Tag #154352 - Interview #90535 (Leonid Kotliar)

I went to the army on 8 December 1940. Before departure I went to say good bye to Ghita. We boarded freight train railcars with plank beds and hay inside.  This big train arrived in Riga in the Baltics26 that became Soviet. I served in Panevezhis (800 km from Kiev) in a training battery in an artillery regiment.  We received Red Army identity cards where it was said that I was a Jew. There was also a Karaim in our battery. His name was Mishka Sultanskiy. The rest of us were Ukrainian, Russian and Uzbek.  There were over 100 military in our battery.  There were 4 combat platoons in the battery. In the morning we had drilling in the frost and then our political officer or commander of the platoon conducted political classes 3 times a week. We had secondary or higher education and in a year we were to become junior artillery lieutenants. We were instructed: we shall learn the lessons of the Finnish War27, and as soon as the enemy attacks us we shall fire back and move to their territory. The war was inescapable. We expected it every minute and when we were raised at alarm at night we couldn’t help thinking: ‘Is it a training alarm or a war?’  I was senior telephone operator. I followed the azimuth and identified the direction for cable installation.  Once somebody stole my wallet with my Komsomol membership card in it in the bathroom.  It was a serious matter and I reported it to my commander. Shortly afterward in March 1941 during another night-time alarm I fell under the ice, fell ill with pneumonia and was sent to Šauliai (today Lithuania) military hospital. They diagnosed tuberculosis. After the hospital I was released from military service. They wrote in my certificate that I was fit only for non-effective service at wartime. I demobilized and returned home. So I automatically lost my membership in Komsomol. 

I returned to Kiev on 18 May and on 20 May I started working as a tutor at the children’s tuberculosis recreation center in Budayevka. My health condition improved there: I was breathing fresh air in a pine-tree forest and we had sufficient food. I was there when the Great Patriotic War began. I was stunned when Stalin said: ‘Treacherous attack…’ Did he trust Hitler? Molotov28 wrote before the war that there were over 100 divisions pulled to the Polish border. We all knew that the war was inevitable.