They got married. In 1940 Ivan and Nina’s daughter Maia was born. When the war broke out, the girl was one year old. Nina left Vitebsk with her two children, Michael and Maia, and went to Pskov near Leningrad to visit Iosif, Ivan’s brother, who was a bachelor. Nina wanted to get some rest after she gave birth and nursed her daughter Maia during the first year. Thus, they were in Pskov when the war broke out. Ivan thought that his wife would return to Vitebsk, but the war barred the way back. During the war Ivan was taken prisoner-of-war, stayed in a German camp and perished there in 1942.
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Lyudmila Kreslova
Meanwhile, Iosif was also prisoner-of-war, but managed to escape. He became a lone guerilla. He blew up trains and at the place of diversion left a piece of tree bark on which he wrote, ‘Guerilla Hussar.’ Hussar was his nickname. The Germans promised a lot of money in exchange for his head, they wanted to catch him. Later Iosif was drafted into the army, was at the frontline and survived.
Sholom volunteered for the Leningrad frontline at the age of 25, though he didn’t have to go to the army, and perished in 1942.
Mother’s education was limited to three grades in cheder [11]. The rabbi, who taught the children, beat her. He beat all children. The teacher beat them on the hands with a ruler for each mistake. That’s why she quit going to cheder. Her parents knew it, but there were no other teachers. And my mother didn’t want to go to this cheder. So they contented themselves with already obtained education and it was enough for Mother for her life. Mother said she couldn’t tolerate it any more. Thus she finished only three grades with difficulty. However, she spoke, wrote and read freely in Yiddish and Russian. When Mother grew up and became a young girl, she rolled cigarettes in order to earn some money.
,
Before WW2
See text in interview
Mother lived with her parents, the Kurnovs, when my father returned from the front in 1916 and started to work with them. Grandfather Mendel hired him to work as an assistant. Mendel taught him the tailor’s craft, though Father already had considerable experience. When Mother and Father fell in love with each other, there was no match-making. My father was completely alone by that time. His father, my grandfather Boris, had disappeared from Vitebsk long ago. They had a splendid wedding, with a lot of guests and presents. They were a very nice couple.
Mother always sent me to do the shopping. That was the NEP [13] period. The authorities allowed private trade and small business. It was possible to buy all necessary things if one had money, but we had none. However, the sales assistants at the stores kept debt books to write in the name and the amount of the debt. I was small, only five years old. I came to a store and named what we needed. The shop assistant gave me food products on credit. My parents paid off the debt later.
Mother bought live hens, took them to the shochet to be slaughtered, and later plucked them and made pillows out of down and feathers.
I was four years old when Father hired a teacher. He sat me onto his lap, we sat at the table and he taught me to read and write. I don’t remember exactly, if he was a Russian or a Jew, but he taught me Russian. Father said, ‘Boys have to learn Yiddish, and you are a girl, you don’t need it.’ The teacher tortured and punished me. Maybe he didn’t have the correct attitude to a child. When he said something, I started to object. So he spanked me. I cried very often.
After that teacher my mother hired a Jewish nanny for me and my sister. There were Jewish nannies in Vitebsk. Mother hired one, but she didn’t speak Russian. She was about 60 years old, an old woman. She lived in her Jewish environment: Jewish family, Jewish neighbors. At first I didn’t understand what she said. Mother and Father spoke Yiddish to each other, but they always spoke Russian to us. So the nanny started to persuade me, ‘You have to learn the Yiddish language.’ So I learnt it step by step. I can speak Yiddish now, though I forget some words. Nanny taught me to read books, she brought me Russian fairy-tales, ‘The Gray Wolf, Prince Ivan and Elena the Beautiful.’ [Tsarevitch Ivan, the Fire Bird and the Gray Wolf is a Russian fairy tale collected by Alexander Afanasyev in Narodnye russkie skazki] She gave me the books, because she didn’t understand Russian. I was not five years old yet, when I read fairy-tales myself. I read Russian fairy-tales. There were no Jewish fairy-tales, I don’t know why. But there was the Soviet Power, so there could be nothing of the kind. Nanny spent all days with us, working days and holidays, she also participated in the feasts. She was an old woman, and a lonely one, she had no relatives. She lived for two years with us and then left. After her we had a Russian nanny. The Russian nanny was also old, but she was very cheerful and she also brought me books. She didn’t spend the Jewish holidays with us, she wasn’t invited. I liked both nannies.
We lived on Nizhniaia Petrovskaia Street. We lived in a two-storey building, which looked like a German cottage [14]. We lived on the second floor. Our family occupied two rooms, 20 square meters each. The other two rooms were occupied by our neighbors. We had a common entrance and a common kitchen with the neighbors. I remember that we had huge windows. Our windows faced the yard. There was a back wing in the yard where people also lived. Two rooms faced the street in our apartment. These rooms were occupied by our neighbors, they were also Jews.
Father worked all the time. He worked as a cutter at a clothes’ factory. He worked from early morning for 16 hours. Then he came home and continued working at home. He was considered the best tailor in the town of Vitebsk. The customers had to wait in line for three years and brought their own fabric to place an order with him. The clothes he sewed lasted for ever, the fabric grew old and was torn, but the seams remained. It was so because he always waxed the threads. He even made a hole for wax on the sewing-machine, so that it would also sew using the waxed thread. The customers valued his work very highly. Thus we had a small tailor shop in our house.
My parents tried to stick to their environment; they didn’t have Russian friends. Father was a tailor, that is why Russians came to him, but he tried to work for Jews. Father preferred to work with the Jewish customers, since it was prestigious for him, to see that Jews valued him highly. Russians also appreciated his work, but it was more important that he was recognized by ‘his people.’ They called him Anatoliy in the Russian manner.
We lived very modestly. Father charged 300 rubles per suit, but there were a lot of children in the family and Mother had to receive some treatment after her illness [typhus]. The price of eggs was five rubles per dozen.
Father prayed only on Saturdays, he didn’t have time to do it on other days. On Friday night and on Saturday he put on tallit and tefillin and prayed. We celebrated Sabbath at home. Overnight mother baked matzah and bread. On Friday night Mother lit the candles. We had very expensive big copper candlesticks. When we fled from Vitebsk in 1941, we left them behind. My mother didn’t cook on Sabbath, she asked some Russian women to do it. Mother always bought chicken and cooked broth. She also cooked chicken cutlets and mashed potato. She cooked jellied-meat out of calves’ feet, baked bread in a Russian stove. We were eating it for three days. But my mother didn’t like it when I helped her, she told me not to disturb her.
Mother cooked everything in the room and then took it to the kitchen to put it in the stove. Mother cooked her own matzah for Pesach and I helped her. We made it on a big table in the room. Mother mixed flour and water, nothing else; she rolled it out and made holes with a special small wheel and quickly put the raw matzah on a wooden spade with a long handle and threw it on an iron red-hot sheet and into the stove. Sometimes Mother swept the stove clean, took out the coals and put the raw matzah right into the stove without any iron sheet. We had a big square basket. Mother spread a clean cloth inside it and placed hot matzah inside it, just taken out of the stove. We ate matzah out of it during Pesach, some was even left after the holiday.
My parents also observed the kashrut. When I was small, Mother went to the shochet to have the hens slaughtered. I don’t remember her doing it later, when the Soviet power began to persecute those who observed religious traditions. But when I was small, sometimes I went with her.
When in 1927 my brother Boris was born, a brit milah was arranged for him on the 8th day. A lot of guests came, about 50 people. We had a big room with a big table and chairs around it. Two chairs were put near the window and two huge pillows were placed on them. My brother, very small, was put onto these two pillows. A mohel performed the circumcision. Brother cried so bitterly and I felt so sorry for him, that I ran away, hid in a corner and couldn’t watch all that. I was six years old at that time. There were a lot of presents. Just like for a wedding.
Igor Lerner
And all my grandparents came from Ukraine. My both grandfathers perished during the WWI and I never saw them.
My grandmothers lived in their own houses and managed a household. Their houses were typical Ukrainian huts. [Ukrainian hut is a house made from clay or wood covered with clay, it is usually thatched with straw.] Grandmothers kept cows, a lot of hens, had large vegetable gardens. So they worked without a break since morning till late at night, because they had to produce foodstuff for themselves and also to help our family with food. Leye, my maternal grandmother was very religious and brought her daughter (my Mom) up on the same lines. Grandmother always visited synagogue in Pervomaisk and in Uman. My paternal grandmother Haya was thriftier and much less religious.
Both my grandmothers died in Ukraine during starvation of 1932. [In 1932 the authorities in many instances exacted such high levels of procurements that starvation was widespread. In some places, famine was allowed to run its course; and millions of peasants in Ukraine starved to death in a famine, called the Holodomor in Ukrainian. An estimated 3-6 million people died in this horrible manmade famine.] In the heat of famine we lived already in Leningrad, we got to know about events in Ukraine from rumors. We sent grandmothers food packages, but later we found out that they had not received any.
My father Haim Davidovich Lerner was born in Krivoe Ozero in 1896. In his childhood he attended cheder, and that was all regarding his education. Father participated in the World War I and got into the phosgene area. [Phosgene is the highly toxic gas gained infamy as a chemical weapon during the World War I.] After that he got asthma and coughed all the time. Having returned from the front, Daddy at first worked in the field, but later became a shop manager. The shop was situated in our house (I told you that the house was very large). I guess that parents paid some rent for it. At the shop they sold mainly fabric, which was in short supply at that time. I had a photo showing my father with a folding rule in his hands, he was standing in front of the shop (unfortunately I lost the photograph). At that time our financial situation was not bad.
So, we (my brothers also) studied at school. Daddy worked as a worker at a factory. Later he met a friend who helped him to get a job of a seller at the market. 2 years later my father was appointed a deputy director at a grocery store. Very soon he became its director and worked there till the beginning of the war. At first Mom did not work, but soon authorities introduced food cards into practice [4]. They gave more food for worker’s food card, therefore Mom went to work at a knitting factory Krasnoe Znamya [‘Red Banner’ in Russian] in Leningrad. She worked there 2 years, and then began sewing at home.
We could not live together with my uncle’s family very long. We handed in an application about separate place of residence. As a result we got a small room and a very large kitchen (the most part of it was occupied by a huge stove). It was impossible to live five together in that small room, and my elder brother wrote a letter to Stalin (so resolute he was!). As a result, a local official came to us and ordered to replan our kitchen and change the stove. After it there appeared 1 room more. The situation changed for the better, though still we were cramped.
In Leningrad region Olgino was a very prestigious place for vacation. In summer a lot of Leningrad citizens came to Olgino with their children to spend summer holidays. I had many friends among those children, but we met only in summer. I swam perfectly (mastered all styles). In winter I skied much. At school I attended a historical circle. I was fond of history, and our teacher entrusted me with making lectures for my schoolmates. I also attended a photographic circle. Behind the staircase in the small lumber-room I used to process my films.
I liked to go to different parties arranged at school. In Olgino there was a good library.
In the former times there lived many Finns, Poles and Germans. During the Great Terror [5] all of them were arrested, and their books were collected into library. Therefore the library was very rich in books.
Political life of the country did not avoid us. At school we (schoolchildren of the 4th grade) voted for execution of Nikolaev, the murderer of Kirov [6]. Parents never talked about politics in our presence.
My elder brother was a professional soldier and served in the Far East. Jacob was drafted in 1942.
I joined a volunteers battalion. Those battalions were created for struggle against saboteurs, spies, and gunlayers which launched signal rockets near the military objects, etc. They gave each of us a rifle, 120 live cartridges, a gas-mask. We kept it at home. We lived at home and studied at school, but at any time on a signal we had to run fast to the alarm post. Officers from NKVD [7] waited for us there. Usually we searched the district. 2 or 3 times paratroopers touched down nearby and we managed to neutralize them. Sometimes we were on duty near important objects (it was called to stay in secret). After a while we were lodged in barracks in Pargolovo, near Olgino. There we stayed till January of 1942. We were very hungry. I realized that it became useless to study at school and handed in an application of an army volunteer. They sent me to a military camp. So I became a real soldier.
Soon I managed to persuade Mom to evacuate, and she left for Altai region.