Our family was absolutely non-religious. Only my great-grandmother prayed, but even she didn’t go to the synagogue, the synagogue was closed, and it was impossible to go there [17]. I can’t say that my father was completely, totally Russified, because he was under a very strong influence of his brother Zinovy and in some sense Zinovy was a Zionist. But even though Father had some kind of national identity, he, as well as my mother, was an atheist. They never observed Jewish traditions or celebrated holidays, not at all. They would clean the house and wash the floors on Saturdays! They never spoke Yiddish or Hebrew. They spoke only Russian, and, after all, Mother taught Russian and Literature.
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Rita Razumovskaya
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There was the following situation. In some families they spoke Yiddish, observed traditions, but nobody talked about nationality until 1936-1937. However, in the 1930s the authorities suddenly recalled that there is such a nationality, not a completely normal one, but they didn’t bother anybody, didn’t discharge people for being Jewish. During the Great Patriotic War there was no Jewish question, but, to tell the truth, in those times the slogan ‘Beat the Yids [kikes]’ appeared, and children started to make fun of their Jewish mates. However, when I was a little girl, I felt nothing like that, there was no anti-Semitism.
Jews were separated into two groups: some forgot that they were Jewish, since it didn’t play any important role in everyday life, and others remembered that they were Jewish. And that could be seen in statements such as: ‘He plays the violin well, that means that he is Jewish,’ or ‘He is a great mathematician, that means he is a Jew.’ In our family we didn’t have such attitudes, even though Zinovy Aronovich liked such things, and liked them very much. However, it wasn’t vulgar, he did it elegantly, and there existed some families, where it was awful, even horrible, this emphasis. I knew such families. In my opinion, it is just the same as anti-Semitism. And it aroused the same emotions.
There were such Jewish families before the Great Patriotic War, and when the Doctors’ Plot [18] started, and the troubles began, the number of those families only increased. In the 1950s there were a lot of families, where they said that Jews were the best, and that they were God’s Chosen People, that they made the [October] Revolution, and that’s the only reason to like this Revolution. I knew a lot of people saying: ‘Bolsheviks organized the [October] Revolution, and Bolsheviks were mainly Jews, that’s why this Revolution is a good one.’ Those people annoyed me so much!
There were such Jewish families before the Great Patriotic War, and when the Doctors’ Plot [18] started, and the troubles began, the number of those families only increased. In the 1950s there were a lot of families, where they said that Jews were the best, and that they were God’s Chosen People, that they made the [October] Revolution, and that’s the only reason to like this Revolution. I knew a lot of people saying: ‘Bolsheviks organized the [October] Revolution, and Bolsheviks were mainly Jews, that’s why this Revolution is a good one.’ Those people annoyed me so much!
I don’t remember any anti-Semitic incidents at school. After all, I don’t look Jewish. My sister Galina looked Jewish, but she didn’t suffer from anti-Semitism either. But in the queues people often addressed me and tried to develop the theme of ‘how awful Jews are.’ Usually people thought that I was Russian, not Jewish, I can’t even guess why. Sometimes it happened so: a Russian woman stands nearby, she has an absolutely Russian face, and somebody tells me: ‘Look, this is a kike.’ And I found myself in such situations quite often, even now the same thing happens sometimes. Since the times of horrible Socialism this thing has stayed and we can’t get rid of it at all.
We didn’t ever discuss Hitler’s coming to power in 1933 [19]. I don’t know if they liked Stalin at home, but all political conversations at home were stopped the same moment they started. Mother was very timid in this sphere, she was afraid of everything, and my father was very silent and never talked. Neither of them joined the Communist Party.
In 1937 the Soviet authorities arrested my uncle Zinovy. They arrested him due to the reason that he was an ‘active participant of the Bund.’ They arrested him and held him for eleven months, demanding to name other people, who were members of the Bund. So they let him out with broken bones and damaged lungs. He came to us, because during the arrest they broke everything in his apartment. About two weeks later he died, and then local authorities closed his Jewish school, because in 1937 no Jewish school could exist any more.
Finally I applied for philology [all those events took place in 1939]; passed the exams, even though before the war it was hard to apply too, because they started to pay attention to your nationality. I finished school with all excellent grades, so I didn’t have to go in for an interview; I automatically passed because I had excellent grades. Then the war started, they called up the boys [Rita means total mobilization] and I was transferred to the History Faculty, where many places were vacant. I transferred from the Philology Faculty, where we had an awful competition, to the History Department, where they didn’t have any competition at all. So finally I did what I always wanted to do.
We met the beginning of the war [22nd June 1941] near Luga, at our dacha.
Father went as a volunteer to the Leningrad Home Guard at the beginning of summer; he was in a partisan unit, which acted in the so-called ‘Oranienbaum corner.
My father died of starvation on 18th January 1942; he was only 49. Before he died he understood what was going on in his country, he understood everything and about ten minutes before his death he pronounced, ‘Shame on me, I was an idiot!’ Two weeks after my father died, my great-grandmother died too. She was 86. Father was buried in a coffin in the common grave in Smolensky cemetery, where they buried people in the first year of the Leningrad Blockade. We took his dead body to the cemetery and asked some gravediggers to bury him first; we gave them some bread I think. However, we didn’t wait for his funeral, because it could take three or five days, and we were very weak. And as for my great-grandmother we drove her dead body on the sledges to the morgue and left her there.
I stayed in Leningrad together with my mother and sisters till March 1942. I built defenses and stood on the roof, when Germans threw bombs down. I even have a medal for ‘Defending Leningrad.’ I also studied at university. When I transferred to the History Faculty, my studies became very interesting and I made a couple of friends. That was the second year and during the blockade we continued to go to lectures. From home I went to the university on foot, passing small and narrow roads and ways. The building of the History Faculty used to be a big store, a selling court, and under the arches numerous dead bodies lay in straight rows. And I remember that I even stumbled on people, still alive, who fell and couldn’t rise. I fell down once too, but somebody was going to the lecture and helped me to get up.
We were evacuated in March 1942 on the Road of Life [22]. We all left together, a large group of relatives: me, my mother, sisters, grandmother, Zinovy Aronovich’s daughter and a cousin of Mother’s father, Nina Lvovna Perel.
In Inskaya they started to divide us and direct us for work, and we happened to find ourselves in Ust-Tarka [small town in South-West Siberia, on the Om River], which is situated not far from Tatarsk [town in Siberia, 150 kilometers from Omsk]. They needed teachers over there, and we went to this place. On the way Grandmother got appendicitis, and when we arrived in Ust-Tarka, naturally, we called for a doctor. Doctor Karl Rottermel was a German, who was arrested and banished to Siberia because of his nationality. He rode a horse on his own and took my grandmother to the hospital, which was 30 kilometers away. There he performed the operation and sewed with ordinary threads, because he didn’t have the surgical ones. Later he took my grandmother back and took care of her together with his wife. Granny survived and in evacuation she worked as a dentist too.
Mother worked at school, and we lived near this school, in a special separate room. Mother bought a cow and a place to keep this cow, and one teacher who was courting her, taught her to milk it, and step by step she learned how to get the milk. We had our own food, and we weren’t hungry. I worked in Zagotskot [government economic agency for the provision of meat], where they prepared the meat, I was a bookkeeper.
I decided to go to university [Leningrad University was situated in Saratov, it was in evacuation too]. All that happened at the beginning of 1943.
Then the university was re-evacuated, and I was evacuated too, together with my class. In Leningrad I had no place to live, so I moved to the campus building on Mytninskaya Street. But I couldn’t stay there for a long time, because people drank a lot over there, there was such a mess, and I didn’t like such things from my very childhood. They finished by taking their clothes off, and running, all naked, with fox tails on their backs, obviously they thought it was fun. But I didn’t; it was something weird for me. I’d rather read a book, or listen to music.
I couldn’t go back to our apartment, because it wasn’t empty, somebody occupied it. All our furniture was taken out and given to the ‘dvornik.’ So for a while I lived at my school friend Irina’s, till our friend Tatiana made us argue. Then I met the mother of my ex-fiancé Alexander, Vera Alexeevna Gurieva, and she offered me to live together with her. She had only an eight-square-meter room in a communal apartment in the building, standing just near our house. So we lived together. My school teacher, Linnik, gave us some wood to warm it up.
I couldn’t go back to our apartment, because it wasn’t empty, somebody occupied it. All our furniture was taken out and given to the ‘dvornik.’ So for a while I lived at my school friend Irina’s, till our friend Tatiana made us argue. Then I met the mother of my ex-fiancé Alexander, Vera Alexeevna Gurieva, and she offered me to live together with her. She had only an eight-square-meter room in a communal apartment in the building, standing just near our house. So we lived together. My school teacher, Linnik, gave us some wood to warm it up.
During the war not only my great-grandmother and father died, but also Father’s sister Elizabeth together with her husband. The place, where they lived [Babinovichi], happened to be occupied by the Fascists. And I heard different stories about what took place over there, somebody told me that the Germans murdered them horribly, tied them to the trees and tormented them. I listened to the radio, and there was information about something like that, but I couldn’t understand if it concerned my aunt or not, because they said the name of the place and said that Fascists murdered a doctor assistant and his wife, but didn’t mention any family names.
Nicolas was born in Vyatka [big town in Middle Volga region]; he studied in Kazan [big town on Volga, capital of Tatarstan]. He graduated from Gorny Institute, and taught there, while being a student. He discovered a couple deposits of copper. In pre-war times Nicolas was a professor, and during World War II he was evacuated to Sverdlovsk and worked at some secret factory.
We decided to marry; the marriage took place on the same day, when Berlin was captured, on 2nd May 1945. Just after this event I moved in with my husband. He came to Leningrad with the Gorny Institute, he was a professor then. For two years we lived on the campus on Maly Avenue, my son was born there. Then we got an apartment on the Fifteenth Line, where thereafter our common family life took place.
My relatives only came back from Siberia in 1946; I even had a chance to go there to visit them. They came back to the same apartment, but only to one room. Before the war they had three rooms, but now they got only one, so they had to live there. Mother didn’t work after the war.
I graduated from the History Faculty of Leningrad University in 1946, and I didn’t work for two years, because they wouldn’t take Jews for a job [cf. Campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’ [25]]. I had a work assignment [26] for the Hermitage, but first I was pregnant, then I had maternity leave, because I gave birth to a child, and when it was over, they didn’t let me work at the Hermitage. Since my husband was a professor, he didn’t want me to work, he desired me to baby-sit our son, but I didn’t like doing this. So I found a part-time job in the City Guide Bureau and I had to guide excursions to Kunstkamera [the oldest Museum in Russia, was founded by Peter the Great as a ‘museum of surprises’], but it didn’t last too long.
In 1951 they discharged all Jewish staff at once. They explained it with ‘decreasing the quantity of staff,’ and they dismissed 18 persons. Among those, who were employed in Kunstkamera, they dismissed three people: me, Emil Evseitch Fradkin and one young woman with the family name Dushkevich. Before this discharging it was necessary to complete different papers and documents, proving that we were the worst in the entire museum.
Later I happened to get a place in Kunstkamera, Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, but my Jewish origins always impeded me. I wanted to be involved in scientific research, not to be a guide. As a matter of fact I did the job of scientific-technical staff, then of the so-called junior scientific staff – almost full-time – with all the necessary articles published and so on. Plus I worked as the senior specialist in methodic; I trained guides in the different fields and themes, so I worked for three people, and got a salary as if I worked for one.
Of course, I could have changed the situation, if I had joined the Communist Party. Some of my colleagues told me, ‘Just do it, a Jew can join the party without any problems.’ But I didn’t want to. So I retired when I was 60, but then for ten more years I worked in the Hermitage as a guide.
Of course, I could have changed the situation, if I had joined the Communist Party. Some of my colleagues told me, ‘Just do it, a Jew can join the party without any problems.’ But I didn’t want to. So I retired when I was 60, but then for ten more years I worked in the Hermitage as a guide.
My husband wasn’t a Communist or party member, he couldn’t help me, he had his own problems, and he had to retire earlier than he wanted to: he was too popular a lecturer and professor, and other teachers were jealous of him, and there were scandals and some kind of competition. As for Communism, he was a great fan of Bolsheviks [29] in the pre-Revolution time, but soon he understood he wasn’t right and in the 1930s somehow he acted like he wasn’t a Communist any more, he said he never joined the Party, and they believed him.
When Stalin died, we understood nothing, of course, it wasn’t a great grief, but still I wasn’t glad, not at all, maybe I even cried. How could we have imagined that he was a dictator, perhaps worse than Hitler, who after all didn’t touch his own people, the Germans, while this man killed everybody? But we thought then that somebody wanted to organize the deportation of Jewish people [30], and Stalin would save us. So if he died, the authorities would organize the deportation for sure and nobody would defend Jews.
People usually thought that Nicolas was a Jew. For example, a Jewish dressmaker lived in our house, and neighbors thought that they were very alike and told my husband: ‘When will my trousers be ready? What, they aren’t ready yet? So be careful, I’ll beat you.’ Sometimes they even beat him and they called him a kike, and they never thought that I was Jewish. From time to time in the store people addressed me, pointing at some Russian woman: ‘Look at this kike, shame on Jews, they all are guilty.
My elder son Alexei was born in 1946 in Leningrad. He has only a high school education, and then he became a car mechanic. He tried numerous jobs, now he is a businessman: in Opochka [town in Pskov region, 500 kilometers from Leningrad] together with his elder son, also called Alexei, he builds hotels and houses.
My daughter, Olga lives together with me. She was born in 1951, graduated from Gorny Institute, and all her life she worked in her professional field, first in ‘Gipronikel,’ then in ‘Lenkompriroda’ [local Leningrad Committee of protecting nature] as an ecologist. Now she is trying hard to organize her own firm, she wants to work in the field of ecological tourism.
My daughter suffered from her Jewish nationality. She applied for the university, and only one exam was left. That was Physics. So when the exam started, somebody came in and, pointing a finger at my Olga, proposed: ‘Let’s examine this girl.’ They began to ask Olga such questions, that she even didn’t understand their content. Naturally, she got the worst grade. She came home, crying.
Of course, my children knew that they were Jews, from their very birth. I never lied to them or hid this fact from them. What for? Olga couldn’t apply for the university, and in the 1970s someone beat up Alexei, perhaps, not even thinking or guessing that he was Jewish. So at home we talked about it, we had such conversations, but I don’t remember that we ever mentioned Jewish traditions.