms.

Later life

My elder sister entered the Foreign Languages University after finishing school; however, she had to quit because of her health condition. During the war, she stayed with our parents and younger sister in Leningrad. She worked at the Hydro-Meteorological Service for the Baltic Navy. At first she worked as a technician-meteorologist, I think she was making drawings. Later on, after special training, she worked there as a technician/meteorologist at the Hydro-Meteorological Observatory.

She married Eliazar Aleksandrovich Smirnov approximately in 1950. His mother, Basya Borisovna, was a Jew and his father was Russian. Both his parents were Communists and took part in the revolutionary movement. His father worked as a Plant Manager and was subjected to repression at the end of the 1930s. Later on he was rehabilitated 17. During the war, Eliazar was in evacuation together with his mother. My sister’s marriage was a common-law marriage and the wedding was a standard one, not Jewish. I was in the army at that time and could not be present. They had no children, but lived in harmony. My sister adored her husband. He also treated her very well. They lived together with his mother, first in an apartment on Dzershinskogo Street, later on Malaya Okhta. Relations between the three of them were excellent. Eliazar graduated from the Engineering and Economic Institute and worked as an economist at the Design Institute, developing famous Siberian Gas Main Lines designs. He also went to Siberia on business trips.

Eliazar died a year before Chasya, in 1988. They are buried at the Jewish cemetery. I am taking care of their graves. There is a family burial place: Basya Borisovna, Eliazar Aleksandrovich and my sister Chasya are buried there. My aunt Revekka, my mother’s sister and her husband Kusiel are also buried at this cemetery. Uncle Kusiel starved to death during the siege and was buried during the war. A synagogue attendant was invited to read a prayer. The synagogue arranged everything as Uncle had worked at this cemetery for a while.

My younger sister Liya was born in 1926. She stayed together with our parents in Leningrad during the siege.  She finished the ninth grade in the course of the war and after the war attended three-year foreign languages’ courses for translators. During the war she worked at the Hydro-Meteorological Service for the Leningrad Front. After the war she worked at the Hydro-Meteorological Service for the Baltic Navy. Chasya worked at the Hydro-meteorological Observatory, while Liya was an employee of the Hydro-Meteorological Service. An observatory is a scientific-research institution, which specializes in producing systematic stellar and planetary observations, as well as experiment and theoretical investigations. Meteorological Service does not do any research. The Service is occupied only with telegraph transmission of data, received from the observatory, i.e. transmission of weather forecast data to airports, various enterprises, to the radio and television companies, etc., as per request. Liya worked as a radio operator all the time and worked for a very long time. She retired just recently, several years ago. And she had to retire because of her health condition.

She got married in 1950. Her husband’s name is Ruvim Borisovich Kitaychik. He had a technical secondary education, worked as a technician and was responsible for maintaining sanitary equipment in boiler-houses. They constructed a cooperative apartment in the 1960s. Ruvim is safe and sound; he is retired now. They have two children, an elder daughter called Isabella and a son, whose name is Yakov. Both obtained engineering education and work as engineers now. They have children, Isabella has a son, Boris, who is a student of the Electrical and Engineering Institute, and Yasha [Yakov] has a daughter, and she is a schoolgirl. They live separately from their parents, each in their own apartment.

I entered the Military Academy after the war. I had a hard time graduating from the Academy in 1952. The Doctors’ Plot 18 as well as increasing anti-Semitism influenced both the assignment and the career. People of Jewish nationality were assigned regardless of their desires, capabilities and talents 19. I, Kruchinetsky, Dlin and several other officers were assigned to an antiaircraft-missile range in Kapustin Yar, Astrakhanskaya region, into almost a dessert, a dry plain. Missiles were allowed to be tested only in low-populated areas. We did not even know where we had been assigned. When we came to the interview before departure, we were told that the location was ‘three to four hours from Moscow.’ We were not told that it was by plane. Such a cunning move. We didn’t have any choice though. I served in this wild plain for six years. I wanted to get transferred to Leningrad, but it was very difficult. I think that my nationality 20 was also a reason for this difficulty.

I met my wife to be, Anna Movshevna, at a railroad station in Sochi in 1953. I was on vacation in Sochi in the Caucasus. I wanted to send a parcel of fruit to my elder sister in Leningrad. I bumped into a woman at the station, my wife to be, and asked her to deliver my parcel. So this is how our acquaintance started. She left her address and we began to correspond. Later on we came to know each other closer. She turned out to be a Jewess. She really doesn’t look like one and I didn’t know at first that she was Jewish. Later I invited her to our military station, where I lived near the Kapustin Yar range. She stayed with me for some time, and when I came for a vacation to Leningrad we got married. We had Jewish meals at our wedding; however, we didn’t observe Jewish traditions at the wedding. Actually some of our elder relatives, who were present, knew Jewish traditions. We had no chuppah, we didn’t pray or invite a rabbi. Everything connected with religion was prohibited in the country since the Soviet regime had been established in 1917 21.

Anna Movshevna’s family came from a small village called Pustoshka in Pskovskaya region. Her father, Movsha Vikhansky, was a distiller by occupation. Her mother was a very intelligent woman; however, her living conditions didn’t allow her to obtain an education. She finished only four grades of elementary school, but she was a very competent, smart and wise woman. They had two daughters: the elder Agnessa and my wife to be, Anna. They were not Orthodox Jews. They were ordinary people and lived like everyone did. They did not attend the synagogue, did not pray at home, worked on Sabbath and didn’t even think of the holiday. Other holidays were never on the mind either, when there was lack of food in the country.

They moved to Rzhev in Kalininskaya region from Pskovskaya region. Anna was born there. Agnessa was born in Pustoshka. They moved to Leningrad before the war. Anya’s mother’s brother, David Mendelevich Vikhansky, lived there. He worked as Commercial Manager at a Metal Plant and was a very talented engineer and a good organizer in the Communist Party. They all lived in one room before the war. My wife’s father had a small commercial business during the NEP. Later on he was subjected to repression and wasn’t allowed to live together with his family in Leningrad. However, during the war they reunited and were evacuated with the Leningrad Optical and Mechanical Plant, where their elder daughter worked. They were evacuated to Kazan and Anya was sent to participate in works in Vologodskaya region. Later her father went to pick her up and brought her back to Kazan. He caught typhus on the way back and died in Kazan.

Our son was born in 1960. We waited before having a baby because my wife was first busy with her thesis, then with defending her thesis, and then her mother fell very seriously ill. We lived separately for several years, while being married: I lived at the secret range in Kapustin Yar, and she lived in Leningrad. Later on, when I got transferred to Leningrad, we decided to have a baby. First we lived in my wife’s room. After that we built a cooperative apartment.

Now my son Mikhail is married. His wife is Russian and they have two daughters. He didn’t become a religious Jew; however, he takes great interest in the history of the Jewish nation. His friends and schoolmates left for Israel and observe all Jewish traditions. They work there now, are very gifted programmers. They attend the synagogue, pray and celebrate all Jewish holidays. They also observe the kashrut and do not work on Sabbath. 

I was an Oktyabrenok 22, a pioneer 23 and a member of the Young Communist League 24 from the age of 14. I became a member of the Communist Party after the YCL. I did not feel any bad attitude directed towards myself. There were bad people and there were good people. I remember how my college mate, not a Jew, with whom I served at the range, appeared to be a scoundrel and a go-getter. He undermined the career of one of our colleagues. There was this Russian, Ignat Kuzmich Soldatenkov, a hard worker, a wonderful and honest person. And this careerist ‘drowned’ Ignat. Not because he was Russian or Jewish, simply because my college mate was a scoundrel. The chief engineer of the range, Yakov Isayevich Troegub, was a Jew, though there were not many Jews at the range. The chief designer of antiaircraft guided missiles was also a Jew, his name was Lavochkin. He was a very famous aircraft designer. So in this respect everything was fine.

Until I visited Israel in 1990 I had no correct idea about it. Our propaganda gave us a one-side illustration of the state. When I visited the country and saw with my own eyes what kind of a state it was, my opinion changed significantly. My cousins, Moisey and Itskhak, invited me and I went to visit them. I have seen a lot thanks to them. We visited a lot of places; I have seen Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. I visited a city where Muslims, Circassians live and I also saw Bedouins’ settlements. Those who practice Islam have all the rights of Israeli citizens and live in good conditions. They serve in the Israeli Army and protect the interests of the state. There is no antagonism with the population of Israel. Circassians and Bedouins have no antagonism with the Jews either. Quite the contrary, Bedouins express antagonism towards the Palestinians, since they do not agree with many of their actions and their way of living. Bedouins are cattle-breeders, a very hard-working nation. Seemingly both Jews and Arabs are Semites. There is no ‘biological’ racial foundation for hostility. Their relations are an issue of upbringing.

I remained a secular person; however, I take an interest in Jewish history. I have a connection with the Moscow Institute of Judaism; I receive literature from them and correspond with them. I am very much interested in the history of the Jewish nation as well as in the history of the Torah. So I study the history and celebrate holidays. I love the merry spring holiday of Pesach, the celebration of the Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah. We do not arrange any special celebrations at home, but we have been attending the synagogue on these holidays for the last several years.

I think this is very important for preserving national traditions and the image of our nation. It is an important matter, owing to which the nation is intact. We celebrate holidays at home – maybe, we don’t observe all the rules strictly, but still – and we eat matzah. It has always been like that, especially when we meet our relatives and my cousin. When Hesed 26 was established, we started to receive Jewish calendars with holiday dates. We like it very much, because it keeps one disciplined and reminds one when and what to do.

Glossary:

Fanya Israilevna is a short woman with young lively eyes. She is very old.
Remaining faithful to her profession, Fanya Israilevna still works
as a volunteer librarian at Hesed Avraam 1.

When she tells her story, events get confused in her reminiscences,
because all this happened a very long time ago.

Fanya Israilevna has many relatives and she makes a
lot of effort to tell me more about their lives as well as about her own fate.
It was a real pleasure for us to work on this particular interview.

Family backround

School and work

During the war

Marriage and later life

Glossary 

Family background

I was born in Kiev [today Ukraine] in 1917. My mother, Maria Maryanchik, nee Slutskaya, came from the village of Anatovka, Kiev province. She was born there in 1892. My father, Srul Avrumovich Maryanchik was born in Brusilov [today Ukraine] in 1889. I don’t know how they found themselves in Kiev. They met each other in 1916. Mother told me that they had a wedding with a chuppah, according to Jewish traditions.

All the relatives of my father – the Maryanchiks – came from Brusilov, Kiev province. I don’t remember my grandfather, Avrum Maryanchik, as he died when I was a small girl, in the 1910s in Kiev. According to my mom, when I was three years old, I saw my grandmother, but I don’t remember her either. My grandmother was my grandfather’s second wife. His first wife died giving birth to a baby. She had six children. His second wife also gave birth to six children; my father was one of them. The family was very big – 14 people. Grandfather was the only one who worked. Father told me that Grandpa worked as an agronomist for a landowner in Brusilov and was engaged in agriculture.

Grandpa and Grandma had big families. Everyone lived in Kiev. It’s difficult for me to describe everyone. They all observed the Jewish way of life and paid visits to each other. I remember that when I was a little girl, before the war started in 1941 2, Mother’s cousins celebrated their weddings. At first one of my mom’s sisters got married, then another, then her third sister celebrated her wedding, and so on and so forth. We were present almost at all the weddings of our relatives in Kiev. 100-150 guests were invited and klezmer musicians played. Mother’s brother Moisha had such a big wedding in January 1927. There was a chuppah installed in the five-room apartment. Aunt Rosa was the bride; she was from the Slutsky family – just a namesake. Cooks prepared food and waiters served the tables.

My maternal grandfather, Berl or Boris Slutsky, came from Anatovka. I came across this name only in literature, because everyone called the place Ignatovka. I don’t know why people gave Anatovka the name of Ignatovka. Ignat is a Slavic name, Russian or Ukrainian. This is probably the reason for giving such a name to this place. As Sholem Aleichem’s 3 character Tevye, my grandfather was a milkman. Sholem Aleichem’s family lived not far from Anatovka. Grandma even told me that she saw Sholem Aleichem and his wife, Olga Mikhailovna.

Milkmen, as is well known, kept cows, produced sour cream and cottage cheese and sold their products at the market place. Grandpa was not as sociable and talkative as Tevye. Once in 1919 Grandpa and his son Mikhul, my mother’s brother, loaded their cart with goods and went to Kiev. As soon as they left Ignatovka, they were attacked by either local or Petliura bandits 4. There were two of them. They killed Grandpa and wounded Mikhul in the head. One of the bandits said, ‘They are still alive.’ Mikhul lay there silently. The other one said,  ‘Leave it, they’ll die.’ The bandits took the horse and the goods and left. Mikhul remained on the road with Grandpa’s dead body next to him. When it got dark, he went to Anatovka and told everyone about what had happened.

After the robbery Mikhul had to undergo medical treatment for a long time, but remained disabled for the rest of his life and worked in commerce from then on. His wife, Yeva Stolyarova, came from the village of Taraschi, Kiev province. They got married in 1931 and had a wedding with a chuppah. Their elder son was born in 1932 and their younger son was born in 1938. They were in evacuation with both their children during the war. Uncle died in 1964. Aunt Yeva died in the 1980s. Their elder son Boris is still alive and lives in Israel now. He called me recently.

My maternal grandmother’s name was Rivka, nee Kholemskaya, she became Slutskaya after marriage. She was born in 1863, also lived in Anatovka and got married there. Grandmother and Grandfather were religious people. They had two sons and five daughters; my mother was one of them. Grandma Rivka had three sisters but I don’t remember their names.

Grandpa died and the Slutsky family moved to Kiev. Grandma stayed with her daughters and sons at 4 Basseynaya Street. It was a single-floor building, where they occupied a three-room apartment without any facilities and with a Russian stove 5. Grandma was illiterate and looked after the house. Her favorite work was to sort out pepper and make pillows.

My grandmother did not attend the synagogue, never wore a wig, however, she observed all ceremonies. Grandma kept everything kosher in her household; there was even a butcher, a shochet in the yard, who cut chicken on Fridays. She made challah every Friday. She baked it in the Russian stove in a special form and it was not twisted. At 5 o’clock Grandma lit the candles, prayed, but there was no family gathering – no Sabbath. The whole family usually gathered only for Jewish holidays, which Grandma always celebrated. I spoke to her in Yiddish. When in 1933 we were not able to buy matzah because it was very expensive, I made it for Grandma myself. Mother’s brothers and sisters’ weddings were celebrated according to the tradition – with a chuppah.

The siblings and cousins lived in peace and friendship. Everyone had a big family. All families observed the Jewish way of life. There were no [Communist] Party members in the family. We were closely in touch and met for holidays, weddings as well as when visiting friends. We were great friends with my father’s cousin Shloima Maryanchik and rented a summer house 6 together in Svyatoshen. Such gatherings were very cheerful. I remember huge tables covered with plentiful viands, especially during summer time. The children helped the adults to set the table and serve the dishes. The children were fed first, so when the grownups had their meal, the children already played in the yard.

My father was born in 1889. He had no education and my mother also only had home-education. Dad served in the tsarist army starting from 1911. In 1916 he was sent to the war [World War I]. But he did not stay long at the front: he began to lose his sight because of gassing, which the Germans started to use during World War I. He was brought to a hospital and soon, in spring 1917, he was sent home. He suffered from optic atrophy. In 1924 he was still able to see, read and write, but little by little he lost his sight completely.

Father had twelve brothers and sisters. Rukhl, the younger stepsister, my grandfather’s first wife’s daughter, left for America before the revolution 7. The next stepsister, Inda, was ill and died in Kiev in 1920. I don’t know why. She had no children. After that her husband married another woman. Later they both perished. Father’s brother Falek Maryanchik, was born in 1893. He was a furniture upholsterer and perished at the front in 1942. The next brother Kiva, born in 1895, was in evacuation with his family in Chkalovskaya region during World War II, retired after the war and died in Kiev in 1953. Grigory Maryanchik, my father’s next brother, emigrated to the USA in 1966. My father’s stepsister Etl Maryanchik was run over by a tram in 1934. I don’t know any details of her life.

In the 1920s and 1930s both Mother and Father were handicraftsmen. Mother worked from home and Father joined the Cooperative Association of Blind People. He knocked up wooden cases and assembled switches. We lived in the center of the city, in Bessarabka  [Bessarabskaya Square – a district in Kiev, where mostly Jewish families lived], across the covered market. The famous actor Mikhail Svetin also comes from this district. When I met him, I asked him, ‘Are you from Bessarabka?’ – ‘How did you know?’ I said, ‘I read about it in a book.’

Mother had a workshop with knitting machines used for knitting stockings, socks, and theater tights and a small store. A lot of interesting people came to the store. For instance in 1928 the famous actor Solomon Mikhoels 8 and his wife visited us after their trip to America. He made orders for his theater. Since I went to a Jewish school, I could speak Yiddish to him and answer questions, which Solomon Mikhailovich asked me. I remember that encounter to this very day.

First we lived in premises attached to the workshop with no facilities. In 1930 the building’s upper floor, which was a hotel, was reconstructed into communal apartments 9 and we occupied one of the rooms. Our neighbors in Kiev were very different people, both Russians and Jews. We all got along very well. Father was respected most of all. He was a very witty and sociable person and always took part in public work – he was a member of the mutual aid fund, when he worked in the Blind People Cooperative. In summer my parents rented summer houses in Boyarka and Svyatoshen. We had a housemaid up to 1930, Aunt Vera, who was a Jewess. Later on she left for Simferopol for her relatives’ place and perished there in 1941.

Mother and Father were very busy working, but they never forgot about their children’s upbringing. Their mother tongue was Yiddish, but they spoke Russian. Mother received a home education. We had a lot of books at home – children’s books and religious books, including prayer books. I cannot remember the names of the books. It is difficult for me to say, how religious my parents were. They never were members of any party, or any Jewish community. I don’t recall my father praying, we never celebrated Sabbath and we did not even know the word. But we celebrated Jewish holidays and attended the Lisatsedikh synagogue on these days.

There were a lot of synagogues in Kiev in those times. There were three synagogues on Malaya Vasilkovskaya alone, where we lived: Lisatsedikh, Brodskogo synagogue, constructed with the use of Brodsky’s money and Kupecheskaya synagogue, constructed by the merchants. [Brodsky – famous sugar manufacturer in Kiev. There was a choral synagogue located on 13 Malaya Vasilkovskaya, built on his donations. Later on the Kievsky Puppet Theater was arranged there.] At the end of the 1930s the synagogues were abolished 10. A sports club was organized in the first synagogue, a children’s theater in the Brodskogo synagogue – now a synagogue is being organized there again – and a club in the Kupecheskaya synagogue. 

School and work

I went to a private Russian kindergarten. In those times, at the beginning of the 1920s, such kindergartens still existed. They taught French there and, moreover, there was a ballet troupe with choreographer Chistyakov as a teacher. Two sisters, who studied together with me, became ballet dancers. Later I was accepted to a ballet school. I acted in 1924 in a ‘Fairy Doll’ ballet performance to the music of Joseph Bayer. I remember my mother bringing me to the theater before the performance and leaving me there. I was walking around there crying. Somebody found my mother in the box, I calmed down and went to put on makeup and get dressed as a doll. All our relatives came to watch the performance. I also remember a circus performance – a Chinese pantomime. I practiced ballroom dances since I was seven and I still dance.

In 1925 I was eight and time came for me to go to school. Mother wanted to send me to a prestigious Russian school, but she failed. There were Jewish schools in Kiev in those times, and the RONO [District Department of Education] directed me to such a school located on Malaya Vasilkovskaya, now it is Rustaveli Street. It was school #85, later #59 11. This school was closed after 1932.

Only Jewish children attended the school. I was accepted to the second grade. First we had to pay three rubles per month. Later we did not pay anything. All subjects were taught in Yiddish: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geography and others. I did not like exact science at school, I liked languages better. We were taught Ukrainian, Russian and German. We knew nothing about Hebrew, it was prohibited. There was a Jewish theater at school and a gymnastics group. I loved to dance and do sports. We were not told anything about Jewish traditions and we had classes on Saturdays. There were approximately 30 children in our class. Now I cannot remember exactly what kind of special subjects we had in this school.

My favorite teacher was Zalman Skudinsky, I even read about him in the newspaper. He taught Yiddish. In 1931 he left our school for the Literature Department at the Academy of Sciences. Dora Moiseyevna Epstein was our headmistress. She perished during the war in Babi Yar 12. Her husband worked together with me at the Manuscript Department at the Academy of Sciences Library in Ukraine before the war. I also attended a Jewish Musical College. The headmaster, Moisey Beregovsky, was a famous specialist in Jewish folklore. Owing to him I came to love the Jewish folklore.

I did not feel the political climate at that time. I did not feel any anti-Semitic manifestations. We were brought up as atheists. It was prohibited for us to attend the synagogue; however, we did go there for the Simchat Torah holiday. We went to the theaters, including Jewish ones. There was a Jewish children’s theater in Kiev. We had a pioneer organization 13 at school. I was an activist and member of the Red Cross Society when I was in the 6th grade. Beginning from the 1930s we spent summer in a pioneer camp in Boyarka. The camp belonged to the Society of Disabled and my father was a member of it.

All my school friends were Jews. Fima Burakovsky was also a Jewish boy. We often visited each other, did our homework together, but didn’t play any games. In 1927 he left for America.

My parents wanted to send me to a musical college also, but, alas, I did not really have an ear for music. We had no piano at home and I did not possess any musical talent. My brother Boris, who was three years younger than me, learned to play the violin at the Jewish Musical College. Kholoneiser was his teacher. The college was not far from our house and he went there by tram or walked. I also went to Jewish music concerts with Boris. Boris studied in a Russian school. Mother didn’t want to send him to a Jewish school. He did not know a word of Yiddish. Everyone, including Mom and Dad, were sure that he should study in a Russian Soviet school. He finished Russian school #131 located on Malaya Vasilkovskaya Street. I attended foreign languages courses in that school.

When the Great Patriotic War started Boris wanted to join the army, but he was not accepted because of his illness. He left the city on foot and joined the army as a volunteer. He studied at the Polytechnic Institute and was transferred to the Leningrad Optical and Mechanical Institute during the war. He graduated in 1947 and worked as an engineer. Boris married a Jewish woman, whose name is Rosa Samuilovna. They have a daughter, Maria Borisovna Ivanova. Boris died in St. Petersburg in 2000.

In 1932 I finished the seventh grade of the Jewish school and entered a Librarian College. I studied there for two years. I found out from my friends that the Library of the Academy of Sciences was looking for employees to work at the Exchange Fund Department for the Dnepropetrovsk University. I was accepted to the Library. At the same time the Kharkovsky Institute of Culture with an affiliate in Kiev announced enrollment to the Librarian faculty. Women with a certificate of a gymnasium and even high school education applied for this faculty in order to obtain a librarian education degree certificate. Girls, who already graduated from a librarian college, also took the exams. They invited me to try and enter the Institute with them.

I went to the District Department of Education with a request to be released from the college because I was still a college student by that time. They told me: ‘If you pass the exam we will accept you as if you have secondary education, without a college certificate.’ I passed the exam and thus was accepted to the part-time study faculty at the Librarian Institute, Kharkov affiliate. I studied and worked at the same time. It was in 1934. I was transferred from the Exchange Fund at the Library to the Acquisition Department. I received all literature and distributed it to various departments in the Library. There were around 300 employees at our library. When everybody understood that I was a hard-working employee I was accepted to the library to work on a permanent basis.

I worked at the Academy of Sciences Library and often visited the Jewish Culture Institute at the Academy of Sciences of Ukraine. My schoolteachers worked there: Yiddish teacher Skudinsky and Maidansky, the teacher of Ukrainian. My friends were Ulya Wolfmann, Nastya Adamenko, Barya Pavlova and Vera Turyan. We studied together at the institute and everybody called us ‘academicians.’ We studied in the morning and I had to work in the evening.

The working day was six hours. It remained like that until 1940: there existed a law about the six-hour working day. I was busy with acquisition; later on I was ‘shifted’ to work with the alphabetical catalogue and sorted out catalogue cards the whole day. Later on I worked at the book distribution department, which was more convenient for me: I stayed at the Institute until 1pm and had enough time to have lunch at home, as my department worked between 4.30pm and 11pm. I came back home late at night. I was 17 years old at that time and I actually helped to support the family. Our work at the library was counted as practice. We graduated from the Institute within three years, in 1937.

I became a member of the Young Communist League 14 at the Academy of Sciences. In 1969 the Academy YCL organization celebrated an anniversary and I received an invitation. However, my son was sick and I was not able to go. I sent a long telegram, which was read out during the celebration.

When I graduated from the Institute in 1937, I worked as a Senior Librarian Assistant, later as a Librarian and finally as Senior Librarian. When I started to work as Chief Librarian, I was transferred to the Department of Arts. Its assets were stored at the Vladimirsky Cathedral and I had a key to it. The artist Nesterov arrived unexpectedly and I was told to go see him. He was very surprised and said, ‘Women were never allowed to the altar and suddenly a girl opens the door for me!’ I invited students from the Institute of Arts to meet the famous artist. We usually worked in the Cathedral in summer. During the war the Germans destroyed all assets that were kept there. 

During the war

At 6 o’clock early in the morning in June 1941, when the war started, Mother came from the market place and said to me, ‘Take the gas-mask and run!’  I was a member of the PVO group [antiaircraft defense troops]. On 17th September 1939, the Germans entered Poland and state of siege was announced in Kiev 15. We were on duty at the library, as we were afraid of attacks. We were well prepared for cases of military warning. I remember that the siege lasted for five days. And when in 1941 the Germans crossed our border I told everyone at home that we all had to leave. But Dad said, ‘I will not go anywhere.’ He told us that nothing awful would happen. However, we had already heard about ghettos from those who came from Poland. I wrote in the evacuation reference note for the library that my father, my mother and me were leaving together. However, my parents changed their mind and decided to stay.

We packed precious books urgently at the library to take them out to Ufa. We also took part in digging trenches in June 1941, 30 kilometers from the city. We cut wood there and lived in tents. We were soon told to leave that place. Almost all employees from the library participated in these defense works. We were 100 people and on 11th July, on our way back several people, including me, became detached from the rest. I reached a peasant house and suddenly bombing began and everything was set on fire. I was not sure if we would survive. Everyone managed to come back home before 11pm, except for me. We spent the night in the village and then another bombing started. We were not allowed to go to the city and had to stay with the military in the forest. Later on, when everyone came back to Kiev and went to the library, my mom was there crying: everybody came back, except for me. 

On 26th July I went to Ufa by train together with other library employees, where we delivered the most precious books. Before the evacuation my mother gave me 700 rubles and I was able to rent a room in Ufa. I had to find a job and started working as a timekeeper at a construction site. Later I met some relatives on the Maryanchik side. They were planning to leave for Fergana [Central Asia]. Our uncle lived there. He worked as a superior at the KGB 17 and ‘turned into’ Kuzma Timofeyevich Makarenkov from Abram Maryanchik. [A lot of Jews were forced to change their first, patronymic and last names, since it was easier to find a job and to enter an institute that way] 18. Together with my relatives I went to Fergana where again I had to look for a job; my uncle could not help me. It was the end of 1941.

There was an Oriental Institute in Fergana. I thought I would be able to enter the institute, get a room at the dormitory and some scholarship. But I was not accepted since I had no secondary education certificate. My higher education did not count. So I took a job as a pioneer leader at a children’s home. I never had any conflicts related to my Jewish identity. However I could not stand the Central Asian climate with its sand and heat. It was very difficult to live there because we had no ration cards. Aunt Sima’s husband died and she invited me to come to Sverdlovsk.

Two Mikhalchuk boys worked at that children’s home. Both their mother and their stepmother were Jewish. These Mikhalchuks asked me to hand over a letter to their father who worked in Sverdlovsk in UNIKHIM [Ural Scientific Research Chemical Institute]. I went to Sverdlovsk in 1942 and visited UNIKHIM looking for Boris Vasilyevich Mikhalchuk. He asked me how his children were – they were his children from his first marriage. He also asked me why I had come there. I told him that I had come to visit my aunt and that I was looking for a job. The librarian at their institute was on maternity leave, so I started to work at the UNIKHIM library. I arrived in Sverdlovsk on 25th July and started to work on 1st August. Soon people evacuated from the Leningrad blockade 19 started to arrive and among them was my husband-to-be. He also started to work at the UNIKHIM. He liked me at first sight.

In Sverdlovsk I was very often summoned by the District Committee for various works. Later, in October 1943, I was mobilized by the YCL to work for the KGB. I was asked if I spoke Yiddish. I spoke the language and they offered me a job as a censor for them. I was given letters, which I had to unseal and read. The letters were written in Yiddish. My responsibility was to check if anything bad had been written about the Party or about Stalin. I was a special public official. The result of my check-up, in case I detected nothing discordant with the Soviet Government ideology, was a stamp that said ‘Passed by the censor’ and the check-up date. Letters of anti-Soviet nature were put aside to be checked further by the KGB. That was none of my business. Two Jewish women worked there and all chiefs were Jewish.

However, my previous place of employment did not want to let me go and sued me. I brought a note from the KGB to the court and, certainly, was let go immediately. Later on they tried to evict me from my apartment, but failed: I was working at the KGB and we were placed on a secret list. We worked there for 14-16 hours. I left the apartment at 8am and came back home at 10pm. We had very good ration there 20 as well as good salaries. 

Marriage and later life

I rented a room in a private apartment in Sverdlovsk. My husband-to-be lived in the men’s dormitory in a room for five people. They all left for various places later on. The last one to leave was Abram Aisikovich Chizhik, a colleague of my husband-to-be. By the way, he kept proposing us to each other. Once I was planning to go to the cinema with my friend, but she refused. So I offered the ticket to Abram Aisikovich. He sent Alexander Gavrilovich instead, who started to court me. Everyone at the institute, where I worked at the library, noticed that Alexander Gavrilovich was not indifferent to me. I came home from work at 9-10pm and he already waited for me. In the evening we went for a walk and everybody saw it.

My Russian husband, Alexander Gavrilovich Karandin, was born in Leningrad in 1898 and raised there. His parents also came from Leningrad and in 1912 they built a house in the suburbs of St. Petersburg, in Sablino. Alexander Gavrilovich got university education and worked as an engineer at GIPKH [State Institute of Applied Chemistry]. My husband’s father was a worker. He died in 1917 and his mother, a housewife, died in 1937. He had three sisters and one brother, who was subjected to repression 21. My husband’s sisters got on very well with me. My husband was Russian and I decided to stay a Jew, thus I did not change my last name. My aunts, who came to visit me, were very much pleased with my husband.

However, a fatal tragedy befell our family. I concealed from my husband the fact that our son had a sarcoma. I did not tell him about this disease in order not to upset him, since his mother had died of a sarcoma. His nephew also died of this disease. My son finished school, entered the LEEI, Leningrad Electrical and Engineering Institute. He served in the army between 1964 and 1967. When he returned from the army he worked at the LEEI and studied at the same time. However, at the age of 25 he fell sick very severely and died in 1970. It was a total tragedy for me and we could not do anything to save him.

My husband spent the beginning of the war and the first blockade winter in Leningrad. He was evacuated from Leningrad along the Road of Life 22 in a very grave condition in 1942. He was older than 40 at that time but he looked younger than his age. We got married in 1944 and lived together for 35 years.

We did not really have any wedding. When our baby was born we went to the ZAGS [State institution, which registers acts of civil status – birth, marriage, death] and registered our marriage. We did not celebrate the event and had no feast. Our son Kolya, or Nikolai, was born in 1945 and weighed only 1.6 kilograms. My pregnancy was very painful and I had to stay at the hospital all the time. The labor was very difficult and nobody thought that I would give birth to a baby. There were no gifts because everyone thought I would die. I had nothing to swaddle the baby into. Later on my husband’s sisters sent us some clothes. I quit my job in Sverdlovsk after my son was born. In 1947-1948 I worked as a librarian at the Sverdlovsk Musical College.

My son, Nikolai Alexandrovich Karandin, was not raised as a Jew. He understood his identity as a Jew on his mother’s side, but he was more attracted by the Russian Orthodoxy. He lived in Leningrad, finished the Electrical and Engineering Institute and worked there for some months as a laboratory assistant. But as I mentioned before, he died in Leningrad in 1970 of a sarcoma.

After Kiev was liberated I made an inquiry at the District Soviet [local state authority] about my relatives who stayed in Kiev during the war. I knew that all the Jews, who stayed in Kiev at the beginning of the war, perished at Babi Yar. My mother, father, grandmother Rivka, two of her sisters and her grandson perished there in 1941. I do not know exactly how my parents died. However, I know that it happened at Babi Yar, because our former neighbors, Russians, told me about it. My relatives’ names are not written down anywhere. Though someone told me that he saw their names in some museum, but I couldn’t find them in the books. On my visit to Israel I made an inquiry at Yad Vashem 23, where all Jews, who died during the Holocaust, are being registered. I never received a reply from them.

After the war my uncle Mikhul, my mom’s brother, found out from various witnesses about Uncle Moisha and his wife, Aunt Rosa. They also lived in Kiev and had no children. My uncle came from a butchers’ family. When in 1941 the Germans entered the city the local population gave over my uncle and aunt Rosa’s brothers. When the men were taken away, Aunt Rosa hanged herself in her apartment.

At the end of 1949 I moved to Leningrad with my husband. The Ministry transferred him to GIPKH. He worked as an engineer at the Design Administration. In 1950 we obtained accommodation on Kirovsky Prospekt, which is now called Kamennoostrovsky Prospekt.

In 1953 I wanted to find a job. Those who saw my labor book, which said that I worked as a Chief Librarian in Kiev, were very much surprised and said to me, ‘You’ve reached the position of a library General!’ But when I asked why they did not give me a job, they simply had nothing to reply. The reason was clear: I was a Jewess 24. In 1953 I had been working for two months at the Library of the Botany Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Later on, in 1954 I managed to get a temporary job at the Library named after Pushkin 25 in Petrogradsky district. At first I borrowed books there and later on I offered my services. I was asked to prepare a catalogue, which I fulfilled. I worked in this library for 20 years. Later on I organized an affiliate of this library at the Leningrad telephone station, where I stayed to work. From 1982 I was managing the technical library there, which I also organized. After 1994 all pensioners were fired.

I live alone now. My husband died in 1979. I lived for 48 years in a communal apartment. When we came to Leningrad after the war and got a room, it was luxurious for those times, we even had hot water! In 1988 I exchanged my room for a small, separate, bedraggled single-room apartment on Leninsky Prospekt.

I had a lot of relatives on the Maryanchik side as well as on the Slutsky side. Almost all of them have died by now. Many perished in Babi Yar. I am the only one from my generation who is still alive. I keep in touch with my cousins’ grandchildren. Two of my nieces on the Maryanchik side, as well as one cousin on the Slutsky side live in Israel now. In 1994 I visited my niece in Israel. I meet some of my relatives and keep corresponding with my half-cousin. Some of my relatives on the Slutsky side live in America. I liked Israel, though its climate is too hot for me. Besides, I love Leningrad too much and I got used to living here.

I’ve devoted all my life to library science. When I came to Hesed to the Yiddish club and saw the books, I started to work as a volunteer at the library in Hesed. This is how Judaism reveals itself in my life. I never attended the synagogue and I do not attend it now. The life of the Jewish community is very tangible in our city: Jewish music concerts, major holiday concerts. A lot is done for the revival of Jewish traditions. And I think it is good. 

Glossary:

Susanna Breido
St. Petersburg
Russia
Interviewer: Ludmila Lyuban
Date of interview: June 2002

Susanna Aronovna Breido is an elderly woman of 78 years of age. She is not tall, rather slim, with a high forehead, made higher by a slightly receding hairline.

Her hair is gray; she is dressed rather modestly and walks slowly. She hardly ever leaves her home and reads with a magnifying glass.

She lives alone in a three-room apartment with a lot of books and family pictures on the walls. The abundance of thick magazines [‘Znaniye,’ ‘Novy Mir’ etc.] amazes the visitor.

These are magazines of past years; they are piled up near the walls, almost reaching the ceiling. She answers my questions gladly.

She collected information about her relatives even before her participation in this program. She remembers a lot of them and keeps several big picture albums.

She was a teacher of the Russian language and literature, so her speech is correct, as if she dictated an interview to her pupils, narrating in an entertaining and inventive way.

She is a very nice, well-disposed and hospitable woman.

• My family
• Wartime years
• After the war
• Recent years
• Glossary

• My family

My name is Susanna Aronovna Breido. I was born in Leningrad [today St. Petersburg, known as St. Petersburg until 1914 and Petrograd during WWI] in 1924. I had a chance to see my paternal great-grandfather Yerukhim Breido while he was still alive. He was born in the town of Polotsk [today Belarus] in Vitebsk province in 1826.

When I was born he was already 98 years old; he lived to the age of 106. He was a Polish Jew by birth. He was a craftsman, a household chemistry expert: he made ink, shoe polish, skin ointment, various cleaning products and so on. Formulas of chemical compositions were handed down through generations. Judging by these formulas, our ancestors traveled to England through Spain, to Germany from America and to Poland from Germany.

My father was especially interested in this subject. Looking at the ancient formulas, which reached our times in manuscript, he asserted that our ancestors on Breido’s line reached Polotsk and Vitebsk from Poland. I don’t know when exactly my great-grandfather moved to St. Petersburg from Polotsk, but I heard from my relatives that being a craftsman with a business of his own he obtained a permit in the second half of the 19th century from the Petersburg Crafts Board for residence in St. Petersburg with his family 1. My grandfather and my father obtained such permits later, as they were in the same craft.

My great-grandfather Yerukhim Breido was married twice and had children in both marriages. He had five children in his first marriage, four sons and a daughter: Grigory, [1850s-1915], Israel [1850s-1928], Rakhmil-Chaim-Ber-Leib, my grandfather [1860-1942], Tsiva [Belenkaya after marriage]; there was another son, whose name I don’t know; he left for the USA in 1915.

According to some information my great-grandmother’s name was Khvolos. I don’t know my great-grandfather’s second wife’s name. Grandfather Chaim took offence at his father Yerukhim because he ‘rewarded’ him with a stepmother when he already had children of his own, so he didn’t keep in touch with this second family for some time.

I remember my great-grandfather Yerukhim from the time when I was five or six years old. He wore a moustache, a full beard, divided into two parts, and a skullcap. By that time his second wife had already died. I visited him with my father, we brought him lunch, which Grandfather Chaim sent, and it happened on holidays when Father didn’t work.

I remembered very well my great-grandfather’s wonderful benevolence and deep respect for any person, even for such a small one like I was. He was the only relative who didn’t call me Susanna but Rasel, the name my parents really wanted to give me when I was born. I thought Great-grandfather mocked me and teased me.

When I asked him why he did so, he explained to me that my name was ‘hidden’; that I wasn’t given the name of Rosa because there was already a Rosa in the family, my sister Rakhil; but I was given the possibility to be the ‘flower queen,’ not in the Sinai valleys, but Sinai sea valleys, to be the white lily. Every conversation with him ended with friendly jokes.

When he spoke Hebrew with my father and discussed complicated stories, which were obscure for me, he translated something for me every two-three minutes, because he thought that a child shouldn’t be left in the dark. I couldn’t acquire a better lesson as a teacher-to-be. His influence on my father was great.

Once I asked my great-grandfather why his other grandchildren didn’t visit him. He replied that the grandchildren paid homage to him but his work didn’t interest them and my father was the only one he could talk to heart-to-heart.

He told my father that he had to get back to the comments he had done earlier on the Talmud, because life had forced him to reconsider everything all over again. They talked a lot about the history of various nations and religions. It seems to me now that it was what is called kabbalism. Kabbalists have to know the history of various nations as well as the history of their own faith. They never mentioned in their conversations that people choose their destiny and their time. 

My great-grandfather was an Orthodox Jew, he observed all the Jewish traditions and prayed a lot. He taught that if one found oneself in a foreign country, in a non-Jewish society, one should never express disrespect for the traditions of the other nations, as this makes one disrespectful of oneself; though one should know very well and stick to one’s own traditions. Of course, my father told me all this when I grew up, because at the time when I was in touch with my great-grandfather, I was too small to understand such things.

However, I remember how children from a Jewish boarding school and a school on Vassilyevsky Island [district of Leningrad] came to us for lunch every Friday and Saturday, called my great-grandfather rebbe Yerukhim, sometimes rebbe Yerukhim Polotsky, and the word ‘rebbe’ means ‘teacher.’

Great-grandfather Yerukhim was very sick at the close of his life; he suffered from dropsy and didn’t get up from bed. He lived with his grandson from his second marriage, a revolutionary sailor, who didn’t really show respect for his grandfather. Mother told me that the sailor shaved Grandfather’s moustache and beard off before he died, in order ‘not to have trouble with that later,’ as he said. But Yerukhim, who was affectionate and friendly with everyone, forgave him that outrage. My grandparents were exiled from Leningrad at that time and lived in Novgorod. Father was in exile in Siberia.

Great-grandfather died in Leningrad in 1932. He was buried near an old office, a red brick building near the synagogue. But owing to reforms and reconstructions, which took place later, his grave was lost. When we returned from Novgorod in 1939, we weren’t able to find Great-grandfather’s grave.

My paternal grandfather, Rakhmil-Chaim-Ber-Leib Breido, was born in Polotsk in 1860. He had a ‘weak heart’ from birth, as they called it at that time; and he suffered from ‘breast pang’ fits, which is now called stenocardia. That is why he was given so many names – it was considered that it would help to ‘cheat death, if it comes to take him away.’ They called him Chaim at home. He was a successor of his father’s craft and worked at the chemical workshop.

Chaim married Rivka or Riva Galyorkina in 1880. Grandmother Riva was born in 1860 in Polotsk into the family of a First Guild Merchant 2, Irma Galyorkin, my great-grandfather. Great-grandmother’s name was Mira; her maiden name was Sverdlova. It was a very well off family.

Irma Galyorkin owned a glass factory in Novka between Polotsk and Vitebsk, a lot of land with vegetable gardens in both cities, a whole block of profit houses in Polotsk, various stores, etc. However, my great-grandfather, a merchant, seemed not to be delighted with the marriage of his daughter Riva and provided only a cereals store as her dowry. Grandfather Chaim’s family lived from hand to mouth and, as I was told, the ‘younger sons always wore the cast-off clothes of the elder children.’

Grandmother Riva had probably had no education, but she was very thrifty and independent. She cooked perfectly and her food was most delicious on Jewish holidays. To all appearances she was one of the elder Galyorkin children and also ‘gave orders’ in her own house later on. Matriarchy was very well pronounced. Grandfather Chaim, a very good-natured person, obeyed my grandmother. She kept the household and brought up the children.

She was in command of the children too; she had six of them, besides two daughters, who died as babies. Five sons: Samuil [1881-1944]; Grigory [1882-1944]; German [1887-1959]; Aron, my father [1889-1944]; Isaac [1897-1933] and a daughter, Tsylya [1894-1961]. The four elder sons were born in St. Petersburg, Isaac and Tsylya in Polotsk, where Grandfather Chaim decided to move, after he took offence at his father, when the latter married for the second time. Grandfather Chaim’s family returned to St. Petersburg when my father was eight. 

Grandfather Chaim proceeded with his craft. Subsequently my father Aron became his successor and his brothers assisted him. Grandfather was an official owner and holder of the Breido Brothers Chemical cooperative 3. In 1931 the cooperative was shut down based on an accusation of using hired labor.

Father worked at the Breido Brothers Chemical cooperative until 1930. Grandfather Chaim was the owner and Father was the chief administrator, who managed everything. He was dealing with the watches [duty teams], kept the accounting and held negotiations with the suppliers and customers.

Though he could communicate perfectly with various people, he didn’t like to deal with the purchasing issues, he never had this streak, this capability. However, he was the only one who dealt with the formulas and was a remarkable expert in that field. They rented space for the cooperative. Jews and Russians worked in the cooperative. If there was even the slightest opportunity to help someone, Father did that immediately.

On 15th January 1931 the workshop was shut down, Father was accused of using hired labor, regardless of the fact that members of the cooperative received a certain share payment, and at the end of the year the profit was distributed between all of them; besides, Father and his brothers worked from early morning till late at night. But no one was interested in this.

They were ‘bourgeois’ for the authorities and they were to be ‘dispossessed’ as kulaks 4. Grandfather as an old man was exiled to Novgorod, to the ‘101th kilometer,’ he was deprived of his rights for three years. [Editor’s note: For any of several reasons the Soviet government did not allow people, who were exiled, to live closer than 100 kilometers to big cities. Novgorod was considered a big city.]

The brothers were exiled to other cities. Father was arrested as the principal, put into the famous Leningrad ‘Kresty’ prison and later transferred to ‘Butyrka’ [Butyrskaya Prison in Moscow]. Someone informed my mother about the time when Father was to be transferred and together with us, children, she went to see him. Soldiers with dogs surrounded the train; it was impossible to talk to Father, we could only see him. When we came home, our neighbor, a Jew, came to us, brought a picture of his wife together with our little Ada [the interviewee’s youngest sister], and tore it to pieces in front of us. Thus we became a family of an ‘enemy-bourgeois.’ 

In Novgorod Grandmother and Grandfather rented a room in the house of the Belenky family, who were cantonists 5. I still remember their Novgorod accent. The Belenky family was also Jewish, however, being cantonists and baptized, they had more civil rights. My grandparents returned to Leningrad in 1939. I met them when they were people of pension age.

Grandfather, as well as his father, wore a moustache and a beard and a skullcap. Grandmother didn’t wear a headscarf as many other Jewish women did, but remained bareheaded. Grandfather was sick most of the time and didn’t visit the chemical workshop any more. He handed over all his knowledge to my father, though they had to seek advice from him regarding formulas, especially when new compositions were invented.

My father’s parents were Orthodox Jews, Yiddish was their mother tongue and they spoke only this language with each other. However, Grandfather also knew Hebrew. I remember that he always sat in the room with his prayer books. He was sent somewhere; then he came back and continued his prayers. All Jewish traditions were observed in the family. I remember how Grandmother was washing and cleaning the dishes endlessly; they only ate kosher food.

All relatives celebrated Jewish holidays at my grandfather’s. Up to 30 people gathered there. Grandfather lived with his daughter’s family in a big apartment one floor above his daughter. Grandfather checked that everything was according to the rules: prayers, candles lighting, all ceremonies. This was so in Leningrad, as well as in Novgorod. Grandfather attended the synagogue and in Novgorod he prayed in some chapel, where ten Jews [that is, a minyan] gathered for praying. Grandfather Chaim, unlike his father, had no interest in any other religion; he thought that Jews should by all means preserve their religion and traditions, that is why he was strongly against mixed marriages.

Grandmother Riva supported her husband with regard to traditions. She died in 1940 of pneumonia. She, as many Galyorkins, had weak lungs, but suffered from such a form of tuberculosis, which allowed her to live up to the age of 80. She was buried at the Jewish Preobrazhensky cemetery in Leningrad. The funeral was carried out according to the Jewish rite.

Grandfather Chaim died at the beginning of the winter of 1942 in Leningrad, which was besieged by the Germans. He starved, in spite of the fact that his daughter Tsylya, with whom he lived, tried to provide some food for him. She sold her belongings, but it wasn’t enough. It was certainly not possible to keep kosher during the blockade 6, as there was nothing to eat at all. Grandfather died of dystrophy. It was really difficult to bury him. Albert, Grandfather’s younger son Isaac’s son, knocked up not a coffin, but a plywood case, which fell into pieces when it was pulled downstairs from the third floor. Tsylya’s husband Lyova Katznelson dragged Grandfather’s corpse on a piece of plywood to the Preobrazhensky cemetery, paid off the cemetery attendant with Grandfather’s bread [that is, his daily ration 7] and buried him there.

I know little of Grandfather Chaim’s brothers and sisters. His brother Israel Breido left for Palestine in the 1920s. In 1927 Israel wrote to my father and invited him to Palestine, saying that there were all the conditions for setting up a workshop. However, Father refused flatly, saying that this country was his only home and this was where he belonged. Later on Israel liquidated all his business in Palestine and moved with his family to South Africa, to Johannesburg. He purchased some kind of a store there and strenuously invited [his nieces] to come to his place. However, very soon, literally in several months, an accident happened: he was run over by a car and died. Thus none of us left for Johannesburg, it wasn’t meant to be.

Great-grandfather Yerukhim had more children, but I know something only about Grandfather Chaim’s stepbrother Isaac, who was born in 1889, the same year my father was born. At first he worked at the Breido Brothers cooperative, but later they had a fight and he quit. He married a Russian woman and converted to Russian Orthodox Christianity. His name was changed to Alexander Zaozersky and my parents and other relatives terminated all relations with him. However, when he died at the end of the 1940s/beginning of the 1950s, his wife called my mother and invited her to the funeral service in the church. She said that her husband, before he died, spoke only the Jewish language [i.e. Yiddish] in delirium and she hadn’t understood a word. Mother replied that she should have invited her then, so that she could have translated. Mother didn’t go to the burial service.

The narration about Grandmother Riva’s brothers and sisters should start with her sister Rakhil Galyorkina, who was my maternal grandmother. So, my parents were cousins. There were several such marriages in their family. It was done for the purpose of preserving the family capital within the family. But sometimes they really fell in love, as in such a big family they met each other often.

My grandmother Rakhil Strunskaya [nee Galyorkina] was born in Polotsk in 1870. Her husband, my maternal grandfather, Aba Strunsky, was a Polish Jew. He was born in 1869, but I don’t know in which town. He was a cabman, driving passengers who arrived in Polotsk, especially those who came by night trains. The owner of the horses was a merchant, Irma Galyorkin. During the daytime Aba played the violin, he was one of the best violinists in Polotsk. He played at weddings and funerals, both rich and poor.

Grandfather Aba’s elder brother was a civilian in the Tsarist Army. He hit an officer with a bottle on the head because he called him a ‘dirty Jew.’ In order to avoid the punishment, he had to be secretly transported to America in a ship’s hold. I don’t know anything about my grandfather’s other brothers and sisters.

The Galyorkins could have hardly liked their younger daughter’s husband, as he came from a totally different environment. As dowry, Grandmother Rakhil got the house where her family lived. They had three children: Braina [1895-1975], Moishe-Zalman [1890-1906] and Dina, my mother [1898-1983]. My grandmother Rakhil died in 1899 when she was very young, only 29 years old. She had consumption. She infected her husband Aba, her son Moishe and her elder daughter Braina with tuberculosis.

When his wife died, Aba called on his parents for assistance. His father and my great-grandfather, was a ‘forest controller’ as they called it, though I don’t know what exactly his responsibilities were. Two years later Aba died of tuberculosis. The Galyorkin brothers immediately turned out his parents from the house and took the children into their families. Before Aba’s parents lived with his family in the same house.

My grandmothers Rakhil Strunskaya and Riva [Breido] had five brothers: Leib [1842-1930s], Lipa [1860s-1920s], Isaac [1844-1915], Moisey [1846-1938] and Don [1850-1921]. Leib Galyorkin lived in Vitebsk. He was a First Guild Merchant, a wholesaler, just like his father. He had seven children: daughters Dina [1892-1967], Temma [Emma, 1882-1964], Chaya-Rokha [Anna, 1880-1944], Maria [1883-1976] and sons Girsh [Grigory, 1880-1919] and Rafail [1885-1919]. As a merchant, Leib had the right to educate his children, both in Russia and abroad.

Emma obtained high school education; Maria graduated from the Medical Institute in Derpt [today Tartu, Estonia]; Girsh and Rafail got technical education and Anna graduated from two universities: Sorbonne [France] and Bern [Switzerland]. They were certainly all Orthodox Jews until the Soviet power came.

Leib Galyorkin’s daughter, Anna Lvovna [she was Lvovna according to the passport, as her father’s name Leib was translated into Russian as Lev] was born in 1880 and was a revolutionary in her youth. She had a sham marriage with a famous social democrat, Iosif Solomonovich Blumenfeld. Documents about his life and activity are now kept in the Museum of History in the Peter & Paul’s Fortress in St. Petersburg. He was born into the family of a rabbi in Odessa.

He was a prominent revolutionary, Plekhanov’s follower 8, and had to hide, as he was persecuted for using false documents; he used various names. He was the organizer and typesetter of underground printing-houses of the RSDRP [Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party], a delegate to the First RSDRP Congress, the organizer of the printing-house where the ‘Iskra’ newspaper was printed.

Anna was the revolutionary Chicherin’s fiancée before she met him.  She married Blumenfeld fictitiously in order to get a dowry from the Galyorkin family, which was used later on to set up the Iskra printing-house. She took the printing equipment from Russia abroad. The wedding took place in Paris in the 1900s. She remained friends with Iosif Solomonovich until the end of their lives, but they never lived as husband and wife.

Our family preserved a warm relationship with Iosif Blumenfeld, especially Father’s brother Grigory: they were Party comrades; my father and he also assisted each other. Iosif married other women in 1924 and in 1925. When Iosif Blumenfeld was fired, my uncle gave him a job as an accountant at the cooperative. My father employed Boris Smelnitsky, the violinist, as a guard. Mother was indignant, ‘Boris is playing chess again with Isaac in his office, and who is going to be responsible if something gets lost? If it were your personal workshop you wouldn’t have tolerated that, but it isn’t. If he’s the guard, he has to guard.’ Mother recalled that conversation later.

Anna Lvovna Galyorkina didn’t get married for the second time. She worked as a teacher in Lonjoumeau [France] in a school of professional revolutionaries in the 1910s. After returning to her motherland in the 1920s she worked in a library of the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and later became a pensioner, got awards and had a good state pension. She lived with the family of her niece Bella, her brother Girsh’s daughter. They were taken from besieged Leningrad in 1942 to Balashikha near Moscow, where their relatives lived. Anna Lvovna died there of cancer in 1944.

Her younger brothers Girsh and Rafail worked at the glass factory of their uncle Lipa Galyorkin in Novka. They perished there in 1919 during a pogrom. Rafail was never married. Girsh’s wife was left with four children: Bella [1905-1980], Abram [1907-1966], Sophia [1903-1990] and Mendel [1911-1949]. The eldest, Bella, was 14 years old at that time. Bella worked as an accountant in trade. She got married and had a daughter, Anna.

Bella’s brother Abram was a construction engineer, during the war 9; he served in the field-engineering forces on the Leningrad frontline. He found himself in a brigade, which made mass graves using explosives at the Piskaryovsky cemetery. Each grave was for 1,000 people. When one grave was full, they started a new one. Everybody who participated in that digging was later on assigned to various frontlines. They were told, ‘Hitler shouldn’t know about our losses.’ Abram died after the war.

Their other brother Mendel was also in the war, he was a medical attendant and was taken prisoner when wounded. He was blond with blue eyes and didn’t look like a Jew, so no one gave him away. The Germans sent Mendel to forced labor in Germany, where he worked at a farm. The landlady of the farm, a German, knew that he was a Jew but didn’t give him away to the authorities, though there wasn’t much use of his work, as he was very weak after the wound and often fell sick. After the war he was transported to the Soviet Union but died in 1949.

Leib’s brother Lipa Galyorkin inherited a glass factory from his father in Novka, a small town between Polotsk and Vitebsk. Lipa had a technical education; he re-organized the factory and purchased new equipment. ‘Novka’ became the largest glass factory in the province. About 700-800 non-Jewish workers, taken on from neighboring villages, were employed at the factory before the Revolution 10. They were all provided with accommodation: a special compound was constructed for them near the factory. After the revolution he remained its General Manager, a management was formed out of the employees, though the positions of engineers were held by Lipa’s relatives and other Jews, who obtained education abroad: in England, Germany and Switzerland.

Workers who were dissatisfied with that condition arranged a pogrom in 1919, having asked a ‘Green’ gang for help 11. The Reds and the Whites 12 were at war with each other and there were also the so-called Greens, who put together armed gangs, for example, the famous bandit Makhno 13, and plundered the population. The bandits killed Jews and robbed their houses. Eleven members of the Galyorkin family perished in that massacre, including Leib’s sons, Girsh and Rafail. Lipa himself was in Petrograd at that time and avoided death.

When he returned home and, approaching Novka, found out about the pogrom, he went to Vitebsk, where his elder son Irma worked as the head of the Revolutionary Militia. The militiamen came to Novka but it was too late. The investigation revealed that the factory committee initiated the pogrom. It contacted the gang in advance; the local citizens drew up lists of Jews and participated in robbing their houses. The workers’ leaders didn’t make it a secret and at the meetings openly called for getting rid of the Jews. It is difficult to say why no measures were taken in order to prevent the massacre.

The court hearing took place in the Vitebsk province military-revolutionary committee for 18 days. Fifteen of the accused were sentenced to execution by shooting; others were convicted for various terms of imprisonment. However, the All-Union Central Executive Committee Presidium reversed this tribunal resolution in January 1920 and released the accused.

It was a heavy blow for Lipa. He considered himself guilty of what had happened and committed suicide, having drunk acetic acid. His elder son Mendel began to work at the factory instead of him. He was later on exiled for that to a camp in Siberia and perished there. Lipa had four other sons: Isaac [1899-1990], Yeremey [1900-1983], Lasar [1907-1942] and Israel 1910-1989]. Lasar perished on the front, Yeremey also was in the war together with his wife Maria. He was a medical officer. Their son Rafail perished near the town of Belaya Tserkov in Ukraine.

Another brother, Isaac Galyorkin, lived in Polotsk. From his father Irma Galyorkin he inherited land, vegetable gardens, profit houses in Polotsk and owned a distribution market for his goods. However, when he shipped cabbage to Petersburg in railroad carriages, they said that his profit was small, but he got the right to be in any city, visit Riga, Petersburg, educate his children, i.e., it was done not for the sake of money but for the sake of these rights.

Isaac brought up my mother from the age of four after her parents had died of consumption. He was married twice. He had two daughters from his first marriage, Dina and Mira. His second wife had a daughter of her own. Anna, Leib Galyorkin’s daughter took Dina to St. Petersburg. Dina passed exams and entered Bestuzhev courses [an academy for women in the Russia Empire established by the Society of Progressive Intellectuals.]. However, after that she had a fit and was considered mentally ill and she returned home.

That is why Isaac Galyorkin didn’t provide for my mother’s education – he believed that it could make one go mad. His daughter Mira didn’t get any education either; her father took her from school after the fourth grade. Mira married her cousin Abram Sverdlov; they lived in Klimovichi in Belarus. When the war broke out they got evacuated across the Urals. Isaac was at the Leningrad frontline and survived. After the war Mira and her husband returned to Klimovichi, but later moved to Isaac in Leningrad.

Moisey Galyorkin lived with his family in the village of Shumilino between Polotsk and Vitebsk. He brought up my mother’s sister, Braina, who was six years old when her parents died. But soon after that an accident happened. Braina was placed on a hot stove after a bath and got badly burnt. After that Lipa Galyorkin took her in. He provided her with a very good gymnasium [high school] education later on.

Moisey Galyorkin had three other sons and a daughter: Nota, David [1880-1942], Samuil [1885-1942], Irma [1887-1955] and Gita [1891-1965]. David and Samuil perished during the siege of Leningrad. Samuil’s son Sleima and David’s son Zalman perished on the front in 1942. Zalman’s wife Sonya, a teacher, evacuated pupils from school # 166 14, where I studied, from Leningrad, but they found themselves on territory occupied by Germans. She perished together with her two small children in a mobile gas chamber. Irma Moiseyevich survived the blockade and took part in the defense of Leningrad.

Nota Moiseyevich was evacuated over the Urals together with his wife and daughters. Relatives of his wife, Emma Wulfovna Fridman – her brothers with their wives and children – were shot by the Germans in Shumilino in 1942. Nota’s son Yakov was in the war and reached Berlin. He is a disabled war veteran. Together with his son Nota, Moisey was procuring cattle. Nota was my mother’s fiancé for some time, until my father took her away to Petrograd in 1917. Gita Moiseyevna married her cousin German Breido, my father’s brother.

My father Aron-David Chaimovich Breido was born in St. Petersburg in 1889. Soon after his birth the family moved to Polotsk. At a certain age he went to cheder, though he studied there for one and a half years only. When the family returned to St. Petersburg in 1897, he didn’t study at official institutions. He began to work at an early age, as did his brothers. At first he worked as a ‘boy’ at the ‘Brichken & Robinson’ confectionary. At the age of eleven he became an apprentice at his father’s handicraft shop.

He mastered the high school course on his own, with the help of Grandfather, Great-grandfather and a large number of books, which he read and ordered later on. He was even allowed to indicate in formal papers that he obtained high school education, though he never took any exams anywhere. Father was a very capable person, he had an exceptional photographic memory, and if he had studied, he could have achieved a lot. He was chosen by Grandfather from childhood to continue with the family business, though he didn’t have a special chemical education, but he was a wonderful, self-taught person. 

I don’t know how Father came to ‘Tolstoyism,’ but since the age of 16 he was a member of that free philosophical society, he visited the great writer Lev Tolstoy 15 in Yasnaya Polyana and received one or two letters from him, which were destroyed later on, when the Tolstoyans were persecuted. Father became a vegetarian since that time: he never ate either fish or meat, or eggs. He was an Orthodox Jew, but he was interested not only in studying religion, but also in the issue of life and death, as well as in other philosophical issues, since his youth.

The theory of ‘non-resistance to evil by force’ by Lev Tolstoy was very congenial to him. There were people of various national groups among the Tolstoyans, including a lot of Jews. This theory didn’t contradict the Jewish religion; its main thesis was the absence of violent pressure on a personality. In a way it agreed with the Jewish religious teaching.

When World War I broke out in 1914, the Tolstoyans arranged a Petrograd Municipal Medical-Nutrition Detachment, which set up nutrition stations for starving people and a mobile surgery hospital at the Western frontline. My father was a member of that detachment and worked as a corpsman at that hospital, which was situated in the village of Voleyka near the town of Molodechno in Belarus. Father was an employee of the Russian Red Cross Society, which was headed by Yekaterina Peshkova, the wife of the famous Soviet writer Maxim Gorky 16. Father knew her very well. Working at the hospital, he reflected a lot on the fate of the Jewish people and kept a diary, which I read as a grownup. Here are some excerpts from that diary:

“…The fascination and sorrow I feel for the Jewry are not comprehensible for Russians. I would love to have the freedom and faith in myself, which Brother Alexander has [Russian Orthodox Priest], but I will never give up my belonging to the Jewry, until there is this universal faith, love and freedom. I would give away my head, rather than agree to change the ‘Jew’ in my passport to ‘Russian Orthodox,’ the same for my children… I noticed how my sense of Jewish belonging effaces itself among those who are close to me in faith; and how I speak about the Jews with a shade of pride and dignity among those who humiliate them.

I will be a staunch Jew among those who persecute and oppress Jews in any way; but in an environment where there is no such persecution and where there is equality in the eyes of God, I will be equal… I feel that being a Jew, I am most of all bound to the sufferings of the Jews. I like this faith, ancient and clear of any idols; I continue to love it, to understand it, to place it as the foundation and to reveal more future in it than past; something the Jews nurtured in their heart and did not give away to the market of outside books, 100 times deeper and more than is known of them. Their covert teaching of Kabbalah is too early for our century…”

Father was recorded in the wagon train as a civilian as he had an army service delay for ten years based on bad eyesight – he had progressive myopia. He worked at the hospital between 15th December 1914 and the end of 1916. When gas was used on the frontline, 100 Tolstoyans signed the ‘Appeal to Soldiers and Officers’ about the necessity to put an end to that monstrous and senseless slaughter. The signers were arrested. Father was in bed sick with purulent pleurisy and wasn’t arrested, but they didn’t want to keep him on the frontline, as he was a Tolstoyan.

They ordered him to go to the Polotsk Military Affairs Management, where the issue about the extension of his release from military service was to be considered. But it was an excuse, not the reason. He was to go to Polotsk because he, as all Jews, was ascribed to the Jewish Pale of Settlement and was considered a petty bourgeois of the Polotsk District.

Notwithstanding all solicitations from the frontline, Father was sent away from the frontline in 1916, though combats took place and there was a lot of work at the hospital. He was transferred from Polotsk to Petrograd hospital for examination, after that to Vitebsk hospital for after-examination, and finally, he was taken away from the frontline. [Editor’s note: The authorities suspected Jews of pro-German sentiments and removed them from the frontline and deported those who were living there.] Father got acquainted with my mother in Polotsk and in 1917 he took her with him to Petrograd, to his mother, who was her aunt.

My mother, Dina Abelevna Breido [nee Strunskaya] was born in Polotsk in 1898. She became an orphan at the age of three, was separated from her brother and sister and brought up by the family of Isaac Galyorkin, her uncle. She didn’t get any education, but she was taught to read and write. She was also taught how to sew, cook and do household work. She was physically strong, she could ride a horse, work in the garden, climb trees and liked to give orders since childhood, as she had an independent nature. When my mother met my father, she was engaged to Nota Galyorkin, her other cousin, Moisey Galyorkin’s son; but she left with Father gladly and, as she said, ‘never regretted that for a single moment in her life,’ in spite of my father’s difficult fate.

My parents got married in 1918 in Leningrad. They had a traditional Jewish wedding and a lot of guests came. When they started to live together, Mother read a lot and Father selected books especially for her, in order to fill the gaps in her knowledge. They lived in a separate apartment, but always close to Grandfather Chaim and Grandmother Riva. Mother was always among her relatives, as there were many relatives working together with my father at the chemical workshop. Everybody sympathized with and pitied my mother, always took into consideration her wishes, because she had a hard childhood. She felt herself totally free by my father’s side as he never interfered in any household issues. His business as a man was to procure firewood and the like, but all the other problems in the house were solved by my mother.

We had matriarchy in our family. No one disturbed Mother and no one ‘pressed’ her. Grandmother Riva was not only her mother-in-law, but also her aunt, her mother’s sister. Grandfather Chaim never hurt a fly in his life. Father loved his parents very much. On his way from work he visited them first, and then went home. This made Mother mad, but she couldn’t change the system. Father considered that Mother was younger and could survive any worries more easily than his old parents.

All in all, my parents lived in friendship. The most horrible swearword used in our family was the word ‘fool’; it was impossible to hear any harsh or rude word from them. It wasn’t possible either to swagger, to swank or to show off in our house, as my father despised it. Considering their material condition, they lived very modestly, though it was considered that the children had to be dressed decently and, what was most important, they had to get a good education.

There were three children in our family: Rakhil [Rosa, 1920-1995], Ada, and I, born in 1924. We also had a brother called Aba, who was born in 1927. My parents dreamed about a boy, a son. He was born a handsome and healthy baby, but he was infected with flu at the maternity ward. The flu created complications in his lungs, since every member of our family had weak lungs. He began to suffer from asthma fits, had to breathe oxygen and died at the age of six months. It was a heavy blow for my parents. After that baby another daughter was born, my sister Ada [1929-1975].

Father was deprived of the universal suffrage for five years and exiled to Turukhtansky territory in Siberia. He was convicted based on Article 59 – ‘economic counter-revolution.’ At first he lived in the village of Vereschagino, later in Baklanikha and worked as an accountant in the ‘Soyuzpushnina’ Department [enterprise specialized in growing fur animals and procuring fur]. There was a big Jewish colony and a Tolstoyan commune in Siberia. Jewish Tolstoyans met my father with warm clothes when they found out that he was to arrive. Later, when he had to be examined by a commission which reconsidered his case, and he was kept at the transit prison in Krasnoyarsk, the Tolstoyans sent for my mother and she managed to see Father for a whole week, living at these Jews’ place.

The commission determined that it wasn’t worth it to deport my father, but they didn’t release him either. He was sent with the last ship to the North down the river Yenisey. Most likely the decision concerning the reviewing of my father’s case was connected with the persecution of the Tolstoyans, because my father’s brother Isaac Breido was also summoned for the review of his case. Though he was not a Tolstoyan, he had the same last name and patronymic name as my father; the other brothers and sisters took different patronymics: his brothers were ‘Yefimovich’ and his sister was ‘Lvovna.’ It was done simply because they wanted so, there was a complete mess with documents at that time and one could write down whatever one wanted.

When the arrests of Tolstoyans started in Leningrad and the Tolstoyan Makarov was ‘accidentally’ run over by a tram [he was pushed under the tram], his wife and daughter came to us and told my mother that we had to take out everything from my father’s belongings which related to the Tolstoyans. The collected works could be left, if no one could be discredited through them.

When Mother remarked that Father wouldn’t be sent farther, since he was already in Siberia, she was told, ‘Not only Aron will be murdered, but also you and your children will be exiled to Siberia, whole families are exiled.’ Mother destroyed pictures and 18 pages of my father’s diary, which he kept in 1916 when he worked as a corpsman at the hospital. But our home didn’t get searched.

When my father was arrested, Mother had to find a job, so we had a day nanny, a Russian called Manya. Those who needed registration 17 in Leningrad gladly went to work as nannies. Since a nanny couldn’t manage both Ada, and me I had to go to a kindergarten. Mother worked as an ice-cream vender and at the Club of Sovtorgsluzhaschikh [Soviet Commercial Workers]. When there was no nanny, she worked at home, sewed gloves on a sewing machine; she also knitted mittens, as we had a knitting machine at home.

To be able to send parcels to my father she sold various things and books, of which we had a lot. Mother couldn’t pay as much attention to my education as to that of my elder sister Rosa, who learned German, music, drawing; we had teachers who visited us at home, a whole group of children of the same age were present at the lessons. I didn’t have anything of the kind because our circumstances had changed.

Father was released in the summer of 1934. He left for Novgorod, where Grandfather lived, because it was easier to obtain rehabilitation there, which he did get in October 1934. But after that ‘Part II’ started. After Kirov was killed in December 1934 18, the authorities began to exile from Leningrad the families of those who were inconvenient for them.

Mother with us, children, was exiled to Novgorod at the beginning of 1935. We were called ‘the family of the deprived’; we were unreliable. By that time my younger sister Ada was five years old and Rosa and I went to school, she was 14 years old and I was ten. Father reckoned that Rosa should stay in Leningrad. ‘All the rest will be able to return using our room, i.e., one room in our old apartment’, Father said.

Our parents thought that one of the reasons for our family’s misfortunes was our apartment, which Father reconstructed from a college assembly hall together with an engineer named Anderson. It was done after I was born. Since I was very small and weak, doctors advised them to take me to the summerhouse immediately and to change our apartment with windows facing north for a different one, a lighter and more spacious one.

When Father was arrested in 1931, we had six rooms in Smolninsky district in the center of Leningrad: Father’s office, a dining room, a children’s room, a bedroom, a servants’ room and a room where Mother’s sister Braina lived. The Militia department, located across the street, claimed that apartment, but they didn’t succeed. In 1935 our living space was a matter of interest to the house manager, that is, the administrator of the building. He came from Don and he needed rooms for his relatives.

By that time one of the rooms in our apartment was used by the family of Chernyavsky, children of my father’s friends; another was occupied by the Tikhvin family; and the third room was used by Braina, so we had two rooms left. Father wanted to leave Rosa in one of the rooms. He called Venaver, Yekaterina Peshkova’s assistant at the Political Red Cross [which organized revolutionaries’ activities and was shut down in 1937] and together with the help of their organization they succeeded in obtaining a written permission of the Prosecutor’s office for the children, that is, us, to stay. But only my elder sister Rosa stayed. Mother took little Ada with her and I was taken temporarily to Uncle Grisha’s family, because I was sick.

I went to my school for a short time. Eleven children out of 41 remained in our class, all the rest belonged to families of exiled people; but our teacher gave references to all of us, stating that we finished the school year, though I think, she took an enormous risk. Rosa lived in Leningrad between the age of 14 and 19; she received help from our relatives and children from a Jewish school, who had earlier come for lunch at our place on Saturdays and Sundays. Father was right, not only did we return to Leningrad through this room, but also our relatives who had been exiled before us.

The Tolstoyans always helped each other. When Father was exiled to Novgorod, he got assistance from Molochnikov, the person closest to Tolstoy, who created the museum of the writer in Novgorod. Molochnikov provided Father with a place in his shed, where Father immediately started a chemical shop. When we came to Novgorod, Father worked at ‘Vkuskhimprom’ [gustatory chemical industry] enterprise. He also helped needy people.

For example, he fictitiously took on Tatiana and Natalia Gippius, sisters of Zinaida Gippius [whose mother was Russian and father, Gippius, was German, 1869-1945], one of the most important representatives of the ‘Silver Age’ period of Russian Literature. She was a poetess, a prose writer and playwright and was married to the famous man of letters Merezhkovsky. They emigrated from Russia in the 1920s. The sisters certainly didn’t do any hard work in the cooperative, but they were on the legal list, which saved them from starvation and persecution by the authorities.

My parents were very hospitable and provided meals and shelter for anyone who came to us. I remember Mother telling Father: ‘You wear the same tolstovka and canvas shoes all the year round, and you give money to print cheap and free literature for people.’ These books were printed by the ‘Middleman’ publishing house, which was headed by Molochnikov and Chertkov. We had a whole pile of books of that publishing house.

I remember Novgorod very well, especially the trip to my parents’ place. For the first time I went by train alone, it took me six hours. I visited my grandparents in Novgorod before, but somebody always accompanied me. Aunt Emma, the wife of my father’s brother Grigory Breido, gave me a big paper bag of candies for the trip, so on the way I felt like a real grownup and very independent. I studied very well at school in Novgorod, notwithstanding the fact that I fell ill very often. I was the class monitor and taught those who lagged behind.

My friends were of different nationalities, but none of us paid attention to it at that time. The population of the town was 120,000 people; half of them were exiled citizens, so no one avoided me based on that characteristic. I felt that I was a very valuable person.

At first we rented a room, later the cooperative gave my father an apartment in its building, since he was a foreman, the head of the shop and the first Stakhanovite [winner of a socialist competition at the work place] in town. It was a wooden two-story house, located on the bank of the Volkhov River. There were uninhabitable premises on the first floor and the second floor was occupied by the families of two heads of the shop. The apartment had a stove stoked with firewood, but there was a bathroom and a water supply system. I even had a little room near the kitchen, reconstructed from a small pantry, with an area of three square meters.

Father often went for a walk with me in Novgorod and showed the monuments to me. We visited the Tolstoy Museum and the churches. I remember very well that almost all churches were transformed into vegetable storages or stables at that time 20. Apparently the synagogue was also shut down, as both Father and Grandfather went to pray to someone’s house, where the Jews gathered in a minyan. Father prayed a lot at home too.

My father was an Orthodox Jew. In Leningrad, when I was small, he took me to the synagogue on Staronevsky, near Bakunina Street, and to the Big Choral Synagogue. He said that one should know how to pray and know what our nation is asking from God. Father often attended the synagogue, and when some of our relatives died, he attended the synagogue throughout the whole [mourning] year. Mother kept the fast with him, celebrated all Jewish holidays, though I never saw her pray and she didn’t attend the synagogue. Father began to pray even more when he returned from Siberia, after his contacts with the Jewish community there, which preserved all foundations and national traditions.

In Novgorod Father prayed in my room and I could hear everything he said. There was barely enough space between the table and the bed. He kept boxes there [tefillin], which he put on his forehead and his arm, and tallit but he didn’t always wear it. I asked him once why he didn’t pray like Grandfather. I said, ‘Grandfather always uses the same words in his prayers, and you always say different words. Why?’ Father replied, ‘I pray and thank God for the worthy and useful deeds, that I managed to perform during the day; for what He inspired me with; for His permission to help the others. I ask Him to forgive me for something that I could have done but didn’t want to do or wasn’t able to do. I pray about this every day, that is why the words in my prayers are different.’ His prayers were a peculiar verbal diary with the analysis of his thoughts and deeds.

He didn’t force me to be religious, he said that everybody should solve the issue on one’s own, one could only advise someone else and no one had the right to point the way to someone else. If I became a member of the pioneer organization 20, I shouldn’t do something that was not supposed to be done by pioneers. He thought that I would grow up and understand everything myself. However, he always very gladly and comprehensively answered my questions, regardless of the subject of the questions, whether I asked about religion or about life in general, for example the theory of ‘non-resistance to evil by violence.’ I even argued with him. He said, ‘It doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t resist evil. You should resist evil, but not by way of violence.’ I objected, ‘You tell me that evil doesn’t obey the rules of the good. So how can you prove that something is evil?’ Or I asked him, ‘Father, how can God see what an ant, an elephant, a fox or people of different nationalities are doing at this certain moment on Earth?’ And Father replied, ‘God knows who to watch at any given moment.’ What could I say against it?

Father was a very erudite person; he was called a ‘walking encyclopedia’ not without a reason. He read a lot and went to the Public Library very often. Those he communicated with were cultured people, but he could very easily and reasonably talk to them, as he had enough knowledge in the field of literature, history and the present time, let alone special chemical knowledge.

When he returned from Novgorod for a consultation with a famous professor of chemistry from the Technological Institute, the latter was amazed at the level of his knowledge and advised him to seriously consider scientific work in the field of chemistry, in spite of the fact that Father was 45 years old at that time. I respected my father very much. The level he set for himself in life was accessible only to him. But it was easy to be by his side and one wanted to resemble him.

All Jewish holidays were celebrated in our family, and everything was done according to the rules, both Grandfather and Father kept an eye on it. Father didn’t observe Sabbath; it wasn’t possible, as everybody worked. But he always said that ‘God needs not the form, but the content and the faith of a man.’ There was seder on Pesach, and the Haggadah, which told about the Exodus of Jews from the Egyptian slavery, was read. There were special Pesach utensils and traditional meals on the festive table. Everything was cleaned before the holiday; we never ate bread on Pesach but matzah instead. We didn’t go to get it at the synagogue; we made it at home.

On Rosh Hashanah we also had traditional meals and a big round challah on the table. Chanukkah was a holiday of joy and cheerful games. Every evening eight days in a row a candle was lit on the chanukkiyah; we heard the story of the rebellion of Jews against Greeks, we heard about the Temple, about its consecration and about the miracle with the oil pitcher. Children got sweets and money, the so-called Chanukkah gelt. I remember that everybody had their own piggy bank, where we put the coins we received as presents. When the piggy bank was opened, the money was used to buy presents for relatives.

Everybody had fun and played the fool on Purim. Mother made ‘Haman’s ears’ [hamantashen] – triangular cookies with poppy-seeds. The history of the holiday, the story of Esther, Mordechai and Haman was of course told. So we knew the history of our nation since childhood, the Jewish history of 4,000 years. No one needed to be afraid of appearing worse than someone else; even if somebody said that you were a person of second rank. On the contrary, one could be proud of one’s nation and its history.

All our relatives got together on holidays. My parents kept a very close relationship with their brothers and sisters, though Mother’s brother Moishe-Zalman died at a very early age. After the death of his parents he was sent to learn the shoemaking craft in Petersburg, but his health deteriorated there and he died of consumption at the age of 17 in Polotsk.

Mother’s sister Braina was also sick with tuberculosis, but it was benign. She finished the gymnasium, worked as an accountant and lived with us most of her life. At first my parents sent her money, because she couldn’t find a job either in Polotsk or Vitebsk. Later they took her in. After the Revolution she worked in Smolny and belonged to the category of those who ‘sympathized with the Revolution’. Braina was a sick woman, she had poliomyelitis and she limped. Later she also developed a mental disease but it was in a neurological boundary stage, so she was able to work. She worked either at home or at the workshop as a day instructor. She died at the age of 80.

My father’s five brothers had a hard fate. Father’s eldest brother, Samuil Yefimovich Breido, started to work at the age of 13 as an assistant at the chemical workshop. At the age of 21 he was enlisted into the Tsarist Army and served at first in St. Petersburg. Later he participated in the war with Japan [1904-1905], was demobilized and married Vera Rivkina from a wealthy Jewish family – her father owned a factory. In 1922 they returned to Petrograd. Their younger son Isaac was around two years old at that time. Samuil worked as a carpenter, as a tea agent, later at the chemical workshop with my father, dealing with supplies. Samuil was exiled to Samarkand [today Uzbekistan] in 1931 based on Article 59 [economic counter-revolution]. Since he wasn’t considered chief at the workshop, he, unlike my father, was exiled without incapacitation, like the other Breido brothers. He returned in 1934 and died in 1944 in evacuation in Ufa. He educated all his four children.

Father’s second brother, Grigory [Girsh] Yefimovich Breido, worked either as a lathe operator or as a metalworker apprentice at the ‘Arsenal’ plant. Later he acquired the highest class qualification in this profession. He was a social democrat [Mensheviks wing] 21, ‘Arsenal’ delegate to the Duma; held the position of Deputy Chairman of the Central Military-Industrial Committee in the Duma. He was great friends with Alliluyev, Stalin’s wife’s brother; they were neighbors. He accepted stocks of weapons together with the famous revolutionary Krasin. He was in prison more than once, before and after the Revolution. He married his cousin Emma Lvovna Galyorkina, Leib Galyorkin’s daughter. They had three children: Victor, born in 1910, Ima, born in 1912, and Tsylya, born in 1914.

After the Revolution Grigory Breido became disappointed in the changes that took place and together with his friend Iosif Blumenfeld dropped out of the Party, left for his wife’s motherland and worked at the glass plant in Novka. He survived miraculously the pogrom that happened at the plant, as he was in Petrograd on business together with his uncle Lipa, the plant manager. Grigory’s wife and children were saved by the Russian nanny, who hid them at her relatives’ place.

In 1931, when Grigory’s parents and brothers were exiled from Leningrad, he was included by his revolutionary friend, who held an important position at that time, into the delegation that was to visit the tractor plant [CTZ] in Chelyabinsk in the Urals. That helped him to avoid further persecution. He organized a mechanical workshop at the CTZ in Chelyabinsk. However, it didn’t save him from the 1937 ‘repressions campaign’ [the so-called Great Terror] 22, when he was arrested and exiled to the camps near Solikamsk as an ‘enemy of the people’ 23. It is not inconceivable that Stalin ‘got him’ for his friendship with Alliluyev, because no solicitation on the part of the old revolutionaries worked. He was jailed based on Article 58 [political counter-revolution] and he died in the camps in 1944 24. In 1954 he was rehabilitated posthumously 25. His wife and children were not persecuted and stayed in Leningrad.

My father’s third brother, German [Yeremey] Yefimovich Breido, had a weak health from birth: congenital heart [valvular] defect and bad eyesight [progressive myopia]. His parents considered that he wouldn’t be able to work at the chemical workshop and sent him to Finland to be apprenticed to a tailor. However, on his return home he never worked as one, but assisted his brothers Aron and Samuil at the workshop. He never showed any interest in politics.

He married his cousin Gita Moiseyevna Galyorkina and had two sons: Mark [Morduchai], born in 1913 and Albert [Aba], born in 1918. In 1931 he was exiled to Voronezh without incapacitation and returned to Leningrad in 1934. During the war he was in evacuation in Ufa with his family. His children got university education. German proceeded with the business of his brother Aron, who had died. German Breido died in 1959, Gita Moiseyevna died in 1982 and they were buried at the Jewish cemetery.

My father’s sister’s name was Tsylya Lvovna Katznelson. Her husband Lev [Lyova] Israilevich came from a family of rabbis from the clan of David. He wasn’t religious though. He finished college and was a pharmacist by occupation, but he worked in the advertisement business, he also advertised the household chemical goods produced by the Breido Brothers. Lev Katznelson participated in the construction of Belomorkanal [All-Union Communist Construction in Siberia], which was constructed by convicts. He was doing administrative work there. He also worked as an administrator at the workshop of the famous Leningrad prison Kresty.

My father didn’t like many of Lyova’s actions, but when Lyova dragged Grandfather’s body on a piece of plywood to Preobrazhensky cemetery in the winter of 1944, Father said that God might forgive Lyova for his sins for such a deed. The Katznelson family lived together with my grandparents, Tsylya’s parents, in one apartment. Tsylya had a sight disability, so she didn’t study and worked at the cooperative of the blind. They stayed in besieged Leningrad during the war. They had three children: daughters Mira and Vera and son Israel. Tsylya died in 1961 of a heart attack and was buried at the Jewish cemetery.

Father’s younger brother Isaac [Ichke] Chaimovich Breido was a member of the Bund 26 and later joined the anarchists. He worked at the chemical workshop of the Breido Brothers, but not together with my father. Isaac had a weak health, which is why he worked in tooth powder production. In 1931 he was exiled to a free settlement in the town of Shadrinsk in Archangelsk region, the severe weather conditions of which had a bad effect on his health. In 1933 all the Tolstoyans were jailed. Uncle Isaac had no connection with the Tolstoyans, but his patronymic was ‘Chaimovich,’ just like Father’s. Maybe someone messed something up, but no one wanted to clear up the details, so Isaac was summoned to be transferred to Kresty prison for the review of his case. He didn’t reach Leningrad but died in the transit prison. He left behind a son called Albert, who was born in 1927.

My father’s brothers had different personalities. Grandfather Chaim, as well as my father, never forced his opinion on anyone; he considered that everyone had to make their own decisions concerning religion, occupation, participation in revolutionary activities and party membership. That is why Grandfather’s sons differed from one another: my father was religious and belonged to the Tolstoyans; his brothers didn’t distinguish themselves by being too religious; at the same time Grigory was a revolutionary and was declared an ‘enemy of the people’; German was never interested in politics; Isaac was a member of the ‘Bund’ and later an anarchist. However, they all tried to provide an education for their children and lived in friendship with each other.

• Wartime years

The further destiny of our family developed in the following way. I returned to Leningrad from Novgorod together with my mother in 1939. Father came back a little earlier, in 1938, and began to work in Pushkin, which was called Detskoye Selo at that time. Iosif Blumenfeld arranged everything. There was this dormitory where it was possible to set up a chemical workshop, and this is what they did. Father quickly got registered in Leningrad and after that we could also come back. Father worked at the Leningrad Industrial Combine and combined this with other jobs, simultaneously working at other places, consulting and setting up business.

When the war broke out, he worked in Novaya Derevnya and on Suvorovsky Prospect. They produced cleaning products for wood and metal, skin ointment, waterproof hunters ointment, photoelectric cells, sealing wax, ink, stamp ink, all of it was required on the frontline. It was difficult to get raw materials in besieged Leningrad; Father knew cellars where the craftsmen kept useful materials, so workshops were set up closer to those material storages and thus it was possible to supply the frontline. Father was busy with this work during the blockade, when he was not in hospital with exacerbation of tuberculosis and was able to plod somewhere.

The work he did was hard even for a physically healthy man. A cauldron with mastic, shoe polish or skin ointment weighed no less than 80 kilograms. It was very difficult to stir this thick hot paste, having practically just one lung. Besides, it was harmful to compose chemical compounds and dyes. Twice he was brought on a sleigh from Novaya Derevnya through the whole city, because he collapsed right in the street.

I remember my last conversation with Grandfather Chaim, when we spoke about my father. It happened in 1942; Grandfather sat close to the so-called ‘burzhuika,’ the small stove, and was warming his hands. He said, ‘People can be divided into three categories: in the first are those for whom what is mine is mine, but what is yours is also mine; in the second category are those for whom what is mine is mine and what is yours is yours; and finally, most generous and reliable are those for whom what is yours is yours and what is mine is also yours. Your father belongs to this last category.’

Our relatives sent letters to us, persuading us to evacuate, but we couldn’t do that, because at the end of 1941 a misfortune happened to my elder sister Rosa. She finished school in 1938 and entered the Medical Institute, and was transferred to the fourth year of studies before the war. When the war broke out, she started to work as an anesthetist at a children’s hospital and at the same time she continued her studies at the Institute. In October 1941 a little girl was dying of diphtheria at the hospital and Rosa began to make artificial ventilation for her ‘mouth to mouth’ and sucked out the diphtheria coat.

I don’t know what happened to that girl afterwards, but Rosa fell sick with a serious type of diphtheria. She was put in the infectious diseases hospital and the doctors struggled for her life for one and a half months. She was given injections of anti-diphtheria serum four times, but the amount destroyed part of her brain. She was discharged from the hospital with a diagnosis of ‘organic brain damage’ and she remained handicapped till the end of her life.

At first she worked at home and at the chemical workshop, finished courses of nurses/dietitians [nutritionist specialist] in 1943-1944 and worked in a hospital in the regular preventive and medical attendance service, but after a severe fit she got into the hospital and never worked after that. Later on she was placed into a psychiatric hospital time and again for 13 times.

I finished nine grades of high school before the war and on 26th June 1941 I entered a six-month nurses’ course. We studied theory one day, and on the next day were on duty in the hospital. However, in two and a half months the courses were shut down, since all young men were taken away to the frontline. Besides being on duty at the Central Garrison Hospital, I also worked as a nurse/registering clerk at the health post in ‘Krasny Shveinik’ factory and ‘Krasny Pechatnik’ printing-house in Moscow district. Every other 24 hours I was able to spend a night at home.

In January 1942 I was to accompany the wounded across Lake Ladoga 27, but I fell ill with double pneumonia and recovered only in May. I was sent to an anti-epidemiological detachment, as I wasn’t fit for military service. The task of the detachment was to collect children who were left without parents, take away the dead bodies of citizens from apartments, attics, laundries, staircases and streets, and to deliver those who had fever to hospitals. We were given two weeks to accomplish the task.

I managed to see the real ‘face’ of the war and the siege during that period and it was dreadful. We delivered the children to a children’s home on Zayachiy Island. Dead bodies were taken to the crematorium. The number of children and dead bodies collected was secret information. We were able to find out about it only 40 years later; but at that time everybody reported on his own job only to his own manager.

The next task was Lagoda, where we deployed a tent hospital in order to arrange a barrier for infection. I was on duty in the hospital and studied at the surgeon nurses’ courses. In October 1942 all staff from the aerostatic regiments was sent to the frontline under the order of Zhukov 28. We hung sandbags when the aerostat descended and took them off when it had to ascend. However, in November 1943 I found myself in the hospital again because of a heart disease. When I was discharged I walked with difficulty and worked at a different detachment. Besides my work at the accounting service I also worked as a clerk and phone operator until January 1944. 

After the siege was lifted I was transferred as a phone operator to the antiaircraft-artillery regiment headquarters. I was a Komsomol organizer 29, which is not an elected post, but an appointed one in the army. We guarded the Levashovsky airdrome. At the end of 1944 I got into hospital again with a tuberculosis exacerbation and was demobilized afterwards. The doctors told my mother that I wouldn’t survive until spring 1945, but they were wrong, I appeared to be ‘enduring.’

My younger sister Ada was twelve years old when the war broke out. She fell ill right after Rosa [with severe typhus], recovered, but felt bad for some time and was very weak. Both Rosa and me stayed sick at home. Ada had to go to the market every day and carry water together with Father, since the pipes burst during the first winter. So many deaths were around… such burden appeared to be above her strength. She couldn’t cope with it and tried to commit suicide. She was saved, but Mother took her to work at the workshop, so as to keep an eye on her all the time.

Our family survived the blockade with difficulty. In 1942 Grandfather Chaim died of dystrophy, Father was more dead than alive: he was very sick, he had only one lung left, lost 36 kilograms and looked like a real skeleton, but he lived to see the lifting of the siege and even up to August 1944. When he died, he was buried according to the Jewish rite. Men said prayers at the synagogue, where women weren’t allowed in, and did everything properly. He was buried at the Jewish cemetery. One Belarusian said the following words at his coffin, which I still remember, ‘One can live a life in various ways. Life is a book. A book may be thick, but when you read it, nothing remains in your memory. And it may be a thin paperback book, but you will remember each page and each line all your life. Such was Aron’s life.’ This was my father.

The terrifying blockade time remained in the memory of everyone who survived it. I had horrible nightmares for a long time. I remember how I went home from work, turned to 6th Sovetskaya Street, and saw that the building, in which my classmate Igor Raisky lived, was gone. The place where it had been located was cordoned off as a spot of a direct bomb hit. I knew that my classmates, who were accepted to the sea cadets’ school, were to have a celebration of the event there at that time. They were all killed. There was a lot of crushed glass around and it was one block away from my house. I came home with gray temples.

Memory keeps various things. I remember: There was a three-day line for bread. People didn’t leave their place in the line, they only replaced each other. There was an interruption in production at the bread-baking plant because of the lack of water. A truck loaded with piled-up dead bodies from the Sverdlov hospital morgue went by. A dead body of a naked girl with long loose golden hair stood at the side of the truck, reminiscent of the Summer Garden statues. Everybody standing in line was deeply shocked. Once I was walking home, counting the corpses I saw, which were carried either on a piece of plywood or on a sleigh. I counted 19. Why was I walking and counting? Now I can’t explain that ‘blockade state’ to myself.

Before the attack on Vyborg ‘Katyushas’ were zeroed in, some military men were finding targets, measuring the distance to it for the future combat. A group of mortar men, aged 40-45, stood near the headquarters dugout where I worked as a clerk. They were talking and preparing for the combat. Suddenly there was a casual volley and then nothing was left, only a piece of scorched ground. I still can’t calmly listen to famous poet Mezhirov’s poems: ‘Artillery hits its own people: undershoot, overshoot, undershoot.’

After the combat two tanks pulled over at the dugout. I remember the remains of ground intestines on the tracks. The tankers went to get water and with buckets of water washed off what was recently their own and foreign soldiers. They were doing it busily, calmly, but how to live with that later on? There were a lot of deaths around and the feeling of fear was always there. However, the shelling and bombing didn’t cause external panic, they merely killed the nerves. Not only the living conditions on the frontline of the city-front, but also continuous internal feeling of danger turned us, yesterday’s schoolchildren, into grownups.

There was a notice on the door of our apartment: ‘We exchange everything for food.’ Prices for various goods at that time were as follows: wedding ring – 2 kilograms of bran; Grandfather’s clock – we asked for 2 kilograms of millet, but were given 1.5. One kilogram of bread cost 500 rubles and a junior grades’ teacher’s salary was 475 rubles. A soldier’s pension for the second category of disability was 42 rubles. There were people who came to look at the stuff, then told us that they didn’t like anything and took something with them – they just stole it. But there were also those, who were ready to help at any time. The siege showed us who is who.

Once a person came to us to buy the Schroeder concert piano. He offered us to evaluate the instrument and promised to bring us rice, millet and other food products one to two times per month for this price. He promised to pick up the piano after he paid the entire amount. He visited us for a year regularly, paid the total amount, but never picked up the piano. We were at a loss.

Everything cleared up later: when that man visited us again, he asked us to sell the piano to somebody else, and give him half of the money, because his son had got into a car accident, he was a driver for an air crew commander. That commander perished in the accident. The son was under trial and they needed money for an attorney. It appeared that the man had German relatives, but he hid it, in order not to do any harm to anyone, because the country was at war with the Germans and he felt partly guilty for his nation.

When his son was on the front this man swore to help some family to survive the siege. And he did save us by bringing us food during a whole year. His son returned from the front and now we had to save him. Mother tried to give him the total amount, which we got from the sale of the piano, but he took only half of it and said that if it hadn’t been for his son’s accident, he would have never come to see us again. 

In summer 1944 my fatally ill father decided to summarize all household chemical compound formulas, which he created during his whole life, in one copy-book. He created them using the experience of various countries, nations, our expert chemists, combining those, which were already known and inventing substitutes for the materials which weren’t available.

More than 300 products were manufactured by him or with his help in Leningrad under the most difficult conditions of the blockade. But he was able to write down only 30 formulas including detailed production technology, using short intervals between the hospitals.

Absolute blindness, high temperature and, finally, total immobility didn’t allow him to accomplish this task. He preserved a clear consciousness and started to dictate the formulas to his daughter Ada. She wrote them down into small notebooks, seven by five centimeters. Thus she wrote down around 50 formulas. Father left these formulas to my mother, so that after his death she would continue the family business with our other relatives. Father continued to take care of the people around him till his last breath.

If I talk about all our relatives, the following picture appears. Out of those 57 members of the Breido-Galyorkin family, whom I knew, 30 were on the front, and two were civilians, not based on the draft but volunteers. 21 perished. Ten perished on the front, three in the mobile gas chamber, four in besieged Leningrad and three in evacuation after they were transported from Leningrad, being sick. Nine became disabled on the front. All those, who came back from the front, have been awarded.

30 were awarded medals ‘For the Defense of Leningrad.’ These figures prove the absurdity of some people’s statements, pronounced sometimes even from the high tribune, about Jews who weren’t in the war but stayed deep in the hinterland. Our small people displayed real courage and heroism in this war.

My mother loaded herself with a huge burden during the blockade. She worked and took care of all the sick people. She could divide a small piece of bread into three parts, without touching Father’s portion; since everybody was sick, she sold everything she could and exchanged it for bread. Soya-based milk was distributed at the chemical workshop; it could also be exchanged for bread. Mother wasn’t able to save my physically weak father, however, if it hadn’t been for her, we, her children, would have died too. We all worked to the best of our abilities in this time, which was difficult for both the country and the city. We were all awarded medals ‘For the Defense of Leningrad.’

• After the war

After the war Ada and I continued our studies. She went to school and I signed up for elementary school teachers’ courses following my regiment commander Pyotr Alexeyev’s advice. He told me that I should be a teacher, since I could ‘listen and hear,’ but the medical commission wouldn’t have allowed me to enter the full-time department at the Pedagogical College because of my tuberculosis, but there was no such restriction at the courses. At the end of our studies we were automatically transferred to the Pedagogical College, and after graduation I entered the part-time department at Leningrad Pedagogical Institute, the Faculty of Literature. At the same time I worked at a school in junior grades.

After graduating from the Institute in 1952 I continued to work at the same school in senior grades, teaching Russian language and literature. It was the biggest girls’ school in the city: 2,000 girls. I worked there for 19 years. When our Head of District Education became headmaster of a prestigious school where English was studied seriously, he offered me a position in that school.

However, by that time we had already moved into a separate apartment in a different district of the city and it was difficult for me to go to work so far, so I decided to look for a job in a school nearby. He said, ‘They won’t take you’, knowing that I was a Jewess. And he turned out to be right. I was accepted and on the next day I heard, ‘We are sorry, but this position is taken already.’ It happened because I was Jewish, so I went to work in the school he invited me to and I worked there until 1983. I still keep in touch with my former pupils.

My sister Ada had a tragic fate. At first everything went rather well for her. She had a real gift for languages, mathematics, biology and other sciences. She finished school with a golden medal [i.e. with distinction] and entered the Faculty of Biology of Leningrad State University in 1948. There were a lot of candidates and only few were accepted. It was very difficult to enter, especially for Jews, as anti-Semitism could be felt and Jews weren’t popular at the University 30.

Almost every student was a medal winner. Starting from the first year she began to simultaneously study at the Medical Institute in order to properly master anatomy and physiology. She graduated from university as a physiologist in 1953. It was at the height of anti-Semitism, but she was a very gifted person and proved herself at the sub-faculty with her works and was accepted to the post-graduate department.

As a student she married her university mate. Oleg Grigoryevich Kusakin was Russian. In 1953 their daughter Yevgeniya was born. Ada had bad kidneys, the birth was premature and very hard, the baby was taken out with the help of forceps and this process lasted for two hours. It is now known that after 45 minutes of brain being ‘starved’ of oxygen during the delivery irreversible effect occurs, which leads to severe mental diseases.

It wasn’t known at that time. When it was found out that the baby had organic brain damage, Oleg insisted that she was given away to a special institution, but my mother and Ada didn’t agree. When Zhenya was six years old, Oleg deserted his family. Certainly it was a heavy blow for Ada. Oleg left for Vladivostok.

After defending her Ph.D. thesis in 1957, Ada began to work as a biochemist at the Institute of Cytology. In 1975, a day before defending her thesis for a Doctor’s degree, she committed suicide. There was preliminary defense, academicians and friends arrived. No one expected it. Of course she was very excited and chain-smoked, which didn’t happen before, but there were a lot of reasons for that: a hopelessly handicapped child; a mentally diseased sister; an unhappy private life; worries connected with the trial over a good friend of hers, a famous Soviet human rights-defender, Sergey Adamovich Kovalyov; natural agitation before the defense of the thesis. And she couldn’t stand all this strain. They had six people in their department with medical education, who had a very good attitude toward her, but no one noticed that she was in an absolutely abnormal, psyched-out state. They apologized later to my mother and me.

After Ada’s death, my mother fell seriously ill. She died of cancer in 1983. Two handicapped people were left with me, Rosa and Zhenya, who couldn’t be left alone and without supervision. I had to quit my job and retire. Rosa died in 1995, Zhenya died in 1996. When they died I felt void and without any incentive to live.

• Recent years

I was never married, but it wasn’t a sacrifice to my sick relatives. A close friend of mine was murdered on 5th May 1945 in Berlin. We agreed to meet on the first Saturday after the war in Leningrad at the corner of 5th Sovetskaya Street and Grechesky, but the encounter didn’t happen… many girls of my generation didn’t get married as their real and potential fiancés perished in the war.

Besides, I had a personal reason. I suffered from hereditary diseases. The type of tuberculosis that I inherited from my father [which he inherited from his mother] wasn’t hazardous and contagious for people around me, but my children would have most probably inherited it. My friend Yakov knew it and he wasn’t afraid of it, but I couldn’t take this risk with anyone else.

At present I live alone and stay in almost all the time. I get a pretty decent pension [more than 3,000 rubles = $100. Average pension in Russia is no more than 40 USD], as a teacher with 37-year experience, war and blockade veteran, so this money is enough for me to live on. An employee from Sobes [social security agency] visits me, purchases food for me with my money. ‘Hesed Avraham’ 31 offered assistance to me, but I refused, since I think that there are a lot of Jews in ward of Hesed, who need help much more than I do.

Events that take place now in Israel certainly upset me. I watch the news on TV, listen to the radio and worry for the citizens of Israel, because real war is happening there and I know very well what it means. Besides, my relatives, my former pupils and Jews just like me, live there. I grieve about them; it isn’t a foreign country for me. But what is most important, there seems to be no way out of the existing situation. And it is now possible to see ‘Death to Jews’ posters in the streets [in Russia], which really brings sad thoughts.

Despite the Orthodoxy of my father and grandfather, neither me, nor my sisters grew up in a religious way. Of course the Soviet ideology, Soviet school and institute affected us. We grew up as atheists. Father died early and Mother wasn’t religious. She tried to celebrate Jewish holidays after the war, lit the Chanukkah candles, cooked traditional Jewish meals as far as possible, but there was no one to say prayers and keep an eye on the observance of the ceremonies.

We lived in a communal apartment 32 at that time together with Russians, but it wasn’t them, but the Jewish neighbors who made rows. The most quarrelsome was a Ukrainian Jewish woman from Kiev, who yelled every time that Mother lit the candles with what she claimed were her matches, which was certainly not true. There was another Jewish family that was also very unpleasant, especially the wife, who informed against her friend during the hard years of the Stalinist repressions. [For Soviet people the word ‘repression’ carries a heavy political connotation and is associated with Stalin in the first place.] But there was also another Jewish family, who were very nice and cultured people.

So it’s not the nationality, but the person her or himself that is important. After the war anti-Semitism reappeared, but those who preached it were people of low culture, regardless of their position. Really cultured Russian people, whom I met during my life, were never anti-Semitic. In my opinion the cultural level of those hooligans, who nowadays place anti-Semitic posters in Moscow, is at its lowest.

• Glossary: