Rafail flatly refused to evacuate hoping to start his own business when Germans came. His neighbors told us that he perished in the ghetto.
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Displaying 49171 - 49200 of 50826 results
Boris Molodetski
My mother Chaya Molodetskaya was born in the town of Sosnitsa of Chernigov province in 1889. The family moved to Odessa when my mother was still a baby. The family had lower than average income. My mother finished an elementary Jewish school for girls where she also had sewing training.
My parents got married on 7 June 1919. They had a civil ceremony. There was no religious wedding.
In early 1920, when she was pregnant, my mother moved to my father’s sister Basia in Petroverovka to eat better food. This was at the time of the Civil War and once ataman of a gang that came to Petroverovka ordered to take all Jews to the square to kill them. My mother was in this crowd. She told me that they survived by chance: that very moment someone shouted to ataman that Kotovskiy 12 was in 5 versts from the village and they all rode away hurriedly.
When in 1925 a three-bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor in our house got vacant a meeting of tenants decided to give it to us. There was a tiled stove in a big room, an old folding oak dining table, a sofa and a cupboard that my parents ordered from a cabinetmaker. It was very beautiful with stained glass folds and copper shields at the bottom. There were two beds with string mattresses in another room, a small desk, a sideboard and a wardrobe. Uncle Isaac and his family resided in the third room. There was an old box with copper belts around it in the hallway. My mother kept old clothes in it. In summer she aired them on the balcony. There were ostrich feathers, my mother’s old embroidery pieces and an unfinished quilt rug. There were embroidered napkins on the furniture in our apartment. In 1928 our house was overhauled and the floors painted to imitate parquet.
My mother and father spoke Russian at home, but when they decided that there was something I shouldn’t know they switched to Yiddish. I knew some words in Yiddish.
My father worked as an accountant in Tserabkoop on the corner of Pushkinskaya and Deribassovskaya Streets. He audited stores and shops.
My parents were not religious. I was a convinced atheists and turned my head away when I passed by a church. We celebrated Soviet holidays at home, but never Jewish holidays.
My mother valued chicken. Our standard lunch consisted of chicken broth with rice and a piece of chicken with garnish. She also cooked gefilte fish and dishes from matzah. However, she rarely cooked with matzah since we could only get it at the synagogue and at this period it had to be done in secret.
At the age of 8 I went to Russian school #48.
In 1932 my father went to work in a closed store of NKVD. Life became easier for us. During the period of famine my father received food packages and flour. My mother baked rolls, but she didn’t give any to take to school since there were hungry children around.
My friend Igor Chop told me that Misha tried hard to convince him to repudiate from his father who was imprisoned in 1937 [during Great Terror] 16, for his former service in the tsarist army as an officer. In our class no parents of schoolchildren were arrested, but in the parallel class there were about five children whose parents had been arrested. Our director Mr. Radzinski was a decent person. He supported these children. Igor Chop recently told me that director called him to his office to say words of support. Once on a Soviet holidays we were in the theater where a representative of Komsomol district committee greeted us with general phrases I said aloud: ‘Again propaganda for the Soviet power!’ Our history teacher was sitting beside me. She heard what I said and on the following day she called my mother to school and said ‘You are playing with fire when you allow yourself to talk dangerously in the presence of your child’. At nights people in our house didn’t sleep listening to booted steps in the yard: to which entrance they headed again? My father returned home late and sat reading a newspaper until very late. He was very concerned about the situation, but he kept silent about it. In 1937 few of my mother’s acquaintances suffered, but she didn’t discuss it with me, although I was already 16 years old. My mother was a law-obedient person. She strictly followed whatever orders issued by higher authorities.
I finished school in 1939. I had my father’s jacket altered to wear it to my prom. I had all excellent marks in my certificate and was admitted to the Medical College without exams. We never heard about any limitations for Jewish appellants to colleges. I didn’t dream about medicine, but I joined my friends Boris Reznik and Grisha Golderberg (both Jews) were going to enter the Medical College and I decided to join them. I enjoyed studying there and the more I learned the more I got attracted to this profession. We had highly qualified lecturers.
When we were first-year students an order was issued canceling all privileges for students. We became subject to service in the army. Since I had inguinal hernia and a medical commission in the military registry office made a conclusion: fit for military service with limitations, reserve of the 2nd turn.
. We had a premonition of a war while newspapers wrote that we were friends with Germany and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact 18 was executed: this was confusing.
Shortly before the war my father and I bought a nice 10-valve receiver. I was very proud of it. We listened to radio transmissions and music. On 22 June 1941 we didn’t turn on our receiver. Our neighbor Ida had her radio on. I heard her saying: ‘Madam Molodetskaya, Molotov 19 will speak on the radio’. I got scared; I realized there was going to be a war. I remember that Ida burst into tears: she had two children.
At the beginning of the war my father was to turn 50 a month later, but he received a subpoena and went to the registry office. Even younger men ignored such calls. When we were on the way back he said ‘Tell mother there was nothing I could do to avoid it’, but I knew that he didn’t even try. At first he was sent to Mariupol and then to Moscow to excavate trenches and long-lasting fortifications.
Four days later we arrived in Mariupol. We were accommodated in the foyer of the theater in Mariupol. We sat and slept on our bags for four days. After the first bombing of Mariupol we ran to the railway station. There was a train with open platforms heading to Kuban. We climbed those platforms. When we were going past the railway station in Rostov-on-the-Don some people were shouting to us ‘Hey, zhydy, are you scarpering to the rear?’ It was distressing. In Shkurinskaya railway station we received free borsch. We arrived in Stalingrad on 1 September 1941. It was quiet there. Then we went to Sverdlovsk where we heard by chance that there were many people from Odessa in Alma-Ata [4,125 km from Odessa]. My mother and I headed to Alma-Ata and uncle Isaac and his family moved to Tashkent [3,200 from Odessa]. In Alma-Ata I went to the Kazakh Medical College. My co-student Grisha Goldenberg added missing credit marks into my record book and I was enlisted on the third course. This enabled me to avoid recruitment to the army.
My mother got an accommodation in the apartment of Chadicha Ilgamovna, a single Kazakh woman. She worked in a public library and brought me books that I chose from a catalogue. I remember that I read scripts of American films. My mother received an assignment to work in a brick plant, but she fell ill and quit. When she recovered she went to wash dishes in the canteen of the confectionery factory.
All of a sudden, on my birthday on 10 August 1942 we received a letter from my father. He wrote that he was demobilized due to his age and was heading to the south looking for us. He settled down in Krasnodar where he worked as chief accountant in the all-union scientific research institute of tobacco and makhorka. Every day he went to the railway station hoping to see somebody he knew who could tell him about us and he finally managed. On that same day I heard on the radio that our troops left Krasnodar. In early 1944 when Krasnodar was liberated my mother wrote to this address and the woman that leased a room to my father replied. She said that when Germans came they ordered all Jews to come to a gathering point and threatened with execution to those who were hiding them. My father went there to not let down his hostess. She gave a jar of honey and warm socks. From the gathering point people were transported in mobile gas chambers. This was how my father perished in 1942.
I had all excellent marks and when I was a 4th-year student I made my first surgery: appendicitis. There were 220 students from Odessa in our college. We upheld our reputation in studies and in sports. Te basketball team from Odessa became won championship in Kazakhstan: and this was regardless of lack o food. In early 1943, when I was a fifth-year student I got another job: I lectured on sanitary standards in the railroad technical school and received a rail man coupon for 800 grams of bread. Even when I was exhausted after a night’s work in hospital I shaved before going to lectures: I was their teacher. On 3 July 1943 I received my diploma with honors and became a certified therapist.
On the following day we received subpoenas to the military office.
We arrived at the front in Nezhin on 6 November 1943. Our hospital assigned to the First Byelorussian Front was in a ruined building. We placed bricks into window frames and installed cleaned X-Ray tape to make a window leaf. Surgeons were released from doing repair works, but to engage us they sent us to a neighboring village to get some cattle. The villagers let their dogs free seeing us and we had to return with nothing.
We were following advancing troops to the West.
We arrived at the front in Nezhin on 6 November 1943. Our hospital assigned to the First Byelorussian Front was in a ruined building. We placed bricks into window frames and installed cleaned X-Ray tape to make a window leaf. Surgeons were released from doing repair works, but to engage us they sent us to a neighboring village to get some cattle. The villagers let their dogs free seeing us and we had to return with nothing.
We were following advancing troops to the West.
I was elected Komsomol leader of the hospital. My attendance of all party meetings was compulsory. There was a staff propagandist in our hospital. He read us newspapers in our political training classes in the morning. He also watched that girls behaved decently. He checked them peeping into their windows in the evening. There was one Smersh [special secret military unit for elimination of spies, under the slogan ‘Death to spies’] officer per 2-3 hospitals. Once I had to address one. A train with the wounded arrived at our hospital. Every patient had records of his wounds. Some wounded had a package. This meant that they had had surgeries. I noticed that one patient with a wound in his right hand behaved differently turning away from everybody. I approached him and opened his package. There was a paper with ‘verdict of the military field court’ in it. It turned out to be a self-inflicted wound. I was bound to find a Smersh officer to notify him. He thanked me, took this patient on a truck and they left.
On 2 May 1945 chief of hospital put us on a truck and we went sightseeing to Berlin. We signed on the Reichstag. We were told to not come inside houses. There were many mined things in them. On 9 May we got to know that Germans signed capitulation and by two o’clock in the morning we began to receive patients again. It turned out they saluted from different weapons without looking where they were shooting and wounded many people.
In 1945 I came to Odessa to visit my mother who returned from evacuation. There was a family living in our apartment. I came in my uniform and an order on my chest, put my gun on the table and said ‘Either you give one room to my mother and I am leaving or I shall stay until you move out of here!’ They accepted the first option and later they moved out. Our furniture was stolen. I saw our sofa in our janitor’s apartment and brought it back home. Our neighbors told us how grandmother and Ghenia perished. They were reluctant to tell us the story since they couldn’t do anything to help them. My neighbor Dasha who did people’s laundry kept a suitcase with valuables that my friend Boris Reznik’s father gave her before evacuation.
In 1947 I met my future wife Lidia Vdovina in the hospital. We got married two years later.
Before the war Lidia finished an obstetrician school in Gornoaltaysk. During the war she was an assistant doctor and joined the Party.
The period of Doctors’ Plot 20 didn’t have any impact on me. I knew that accusations against leading doctors in the Soviet medical science about purposeful poisoning of the population were obviously made up. However, I didn’t dare to express my critical opinion about it to anyone. Nobody changed their attitude to me at my work. Besides, chief of our hospital was a Jewish man.
Two days before Stalin died I read a report on his health condition in a newspaper and thought that it indicated that he had a stroke, his Chain-Stocks breathing and other symptoms, this indicated that he was dying. When Stalin died my wife who was a communist said like everybody else around ‘How will we go on living?’ I didn’t share her opinion since I believed that Stalin was a dictator and had been thinking so for a while. My only concern was that Beriya 21, this butcher of a man, could win the struggle for power.
We lived in Chernyshevskoye village, in Nesterov district, Kaliningrad region. I worked as a military doctor in a military unit. We very poor living conditions. I had to fetch water in buckets onto the third floor. We cooked on a kerogas stove.