My grandfather and other relatives went to Tashkent [Uzbekistan, about 3200 km from Kiev] to my father’s sisters.
- Traditions 11756
- Language spoken 3019
- Identity 7808
- Description of town 2440
- Education, school 8506
- Economics 8772
- Work 11672
- Love & romance 4929
- Leisure/Social life 4159
- Antisemitism 4822
-
Major events (political and historical)
4256
- Armenian genocide 2
- Doctor's Plot (1953) 178
- Soviet invasion of Poland 31
- Siege of Leningrad 86
- The Six Day War 4
- Yom Kippur War 2
- Ataturk's death 5
- Balkan Wars (1912-1913) 35
- First Soviet-Finnish War 37
- Occupation of Czechoslovakia 1938 83
- Invasion of France 9
- Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact 65
- Varlik Vergisi (Wealth Tax) 36
- First World War (1914-1918) 216
- Spanish flu (1918-1920) 14
- Latvian War of Independence (1918-1920) 4
- The Great Depression (1929-1933) 20
- Hitler comes to power (1933) 127
- 151 Hospital 1
- Fire of Thessaloniki (1917) 9
- Greek Civil War (1946-49) 12
- Thessaloniki International Trade Fair 5
- Annexation of Bukovina to Romania (1918) 7
- Annexation of Northern Bukovina to the Soviet Union (1940) 19
- The German invasion of Poland (1939) 94
- Kishinev Pogrom (1903) 7
- Romanian Annexation of Bessarabia (1918) 25
- Returning of the Hungarian rule in Transylvania (1940-1944) 43
- Soviet Occupation of Bessarabia (1940) 59
- Second Vienna Dictate 27
- Estonian war of independence 3
- Warsaw Uprising 2
- Soviet occupation of the Balitc states (1940) 147
- Austrian Civil War (1934) 9
- Anschluss (1938) 71
- Collapse of Habsburg empire 3
- Dollfuß Regime 3
- Emigration to Vienna before WWII 36
- Kolkhoz 131
- KuK - Königlich und Kaiserlich 40
- Mineriade 1
- Post War Allied occupation 7
- Waldheim affair 5
- Trianon Peace Treaty 12
- NEP 56
- Russian Revolution 351
- Ukrainian Famine 199
- The Great Terror 283
- Perestroika 233
- 22nd June 1941 468
- Molotov's radio speech 115
- Victory Day 147
- Stalin's death 365
- Khrushchev's speech at 20th Congress 148
- KGB 62
- NKVD 153
- German occupation of Hungary (18-19 March 1944) 45
- Józef Pilsudski (until 1935) 33
- 1956 revolution 84
- Prague Spring (1968) 73
- 1989 change of regime 174
- Gomulka campaign (1968) 81
-
Holocaust
9685
- Holocaust (in general) 2789
- Concentration camp / Work camp 1235
- Mass shooting operations 337
- Ghetto 1183
- Death / extermination camp 647
- Deportation 1063
- Forced labor 791
- Flight 1410
- Hiding 594
- Resistance 121
- 1941 evacuations 866
- Novemberpogrom / Kristallnacht 34
- Eleftherias Square 10
- Kasztner group 1
- Pogrom in Iasi and the Death Train 21
- Sammelwohnungen 9
- Strohmann system 11
- Struma ship 17
- Life under occupation 803
- Yellow star house 72
- Protected house 15
- Arrow Cross ("nyilasok") 42
- Danube bank shots 6
- Kindertransport 26
- Schutzpass / false papers 95
- Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (1943) 24
- Warsaw Uprising (1944) 23
- Helpers 521
- Righteous Gentiles 269
- Returning home 1090
- Holocaust compensation 112
- Restitution 109
- Property (loss of property) 595
- Loss of loved ones 1724
- Trauma 1029
- Talking about what happened 1807
- Liberation 558
- Military 3322
- Politics 2640
-
Communism
4468
- Life in the Soviet Union/under Communism (in general) 2592
- Anti-communist resistance in general 63
- Nationalization under Communism 221
- Illegal communist movements 98
- Systematic demolitions under communism 45
- Communist holidays 311
- Sentiments about the communist rule 930
- Collectivization 94
- Experiences with state police 349
- Prison/Forced labor under communist/socialist rule 449
- Lack or violation of human and citizen rights 483
- Life after the change of the regime (1989) 493
- Israel / Palestine 2190
- Zionism 847
- Jewish Organizations 1200
Displaying 37141 - 37170 of 50826 results
Israel Shlifer
![](/themes/custom/centro/flags/ua.svg)
My co-students and I were mobilized to Kiev Territorial Army [Fighting battalion] [27]. We excavated anti-tank trenches in the southern direction. For many years there was a lake formed where we excavated trenches. There were continuous air raids and in the middle of August I was wounded in my back with a bomb splinter.
I was taken to Kharkov by a sanitary train. I found my father there. I was released from military service due to my wound.
My father sent me to Tashkent. I traveled in a sanitary train for slightly wounded. Our trip lasted 10 days. We were taken to a hospital in Tashkent where I stayed another month.
In late September 1941 my parents came to Tashkent too. We were glad to be together, but we were sad that fascists occupied Kiev.
My father went to work as Financial Manager at the Ministry of Light Industry and my mother became a teacher in a Russian school. My father got a good apartment and my grandfather stayed with us. My father received a special food package as a high governmental official.
My father went to work as Financial Manager at the Ministry of Light Industry and my mother became a teacher in a Russian school. My father got a good apartment and my grandfather stayed with us. My father received a special food package as a high governmental official.
In some time I went to Polytechnic to continue my studies as a third-year student. This College was formed by Kiev, Tashkent and Leningrad Colleges.
By that time my mother’s brothers and their families, my father’s sister Bluma and her son and uncle Mendel that returned from the front as an invalid were living with us. There was too little space and I went to live at the students’ hostel.
I received a stipend and did some work to earn additional money. Third-year students worked as electricians at food enterprises. I worked at the confectionery and my friend Tolia worked at a bakery. Girls wrote synopsis of lectures for us and we shared with them what we stole at work.
We read poems and went to theaters. I liked the Moscow Jewish Theater that was in evacuation in Tashkent. I watched all performances with the legendary Mikhoels [28] playing main roles. Mikhoels greeted me when he met me in town. He probably remembered me seeing me so often at the theater.
In 1944, few months after Kiev was liberated the Kiev Polytechnic College reevacuated to Kiev. We had a choice between Central Asia, Kiev or Leningrad Colleges. I got an offer to go to Kiev. They promised me work in College. The train trip to Kiev took us almost a month, but the feeling was very different from when we were leaving the city.
Kiev was in ruins. Our house was ruined, too. I stayed at a student hostel.
I finished College in 1945. I was a promising employee and got an offer to write thesis in College, but there was no chance for me to get an apartment working in college. Therefore, I went to work at the military instrument manufacture plant called Communist where I became head of laboratory. I also worked part-time in College. The plant gave me a 16 square meter room in a shared apartment [26]. My grandfather Gershl and my uncle Mendel came back from Tashkent and stayed with me.
Grandfather went to synagogue on Sabbath and Jewish holidays, but he didn’t pray at home. We didn’t follow kashrut.
I worked at the Communist Plant several years. I had a sensitive job and often met with high officials. I met several times with the General Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev [30] that became General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR in 1953. Those were business meetings, but I liked Khrushchev.
I still know no explanation of how I kept my job when in 1949, at the height of state anti-Semitism and during the campaign against cosmopolitans [31] my father was arrested in Tashkent and sentenced under a political article of the law. My mother wrote me that he was charged of espionage for Germany and nonsense like that. I understood that my father was innocent. I knew this was a state policy against Jews, but what could I do? I knew that my management had to know about my father’s arrest, but they showed no sign of this and I pretended nothing happened. My father never told me about what he was accused of. They might have remembered his Bund membership. To tell the truth, they didn’t beat him. They used another thing: they kept him in a single cell for the first year. Then his friends managed to help him and my father was taken to a camp near Tashkent. My father actually performed the duties of chief accountant in the camp. He had a privilege: he was allowed to sleep on the sofa in his office instead of going back to the barrack. Besides, he made reports to the bank management. They spoke to him rather than calling an official chief accountant. My father went to the bank with a guard and my mother was waiting there for him with hot lunch. Then my mother moved to Kiev. My father was released in 1954, a year after Stalin died. He was exculpated from all charges.
I went to work at another plant and then changed my job again. I went to work at the New Problems in Physics Academic Institute. I often went on business trips to other plants, Navy bases and airfields. I worked with people that valued talent and work capabilities. They never asked me about my nationality. They had other things to think about. I’ve never faced anti-Semitism in my life.
I heard about the Doctors’ Plot [32] by chance when I was on a business trip in Moscow. I was having lunch in the canteen of our Ministry. A colonel at a nearby table said unfolding a newspaper ‘Now they will finally deal with Jews’. I kept silent, but my companion attacked this colonel and gave him a lecture about morals, equality and fraternity of peoples in the USSR guaranteed by the Constitution.
In 1953 Stalin died. On the day of his funeral I was on a short stay in Moscow traveling from a business trip from the Far North. I wore a sheepskin coat and deerskin boots. This outfit saved my friend and me when we got in a jam in Pushkin Square during the funeral. We got under a trolley bus and stayed there. Otherwise we would have been smashed by the crowd. Hundreds of people died there. Stalin’s death wasn’t a tragedy for me. I understood that Stalin was to be blamed for my father’s arrest and for the suffering of millions of people. I also knew that he must have been aware of the recent anti-Semitic campaigns.
Denunciation of the cult of Stalin and the speech of Nikita Khrushchev in 1956 at the 20th Party Congress [33] were not big surprises for me. Although I wasn’t a member of the Party, we knew about this secret Khrushchev’s speech that was only to be read in Party organizations, on the first day after Congress from our friends that were communists. It was like new wind blowing in our country. Nevertheless, I still think that Stalin had a strong personality and was an unusual man. It’s a different story where he applied his strength and talent.
In 1954 I went to Moscow to pick up my father. He came to Moscow after he was released and stayed with his distant relative that was a rabbi in a synagogue in Moscow. My father was eager to go to the Mausoleum to see Stalin: imagine this devotion and faith after all he had to go through! Until the end of his days he thought that his arrest was a tragic mistake. My father said he wasn’t going home until he saw Stalin. We had to stand in a long line and my father calmed down after he saw dead Stalin.
In Kiev we lived together for some time and then my father received a two-room apartment. My mother and father moved to that apartment.
All of the sons had Jewish wives. It couldn’t have been otherwise. They had Jewish weddings with a rabbi, chuppah and klezmer musicians.
They were my mother’s older brothers. They finished cheder like all Jewish boys in the town.
They were highly skilled craftsmen. They had no problem fixing any piece of equipment and they could work at lathe units and could do joiner work. They worked at my grandfather’s plant until early 1930s when it was liquidated after the NEP [11]. Then they went to work at state owned enterprises.
During the Great Patriotic War my mother’s brothers and their families were in evacuation in Tashkent.
Ilia’s son became a professional in the military. He was at the front during World War II.
After the war he was a foreman at a military plant in Kiev.
My mother’s younger brothers Avraam (affectionately called Mutsia), born in 1902, Boruch (Boris), born in 1904, and Mendel, born in 1907, got higher education.
Avraam was a foreman at the Arsenal Military Plant in Kiev and lived in a nice and big apartment.
Boruch finished the Polytechnic and lived in Kiev with his wife Liya and daughter Sophia.