My grandfather’s family observed all Jewish traditions. Since they didn’t force anybody I remember little. He had a seat at the synagogue, an expensive one. He didn’t wear anything special in everyday life and didn’t have payes. However, on holidays he put on special clothes and prayed.
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Larisa SHYHMAN
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My mother’s name was Basheva Lubalina, she was usually called Sheva or Shura in the Russian manner [13]. She was born in 1902. Since my grandfather was so greedy my mother finished only two grades, probably then my grandmother died and her father didn’t want her to continue studies. So my mother had little education and worked as a seamstress.
I have no idea how my parents met, they never told me. They had a civil wedding. As I already mentioned, my father was an atheist and my mother didn’t seem to believe in anything living with my grandmother.
On holidays we visited my mother’s father. I learned about Jewish traditions there, but I wasn’t interested, though I remember holidays. Of course, Chanukkah was children’s favorite holidays. We were given money… However greedy my grandfather was, he gave us money. I also remember him giving us nuts. Grandfather also wore something strange… We, children, what could we know?
I have vague memories about famine in 1932-33 [14]. It wasn’t so bad in Kiev. Big town – they didn’t let it suffer that much. We weren’t wealthy and we didn’t have much. I remember that there wasn’t good food… When I went to a summer camp, had some bread with me. There were bread coupons… My parents had to save to buy a radio or a coat for my mother…
I went to Russian school #86 [15] in Pechersk that used to be a grammar school before the revolution. There were naughty children in our class and so was I… We were friends. We used to fight with children from other streets, we used to do many things together. There was no national segregation. We were all friends. Nobody thought ‘Is he a Jew? Is he not? I think it started after the Great Patriotic War…
There were many activities in the club and children could choose what they liked to do. Children were involved in many activities, they didn’t go loose like they do now. We also played outside, we played football and I was a goalkeeper. Well, it was different… I used to do modeling, drawing and embroidery. I hated circus and there were no interesting children’s programs.
We played football and teased the children of Kossior [16], who were always accompanied by two agents. Two agents escorted them to school and we teased them… We said, you are two little ones, they don’t allow you to be by yourselves… Many Party officials lived nearby. Kossior was a common man. He even gave us rides in his car… Later Khrushchev [17] lived in his house. Khrushchev’s daughter was a very nice lady… His mother often sat in the yard. Poor thing, she was lonely at home and she used to sit in the yard on her stool wearing a white kerchief, a Ukrainian woman. She watched children playing. And we were naughty…
We played football and teased the children of Kossior [16], who were always accompanied by two agents. Two agents escorted them to school and we teased them… We said, you are two little ones, they don’t allow you to be by yourselves… Many Party officials lived nearby. Kossior was a common man. He even gave us rides in his car… Later Khrushchev [17] lived in his house. Khrushchev’s daughter was a very nice lady… His mother often sat in the yard. Poor thing, she was lonely at home and she used to sit in the yard on her stool wearing a white kerchief, a Ukrainian woman. She watched children playing. And we were naughty…
It was fearful in 1937, wow… People were taken away. There were searches in our home: they were looking for gold in Jewish homes. We were an ordinary family, but they still searched, turning the whole apartment upside down. It felt terrible. My grandmother woke up and there were NKVD officers standing over her demanding gold. Later the situation was resolved, nobody was arrested… I think they didn’t since my uncle Mikhail was working in NKVD. But still, we got so scared then… All we had were these golden earrings with little emeralds – I always wear them: my aunt gave them to me as my wedding gift.
When I went to school the situation was all right: I finished 8 grades; I was a pioneer and then a Komsomol member [18] – this was mandatory at my time.
There were no discussions about the war in our houses and we only heard on the radio that a war began. At first there were talks that it wasn’t going to last long and there was nothing to be worried about, but in August, when it became clear that German troops were advancing, he decided to send my mother, Maya and me to uncle Isaac in Konstantinovka Donetsk region.
When the war began, my father said from the beginning that all Jews had to leave their homes since Germans would have no mercy toward them. I don’t know how he knew… So, he took us to the station where we boarded a train. He said ‘I’ll be back soon’ and he left and the train departed and we never saw him again. It turned out that my father and uncle went to a military registry office to volunteer to the front and they were recruited to the army immediately. We only heard about it from letters when we arrived in Donbass… Since my father was a high-skilled joiner, he could have a delay from being sent to the front, but he volunteered there. At first, he was near Lubny and we received his letters from there, but then we were on the go again and there were no letters from him. Later we got to know from the archives that he perished in 100 km from Kiev, near Fastov, in 1943.
When Maya recovered we were taken to a German settlement [20], in the Volga region. There was a Nemtsepovolzhskiy district in Saratov region with German and Ukrainian population. Those Ukrainian migrants moved to the Volga area during the reign of Yekaterina [21] or Soviet authorities deported some [22], as unreliable residents. The gave their villages names of Ukrainian towns: Kievka, Poltavka, Kharkovka…. So we lived in Kharkovka. Here was ‘ded Vasyl’ [‘ded’ literally means ‘old man’ in Russian]. When he saw us he said at once: ‘I am taking this family with me’. So it’s only in his home we recovered our feelings. I went to deliver water to fields. I had a strange horse looking like a camel. I also made haystacks and worked on a combine unit. All kinds of work I did. Ded Vasyl liked me a lot. I used to read him the Bible. He couldn’t read. It was a Bible or Testament, a huge book, I don’t remember exactly. He loved it when I was at home… He always sent me milk or something else. So we were all friends. My mother worked in a vegetable garden. Maya was already ill, but she went to kindergarten anyway.
Then my aunt employed me as a courier. Winters are severely cold in Aktyubinsk and I had my feet frostbitten the moment I started work. I only had rubber galoshes to wear. There was a school of radio operators opened in Aktyubinsk. I finished it and went to work as a radio operator in 1942. The Morse code and so on. I worked with planes, sending them to Tashkent (today Uzbekistan) where they had crews formed and then they returned, landed where we were and we sent them to the front. This was how I worked.
One day in 1945 chief of the republic’s department arrived and I described this situation to him and he said: ‘You know, I cannot send you to Kiev, but I can arrange for you to go a bearing location school in Baku’, - location operators land planes, special training. So I agreed and went to Baku in Azerbaijan, 3500 km from Kiev where I finished this school. I was there on Victory Day on 9 May 1945. Everybody was so happy…
Meanwhile my aunt addressed deputy chief of the department in Ukraine. He wrote a letter requesting my transfer to Kiev upon finishing school in Baku. I arrived in 1945 and went to work as a radio operator in Zhuliany airport. I worked there until retirement.
‘Struggle against cosmopolites’ [23] didn’t have any impact on us. We were miserably poor. However, there was a search in my grandfather’s apartment one day n 1948. I was at work. They took away my grandfather’s furs. Those KGB officers probably knew that my father perished at the front. They saw how poor we were, so they put the best furs under my sister on the bed and told her to sit on the pillows. So it was. Even they felt sorry for us and left a portion of what they found during the search for us to be able to buy food after they left.
Actually, I never faced anti-Semitism. My colleagues respected me at work. Only once, during the period of ‘doctors’ plot’ [24], one colleague used to talk about it whenever head of department came in and then repeated: ‘Do you see it now? Do you?’, but then another colleague said: ‘Just leave her alone’. And that was all. Well, Stalin’s death, the 20th Congress [25]. Yes, I can tell, it was a shock, but then it passed – there were other things to think about.
But I didn’t brood about things. I was cheerful and pretty. I danced in the ensemble of the Civil Air Fleet. We danced folk dances. Even Veryovka [26] wanted to take me to his group, they were just starting. He wanted to have me and Tania Belaya, he liked us a lot... I think we danced well. I shouldn’t boast, of course. I also danced solo… We gave concerts in the Harrison and in Aviation College… We performed a lot.
Misha finished 2 grades in a Jewish school and then he went to an ordinary Ukrainian school. He finished the 10th grade during the war. His family was in evacuation in Fergana (today Uzbekistan) and he actually finished secondary school by correspondence. In Fergana he was recruited to the army. He was 16 years old. They gave him a rifle that was almost bigger than him. They say he was so thin that he could hardly hold this rifle… He was very smart and they decided he could serve where he was. He became a radio operator. He did so well at school that they made him a teacher in a school for radio operators in Fergana.
, Ukraine
After the war he got a transfer to the vicinity of Mukachevo in Ukraine where he stayed two years. So he served in the army 7 years since wartime was not included in the term of service. Then Misha moved to Kiev and became chief of the locator department. He also studied at the evening department in college. He finished Radio Faculty of Kiev Polytechnic College. He was very smart, indeed: mathematician, physicist and in general… He made 19 inventions, all of them practical.
Then Rimma, my friend, began to see Misha. I always had many friends. We went to the cinema once. He took Rimma home and then he went home with me. And then it started. Actually, I had been seeing a pilot from Ashkhabad before. He wanted to take me with him. He flew there and was away for a long time and there came Misha. When he came back to take me with him a year and a half later, I was married and pregnant. I said: ‘You should have come earlier…’ But I loved him anyway. Misha was smart, and it was interesting to spend time with him. I was fond of astronomy and he told me interesting things about stars…Then we had a walk in Podol and were passing a civil registry office and he said: ‘Let’s go in’, and I said: ‘Let us’. So we registered our marriage. No parties, no traditions. We were poor. My aunt, when she heard about it, she ran out to buy me tights; mine was all patched. We got married in April 1954.
In 1957 my grandfather died at the age of 90. He left a lot of money, but his wife took it all. The Jewish community made arrangements for his Jewish funeral in the Jewish cemetery.
Our life began to get better gradually. Misha was valued in ‘Geophyspribor’, he worked there for a long time. He was training instructor at first, it was something different and I don’t know any details. Then he got a transfer to a design office department. Misha earned well and received significant bonuses for implementation of his inventions. He was even awarded a silver medal for them. He was a joiner and then electronic equipment specialist. He made tools. When he had his both feet on the ground he wanted me to quit my job and stay at home, he said: ‘if you want to go back to work, I will help you with employment’. But his mother told me to keep my job since otherwise I would wear an apron and slippers for the rest of my life. I also wanted to stay at work. I liked my collective, I enjoyed it there and my colleagues liked and respected me. So after my second son Gennadiy was born on 17 March 1961 I returned to work at the airport.
My sons did well at school where they had many friends. We had a good life and never considered departing from this country. Even when our children began having problems with ‘line item #5’ [27] when entering colleges and getting job assignments [28], I didn’t think about it. We managed somehow.
My older son Leonid took after his father, he is very smart. Gennadiy is also smart, but Leonid is smarter. He was very handsome, everybody said so. He was tall, my both sons are tall. Leonid had excellent marks and went to enter a college in Moscow. He wanted to be a theoretical physicist. There was the ‘fifth line item’ problem and it was hard for Jews to enter colleges. He passed his exams in physics and mathematic wonderfully , there were no marks, only plus marks. He got three plus marks in physics and three in mathematic. He even solved some problems in the same way as the teacher who was checking his test. However, he was not so successful with his composition… Misha didn’t mentioned it to him and I didn’t know either that it was better to make it short, but with no mistakes. His subjects was ‘Scientists all over the world’ and he got confused. Who knows correct spelling of those Japanese names? He got a ‘two’. And he returned home. We hastily submitted his documents to Kiev Polytechnic College. They wanted him to fail, of course. Here in Kiev. Anti-Semitism was not so strong in Moscow. He was so bright with his answers, particularly in physics, that one lecturer in the commission said: ‘That’s enough with torturing him’. There was a woman among them, nasty one, she pushed on him so hard that even her colleague couldn’t bear it longer. ‘That’s it’ – he said, - ‘What do you want from him?’ - They asked him so many additional questions! But he was good at physics and mathematic. He had to solve a problem at the exam (and maybe it was plotted so), and he found a mistake. He explained it in his test. As for Russian compositions, he got a ‘3’ again. But he entered a Power Faculty. What of it? He finished it and wrote the best diploma. They said he should go to production industry right away, but the ‘fifth item’ and – they refused to employ Leonid. Assistant dean went to ask for him and to tell them how smart he was, but ‘he was a Jew’ and they didn’t accept him. So he got a job where a 10-grade schoolgirl could cope. He was so distressed. This killed him morally.
My husband went to Chernobyl soon. They sent people there, but he went on his own will. He said that when this unit exploded older people had to go there. They had lived their life and young people should stay away. He went there on 30 April. I was in Moscow and didn’t know about it. Misha went there with his devices to measure radiation. Miners were following him. He instructed them where they could walk, where they had to run or step over… Of course, he was exposed to a big dose. And in 1992 he died having melanoma of the skin. Before he died he didn’t function, even his speech organs… So I am alone…
Gennadiy and Olga moved to Israel. Olga said they had to go and shortly after Stanislav was born in 1990 they managed to leave. They lived in Ramat Gan and now in Forsaba near Tel Aviv. I visited them in 1994. They had a wonderful life there. And they are doing well now. As long as one has a good job there life is all right.
My grandson Valentin entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematic in Kiev Polytechnic College. He passed his entrance exams well, his tuition is free of charge and he receives a stipend. Leonid is an electronic engineer and is doing well... But this is not what he wanted to be: theoretical physicist…
After the break up of the Soviet Union [31] my life hardly changed, I was already a pensioner. I read and watch TV. I have many friends and we often get together, sort of a ‘club for those who are over 30’. We laugh a lot, they respect me well. We celebrate Jewish and other holidays. I get along well with them. I don’t care about nationality whatsoever. I have a small pension, but I can manage. I don’t go out much. They come from Hesed to help me around. I am optimistic and how can one be otherwise? Life is short!
Sarra Shylman
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My paternal grandfather Itzyk Shylman was born in Belopolie town Berdichev district in 200 km from Kiev in 1840s. He was a teacher at cheder and his surname Shylman means ‘school man’ in Yiddish. The majority of population in Belopolie was Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish. Jews sold agricultural products and were shoemakers, tailors, carpenters, blacksmiths and leather specialists.