My father Benjamin Ginsburg also volunteered to the Territorial Army. He took part in the battles in the vicinity of Rzhev in late autumn. It was cold and muddy, the soldiers were freezing. My father had his nose frostbitten. He was captured by the Germans. We didn’t have any information about our father throughout the war.
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Displaying 41101 - 41130 of 50826 results
Irina Soboleva-Ginsburg
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There was a Shota Rustaveli Art College in Ashgabat where I could continue my studies. I had some qualification already, and I was offered to teach graphics in this college. I had a bread card for 400 grams of bread.
It also occurred to me that I could make my own contribution to the struggle against the fascists by developing the idea of the ‘Windows’ [posters with propaganda verses and pictures issued by artists during the Civil War and displayed in shop windows]. I called my invention The TASS Windows [TASS: Telegraph Agency of the USSR]. I issued 40 windows before other local and evacuated artists joined me in this activity. We were paid for this work. Our posters inspired passersby and people with optimism.
All this time I kept writing letters to my friend Andrei Sobolev. He served his mandatory term of two years before the war and then was in the army for another five years. We got closer to each other through our letters. He was eager to become an artist. When he was in the army he was offered to become a professional military, an officer, but he refused. During the war he was a communications specialist. Sometimes he was sitting on a tree and made sketches of the enemy’s disposition.
In 1944 we decided it was time to return to Moscow. Aunt Maria was the first to go. She managed to get her room in our apartment back. She had paid her monthly fee and kept all receipts. My grandmother died, and I didn’t get my room back.
My mother decided to stay in Ashgabat. She had a good job as an editor at the town radio station. My mother had a brilliant grasp of Russian. She also wrote articles that were published at the Aeroflot newspaper.
I entered the Moscow Art Institute in 1944 and got a chance to move to the hostel for art workers. I shared a room with 18 other girls: circus acrobats, singers and artists. There were two tables in the room, where other girls were putting on their lipstick, there were dirty plates on the tables, and I was working. I made linoleum engravings. In winter there was black water between the planks and lots of mosquitoes. Boys came to circus girls through the windows. Singers sang, and ballerinas danced leaning against the beds. The floor was shuttering, but I kept painting. God knows how I managed to study.
One day when I was on a visit at my aunt Maria’s, the door opened and a lean and thin body in a torn overcoat came in. I looked and ran to him exclaiming, ‘Andrei!’ We kissed. He knew my aunt’s address and had come to her hoping to get information about me. This was the only place he knew in Moscow. I was very happy to see him. That same night he suggested that we should live together. We had such a happy life together. I thank God for sending me such a wonderful friend. We got officially married four years later. All this time I lived in the hostel for girls and he lived in the hostel for boys. Andrei entered the Institute for Applied Arts.
My father returned in the fall of 1945. The salute of victory already thundered when he showed up. It was a great surprise. We didn’t know whether he was alive. He also came to my aunt Maria. There was no other place he could go to. He was dressed in rags, all lice ridden, wearing only one shoe. We burnt all his clothes and got some new ones from our acquaintances. He didn’t have a place to live. Some other people were living in his room.
My father told us that he and his comrades, old people that didn’t even have rifles, had been captured by the Germans in the fall of 1941 in the vicinity of Rzhev. He was transferred from one camp to another. He had a very good knowledge of German, and this helped him a little. He was an interpreter for some time and always tried to help people translate things in their favor. He was caught at this and sent to a different camp. He was circumcised, but people didn’t report him to the Germans. He told me that his last camp was an underground facility, where the Germans were developing a secret weapon. He told me the name, but I don’t remember. Apparently the prisoners worked there like slaves. My father told me that the only thing he was afraid of was to see me among the women that were brought to the camp. In 1945 the Germans decided to exterminate all the prisoners and mixed flour with broken glass. They were going to feed all prisoners with the food made from this flour. My father said that he touched this flour with glass. The English armies stopped the train shipping this mixture. The English liberated all prisoners.
,
During WW2
See text in interview
My father met Andrei, and I asked him if he liked him. He said, ‘Well, I believe, it’s temporary’. He also thought that we were very different to be together. Our marriage lasted until Andrei died, though.
Andrei was a very shy man. When we lived in different hostels he used to pick me up and we went to a canteen to have a meal. We could only afford spring onions for the money we had. We also received soap that we changed for bread. I fell ill with dysentery. Andrei sold his ration of bread to buy me a bottle of kefir. I asked my father to let us live in his room for the time being. I felt very ill and at least needed the comfort of a home. He refused. I thought that it was the influence of his new wife.
Later he became director of a Soviet farm somewhere in Middle East. This was at the time when there were anti-Soviet gangs of basmaches in this area. [Basmaches were members of a Muslim anti Soviet movement in Central Asia; the Red Army put an end to this resistance in 1933.] Once they set the house where my stepfather and mother were staying on fire. They escaped. They traveled all over Russia. Lack of education played a wicked joke on my stepfather. He began to get lower positions. He became chief accountant, then accountant and ended up as a logistics manager.
My mother divorced him because he had many affairs. They lived together ten or twelve years until my mother had another affair.
He volunteered to the Territorial Army in 1941 when he was over 50. He was wounded and returned home.
My mother’s next husband, Vassia, was Ukrainian and had a Ukrainian last name. He was a young actor and 25 years younger than my mother. They had a civil marriage.
We spoke Russian at home.
We didn’t observe any Jewish traditions and didn’t celebrate holidays. We didn’t go to the synagogue.
We were very poor. We didn’t follow the kashrut. It was impossible to get any kosher food in Moscow at that time. Besides, we couldn’t afford any. There was an expression ‘LCD’ [eat what you get] at that time.
My grandmother made delicious Polish borscht. Sometimes my grandmother got a herring. It was too small for our big family. My grandmother cut it into smaller pieces and added whatever else she had in the house. This dish was called forshmak. My grandmother made fish very rarely – it was incredible luxury for us. My father tried to support us, but what he could do was little; he earned very little.
Of course, he couldn’t be enthusiastic about the Soviet regime considering that it had destroyed his life, but he was a reserved man and never expressed his attitude.
Once in 1929 my father took me to visit his acquaintances. I put on my best shirt and skirt and we went there. When we arrived there I was struck by the grandeur of their dwelling. One of the mistresses of the house came and said to me: ‘Irina, you must feel awkward in you poor outfit. You can borrow one of my daughter Lialia’s dresses.’ I stiffened. They gave me a silk dress adorned with roses. This was the first time I realized that there are rich and poor people.
My aunt Maria was the first to notice that I was good at painting. She took me by the hand and brought me to an art school. I was ten years old, and I was admitted to this school. I made good progress there and soon went to the Art College.
I also studied at the Russian secondary school until 1935. I don’t know whether there were any Jewish schools in Moscow at that time. I remember some Jewish teachers in our school. One of them was Semyon Gurevich, a very ugly man. He noticed that I wrote nice poems. I wrote about Soviet labor and about Lenin. I can still remember one of my patriotic poems: ‘Pishno znamia nad gornami. Silen vzmah. Trah! Vo ves’ duh. Uh! Tut po vsiudu i vsegda slishna muzika truda’ or ‘Spi Ilich v svoey mogile. Mi tebia liubili i stroitelstvo razvili v nashey krasnoy storone’. [Translation: ‘Bright flames over horns. Strong flap. Trach! Full tilt. Ouch! There is music of labor everywhere and always’, or ‘Sleep, Illich, in your grave. We loved you and stated construction in our red country’.] I was four when Lenin died in 1924, but we were raised as his followers at school. At home nobody ever discussed the subject of Soviet leaders.
We were also raised as atheists at school. There was a lovely 17th century church near my school that was pulled down during the construction of a metro station. At Easter we had to stand on the road facing this church shouting, ‘There is no God!’ We found it funny. We were all pioneers, and our teachers and tutors involved us in these kinds of activities.
I became a Komsomol [10] member when I entered Art College. But it was just a formal membership – I wasn’t involved in any activities.
My father was arrested in 1947. He was accused of being a German spy and sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment. He was sent to wood cutting facilities in the Gulag, but he was so old and worn out that the only work he could do was keeping records. He survived in the camp. He had a number on his arm that was the same as the number of the main character in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s [13] novel, One day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. In the 1960s my father read this novel and was surprised because of the similarities. My father wrote to Solzhenitsyn and Solzhenitsyn visited him in the late 1960s. They spent a few days together recalling the horrors of what they had to go through. Solzhenitsyn told my father that he liked his letter. There was no nagging in his letter. There is a whole paragraph about my father in his book, The Gulag Archipelago. My father spent six years in the Gulag. He returned in 1954. When I found out where he was I sent him parcels and warm clothes.
In my hostel there were actresses of the Jewish theater in the room next-door. Some of them were my friends. They often invited Andrei and me to the theater. We didn’t understand Yiddish, but we attended all their performances. I was especially impressed by the King Lear performance with the striking acting of Mikhoels [13]. He was a great actor. I remember what tragedy it was to all of us when he was shot in 1948. We didn’t know any details but we understood that he had been removed. We knew that terrible things were happening in the country. For the first time in my life I felt uncomfortable about my family name – Ginsburg. Andrei and I went to the registry office to register our marriage. I took my husband’s last name Sobolev.
In 1948 I graduated from the institute with the highest grade and was admitted to the Union of Artists. Andrei had one more year to study at the institute. I couldn’t find a job in Moscow.
When my mother was able to walk again she received a pair of slippers, a dress and a towel. She came to Moscow wearing this dress and pair of slippers. At that time we were renting a corner in the room from an actress in Pushkin Square in Moscow. I was pregnant. My mother couldn’t obtain a permit for residence in Moscow because there were too many refugees in the city, thus she went to Riga.