Tag #153691 - Interview #102282 (Leo Lubich)

I remember the horseshoe clatter and the yelling and singing of the Petliura 6 units that entered the town in 1917. There were other troops in town: the Reds 7 and the Whites 8. The power switched from one side to the other throughout the course of a single day, but I only remember the reckless, drunk Petliura soldiers. A day before the Petliura units came to the city, my father’s employees Mayorov and Vassilkovskiy left town. They dropped by our apartment to say goodbye to my father and to tell us that the Bolsheviks would achieve victory and return. In the morning, the Petliura soldiers spotted the cannon in the square in front of our house and began to fire at our building. All the Jews were hiding in their apartments and nobody dared to go outside. Petliura soldiers found our building's janitor and forced him to show them the apartments occupied by Jews. They forced Jews to come out into the yard and shot them under the poplar tree. Many of my friends, along with the Pressman family and their numerous children, were killed. Our family was lucky; we were wealthy and paid a ransom - the soldiers took our carpets, china, cuts of expensive fabrics and bronze statues, and left us alone. Petliura had his apartment and headquarters on the fifth floor of our house, but I never saw him. On the following day, Petliura’s order came down to take my father upstairs to his apartment. My mother was desperate - she fell on her knees wailing, she thought that Petliura had found out about my father’s Bolshevik friends. She didn’t believe we would see him again, but he returned after some time and told us that Petliura had heard that he was a great tailor and ordered a military jacket from him. When my father complained that Petliura's soldiers had taken away our belongings, he told my father to go to an officer and tell him that Petliura ordered our belongings returned. My mother and father had a discussion and decided to leave it alone. They decided they could forget about all the things they had earned and collected, since they were happy that we were all alive. Fortunately, my father didn’t ask for his property back, for who knows what would have happened if he had. I don’t remember whether my father had enough time to make a jacket for Petliura since the Red units came back soon after. My father’s assistants Mayorov and Vassilkovskiy returned, too. At the end of 1918, Soviet power was established in Kiev. The Civil War was over and NEP began 9.