Podcast

Narrated by Wendy Goldman.

Historian Wendy Goldman of Carnegie Mellon on the Soviet Union and the home front during the war.

Narrated by: Sara Kestelman

Isaac  Aizman was a neurosurgeon in Riga. His wife Tobe-Leya remained at home  raising four children. When war came, Dr Aizman was conscriopted into  the Soviet Army. He told his wife to flee eastward. She hesitated. And  that would cost them all.

Narrated by David Horovitch.

Moses  Chubat was but ten years old when the Romanian and German  armies  invaded Moldova. Barely escaping Chisinau, which was being set ablaze,  Moses, his parents and grandparents fled by train, ship and wagon—all  the way to Uzbekistan, 4,000 miles from home.

Narrated by Allan Corduner.

Samuel Birger tells the harrowing story of what it was like for his  family to flee from their shtetl of Jonava as the Germans sped through  the country, and more than a few Lithuanians joined in what would become  an orgy of killing. The Birger family fled by horse and wagon, by foot,  and then by train—until weeks later, they arrived in Tatarstan. Living  in wretched poverty, Samuel’s grandmother starved to death while he and  his three younger brothers foraged for jobs and food on collective  farms.

On June 22, 1941, Adolf Hitler unleashed Operation Barbarossa, the largest land invasion in history. Intent on destroying the Soviet Union, over 3 million German soldiers streamed through eastern Poland, the Baltic states and into the Soviet Union itself. By the time the Soviet Army had retreated, retrenched and retook their lands, millions of Soviet soldiers and civilians would perish and tens of thousands of villages and towns burned to the ground.