Boris Oliker

This is my father, Boris Oliker.

This picture was taken in Minsk in 1930.

Six years Father was arrested.
He spent most of his life in prisons, camps and exiles.

My father, Boris Oliker, was born in 1901 in the town of Rogachev in Belarus. He was the youngest in his family and at the age of 13 became an apprentice at a private tailor shop.

Difficult working conditions very soon destroyed his health and he had to leave the shop and become an apprentice at a private textiles store.

In 1917, as a 16-year-old young man, he began to participate in the Revolutionary movement in Minsk.

In 1918 during the Civil War, when Minsk was occupied by the Germans, he got acquainted with the members of an underground Bolshevik committee.

Thus he got to know the Party Charter of the Bolshevik Party and he was explained the objectives and tasks of the Bolshevik Party.

Soon he began to receive minor assignments from the underground committee; in particular, he was assigned to conduct the work among the working youth regarding international education in accordance with the Bolshevik Party Charter.

After Minsk was liberated from the German occupation, in December 1918 he was selected to the organizational three according to the convocation of the First Meeting of Working Youth for the purpose of organization and registration of the Komsomol organization in Minsk.

He was elected member of the First Committee of the Minsk Komsomol Organization, among others, at the first organizational meeting of the working youth in December 1918.

He joined the Red Army forces among one of the first Komsomol members, was enlisted to the Fourth Komsomol Company of the Minsk Guard regiment and fought against the White Guard members to defend our native Minsk.

During the White-Polish occupation of Belarus and Minsk, Father, among other Komsomol members, was left in Minsk to conduct underground work.

They assisted the underground Party Committee in setting up the underground Komsomol organization and very often, risking their lives, performed important tasks of the underground Party Committee.

The underground Party Committee and the underground Komsomol leaders were arrested by the White-Polish gendarmerie. After the arrest of the first underground Komsomol Committee, Father was elected Chairman of the Minsk underground Komsomol Committee.

At the beginning of April 1920 the White-Polish gendarmerie arrested him and other members of the underground Komsomol Committee. He was interrogated, tortured and tormented in the torture cell. Five of his front teeth were knocked out.

As a result of torture he had to undergo two operations later, lost his hearing in his right ear and remained disabled for the rest of his life.

He was court-martialed as the leader of the underground Komsomol Committee, and the court was supposed to pass a death sentence, but owing to the violent attack of the Red Army the court didn’t manage to complete the trial.

Father was awarded the Order of the Labor Red Standard of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic for his active work during the Civil War against the White-Poles.

He was the delegate of the III Congress of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Young League, where Vladimir Ilyich Lenin gave his famous historical speech about the tasks of the Young Communist League.

After the Civil War Father finished the workers’ faculty, after that he graduated from the Medical Institute and he became a surgeon and later the Deputy People’s Commissar of Public Health of Belarus.