When I went to school I spent vacations in pioneer camps since they were free.
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Displaying 31021 - 31050 of 50826 results
Susanna Sirota
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I went to school in 1931. There were 13 schools in Priluki: one Russian, two Jewish ones and the rest were Ukrainian. I studied in a Ukrainian school. There wasn’t even a discussion about it. I spoke Ukrainian and this school was near our house so I went there. Children and their parents could decide where to study or send their children. There was no nationality issue at the time. I had Jewish, Ukrainian and even one Belarusian friend, but national origin didn’t matter whatsoever. We had nice textbook. I remember the phrase ‘We are not slaves, slaves are not we.
In 1933 there was a famine 8. I remember my classmates fainting from hunger. My Ukrainian classmate and friend Vera Kalinichenko, whose father worked at a bakery, always brought me something to eat, always, while her hands were cold from hunger and I warmed her hands. People were like this: they were eager to help others as much as they could even when they were on the edge of death. They shared the little they had. She died in this same year of 1933.
My father worked at the grain supply company. He loaded grain with a spade and brought home whatever got into his boots. We boiled this grain. When mulberries and elderberries grew my brother and I used to climb trees eating these berries and then we had a stomach ache. My mother’s aunt Esther lived very well, there were a few families that managed better than others. I don’t know how they did it. It wasn’t proper to ask questions about such things. Perhaps, they had valuables that they could exchange for food. My brother was four years old and I took him by his hand and we went to visit them when we knew it was the time when they were to have a meal. When we heard their spoons clicking we went in and they gave us something to eat.
During the period of famine villagers from surrounding villages were coming to Priluki. They told their stories: ‘Communists came and took away everything. There was no food left, people were dying and buried in the yard where they lived.’ A woman and her daughter came to us from a village near Priluki. The girl’s name was Nastia. The mother returned to her village later and I don’t know what happened to her, but the girl stayed and lived with us before the war. She and I went to school together. When we evacuated in 1941 she stayed in our house to try to keep whatever belongings we had. There was a Torgsin store 9, but we had no valuables to exchange for food. I don’t know how we survived. We starved terribly, but somehow we managed.
However, we all strongly believed that those were temporary hardships and that life would improve. We believed we were the happiest children in the world living in the USSR, the country of equality and justice. We went to villages performing our concerts. There was collectivization 10, kolkhozes 11, everybody would work together and life would be wonderful!
My father worked at the grain supply company. He loaded grain with a spade and brought home whatever got into his boots. We boiled this grain. When mulberries and elderberries grew my brother and I used to climb trees eating these berries and then we had a stomach ache. My mother’s aunt Esther lived very well, there were a few families that managed better than others. I don’t know how they did it. It wasn’t proper to ask questions about such things. Perhaps, they had valuables that they could exchange for food. My brother was four years old and I took him by his hand and we went to visit them when we knew it was the time when they were to have a meal. When we heard their spoons clicking we went in and they gave us something to eat.
During the period of famine villagers from surrounding villages were coming to Priluki. They told their stories: ‘Communists came and took away everything. There was no food left, people were dying and buried in the yard where they lived.’ A woman and her daughter came to us from a village near Priluki. The girl’s name was Nastia. The mother returned to her village later and I don’t know what happened to her, but the girl stayed and lived with us before the war. She and I went to school together. When we evacuated in 1941 she stayed in our house to try to keep whatever belongings we had. There was a Torgsin store 9, but we had no valuables to exchange for food. I don’t know how we survived. We starved terribly, but somehow we managed.
However, we all strongly believed that those were temporary hardships and that life would improve. We believed we were the happiest children in the world living in the USSR, the country of equality and justice. We went to villages performing our concerts. There was collectivization 10, kolkhozes 11, everybody would work together and life would be wonderful!
Since my parents were not religious we didn’t celebrate any religious holidays. We only celebrated Soviet holidays and birthdays.
It was a confusing period, but Stalin and Lenin were our faith, religion and god, if you want. I think that the first word any baby pronounced was Lenin and not ‘mama,’ so strong the ideology was. We didn’t have any doubts. I remember that our class tutor was arrested in 1937 [during the Great Terror] as a Ukrainian chauvinist, although she had nothing in common with them. Our teacher Pavel Yasinovski had a Jewish wife. She was sentenced to death, but nobody knows for what charges, and he followed her. The secretary of the district Komsomol committee and our teacher of drawing were arrested. It was a scaring situation, but we believed that innocent people could not be arrested and that if they were arrested, then it was the right thing to do. It was hard to believe that our favorite teacher, Maria Nikolaevna, was an enemy, but she was arrested as such. Well, then it meant that they truly did something against the Soviet power.
In 1938 I joined the Komsomol 13 believing that young people with advanced ideas had to be in the Komsomol. We were young, optimistic and enthusiastic. And, if there was a war to happen tomorrow we were ready to win a victory, this was what our favorite song said. I attended a sports school and was champion of Chernigov region in gymnastics. I tied my future with sports achievements.
I finished school on 20th June 1941. I took my championship certificate and went to enter the College of Physical Culture in Moscow. I arrived in Moscow on the morning of 22nd June 1941. Moscow was crowded at this time of the day. We got off the train and heard the word ‘war.’ I went to Aunt Rosa, my mother’s sister, living in Taganskaya Street. It was clear that I had to go back home where my mother, my father and my brother were waiting for me.
The Makarovs took our family with them: my mother and brother Lusik who was in the fifth grade at school. Our trip lasted a month and a half before we arrived in the village of Darinskoye in Kazakhstan, 2400 kilometers from home. It was a big village on the Ural River. There was a Russian and Kazakh population and Ukrainians, who either arrived there during the tsarist time or escaped from collectivization. There were many people in evacuation, many Jews among them. There were no jobs and many people wanted to go to other places looking for a job.
I went to work at school as a physical culture [education] teacher having my championship certificate. I was also a senior pioneer tutor. My mother also took to any work she could get selling things or working as a cashier. The owners of the wooden house where we were accommodated lived in the upper part of the house and there was a man, his wife Vasilisa and their two girls living in the ‘podklet’ [basement, normally used as storage] in the lower part. They accommodated us in their room. I slept with the girls, my mother slept behind a curtain and Lusik slept with this man. We lived like a family and they treated us nicely.
My father was in Sverdlovsk in the Ural. We corresponded with him. He worked as a rigger at the Ural machine building plant. Since he was a worker he was not allowed to take his family with him. My father was mobilized to a labor army where workers were subject to military discipline living in barracks. Besides, they could be mobilized to the front line at any moment.
Since I had school education and knew Morse code and was a sports girl they sent me to a school of radio operators in Moscow. This was the Moscow School of Master Sergeant Radio Operators in Moscow region that was recently liberated from Germans. It was a school for girls and there were many Jewish girls in it. I enjoyed studying in this school and found it interesting. I was a head girl in physical culture classes and was an active student. We were hungry and ate heartily only when we were on duty in the kitchen once a month, but we were cheerful and joyful.
We lived in Moscow and performed special tasks at a radio station. We were to receive signals from partisans and there was another station for sending signals. We were sitting at special desks listening for signals from partisans and those signals were very low.
This was summer 1943 when we had to do a landing task. I had some previous experience. When you are twenty you do not have fear. Things are just interesting. It’s easy mechanically: after a signal ‘tu, tu’ a hatch opens and you fall out one by one. The air current catches you and you lose your breath watching the ground coming closer. Many landed in wrong places: on high trees when it is impossible to cut off parachute slings or in the wrong location when you have to find your way by azimuth, but the most awful was to get onto the enemy’s ground. However, I got lucky. This was near the village of Volki, Priluki district. We were to transfer documents to a radio station, power supply for the radio and instructions. I stayed in a partisan unit for about a week.
We received a salary and food packages. We also received vodka at times. Markelov was promoted promptly. I was in the rank of lieutenant at the beginning and he had no rank, but then he was promoted to a captain. I liked him and then I thought that I was to get married some time anyway. I was 21 and he was 19. I knew from my mother’s letter that Kolia was gone and I also knew that I would never meet anyone like Kolia again. Our radio station arranged a great wedding party for me and Lev. We got trophy food products and trophy cognac left by the Germans.
I wrote my parents that I got married. They thought Lev was a Jew – for some reason the name of Lev was considered to be a Jewish name – and were very happy for me and I didn’t give them any details. Nationality didn’t matter to me. We had an official civil registration on 11th May 1945 after Victory Day 15. I remember that happy day of 9th May 1945. It was a bright sunny day and lilac bushes were in blossom. We were feeling happy and then we saw that there was a registry office where we were having a walk and we went in there and had our marriage registered. He kept his last name and I kept mine.
I wrote my parents that I got married. They thought Lev was a Jew – for some reason the name of Lev was considered to be a Jewish name – and were very happy for me and I didn’t give them any details. Nationality didn’t matter to me. We had an official civil registration on 11th May 1945 after Victory Day 15. I remember that happy day of 9th May 1945. It was a bright sunny day and lilac bushes were in blossom. We were feeling happy and then we saw that there was a registry office where we were having a walk and we went in there and had our marriage registered. He kept his last name and I kept mine.
This trip ended in 1948 and we returned to Kiev. The radio station already occupied our room in Sviatoshino. We received a big room of 28 square meters in the center of the city in a crowded communal apartment 17, on the fifth floor with no elevator. Our neighbors were KGB 18 employees. Each family, regardless of the number of family members, occupied one room. There were about five families residing in this apartment. There were three gas stoves in the kitchen, one bathroom and one toilet. There was a line to get to the toilet in the morning.
Our parents moved in with us and we partitioned the room with wardrobes and curtains. We got along well with the other tenants. When we got our first TV with a screen as big as a palm our neighbors came in to watch it even if it was time to go to bed or my husband had his work to do.
Our parents moved in with us and we partitioned the room with wardrobes and curtains. We got along well with the other tenants. When we got our first TV with a screen as big as a palm our neighbors came in to watch it even if it was time to go to bed or my husband had his work to do.
After returning from Bucharest, where I was a housewife, I went back to work in the KGB. I was employed by a secret department fighting bandits. My work covered Western Ukraine annexed to the USSR in 1939 [cf. Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact] 19. There were gangs of banderovtsi [cf. Stepan Bandera] 20 in the woods. Our employees traveled there and I was to maintain communications with them.
At first it didn’t occur to me that the attitude toward me and my Jewish colleagues was changing. Once the former secretary of our party committee advised me in a friendly manner: ‘you shouldn’t mention anywhere that you are a Jew.’ And I said, ‘How can I possibly do this if it says in my passport that I am a Jew?’ Then somebody said that I should have kept my partisan passport in which I was Oksana Sizova, a Ukrainian. I was surprised and ignored those talks at first.
In 1948 Israel was established 20. On the one hand, I felt happy that Jews had their own country and our country supported it. On the other hand, I felt I was an ordinary Soviet citizen and this had nothing to do with me personally. Like cosmopolitans [Campaign against ‘cosmopolitans’] 21 that newspapers wrote about. I still piously believed in the ideals of communism and rightfulness of everything happening in my country.
life. A year later I felt like going back to work and my mother was to take care of the children when I realized that all Jews were being removed from our organization. They didn’t announce any reasons and were firing people due to reduction of staff. But then it was impossible to get another job. I was one of the last Jewish employees fired in 1953, after this story with the doctors when there were no Jewish employees left in organizations.
As for the Doctors’ Plot 23, we believed at its beginning that it was true and that the Soviet power could not do the wrong thing. We thought that what happened was done rightly and if there was something wrong we believed that it happened because Stalin was not aware of it. However, looking at the surnames of those they denounced every day and finding out that most of them were Jewish names we felt uneasy. It couldn’t be true that only Jews were enemies of the people 24.
My husband was more than upset about it. He couldn’t understand how people could be mistreated or become suspects for the only reason that they were Jews. He was used to value people for their human merits. He lived in my family and my parents treated him like their son. Then Lev’s management called him. He was working in the KGB 1st department: work abroad, i.e., intelligence. They told him that he should either leave his family and continue working for them or quit. They told him openly that they were firing him for his connections with Jews. He quit.
My husband was more than upset about it. He couldn’t understand how people could be mistreated or become suspects for the only reason that they were Jews. He was used to value people for their human merits. He lived in my family and my parents treated him like their son. Then Lev’s management called him. He was working in the KGB 1st department: work abroad, i.e., intelligence. They told him that he should either leave his family and continue working for them or quit. They told him openly that they were firing him for his connections with Jews. He quit.
Stalin’s death on 5th March 1953 was a big private grief for us. My father, a very reserved man, was crying and crowds of people marched along Kreschatik [the main street of Kiev] crying. They had black and red armbands on their sleeves and it felt like an overwhelming horror of mourning. It was a great personal grief for me as well. Many years were to pass and I had to read many books and meet with many people to have the scales fall from my eyes and see the horror of this regime in a different light. I was a party member and it’s non-existent now. Only uneducated people still cannot believe in those crimes of Stalin and his retinue. My husband still believes in Stalin. I argue with him, but he doesn’t understand.
It was impossible to find a job. I couldn’t even imagine how hard it would feel when you came to an organization and they said, ‘Yes, yes’ and you leave your documents and the following day, they tell you, ‘We apologize, but we’ve already hired a person for this position.’ It happened many times. I couldn’t imagine this was happening to me. I went to see the secretary of the party district committee and he pretended he was furious about it and said, ‘No, this cannot be true!’ He helped me to get a job as an accountant in a construction company.
I worked there several years until this company closed and I lost my job again. Once my former colleague, a driver, called me. He worked in the ‘Znaniye’ company developing manuals and said that I could work part-time as a typist. Since I was a radio operator and could transmit 140 signs per minute I went to work there. Later they employed me as a secretary and my knowledge of Ukrainian proved to be very useful. Here is the full name of this company: Association for Popularization of Scientific, Technical, Social and Political Knowledge. This was an ideological organization of the regional party committee. I was very grateful that my boss employed me without knowing of my Jewish identity. Later, when he found out the truth, he supported me and treated me with deep respect.
I worked there several years until this company closed and I lost my job again. Once my former colleague, a driver, called me. He worked in the ‘Znaniye’ company developing manuals and said that I could work part-time as a typist. Since I was a radio operator and could transmit 140 signs per minute I went to work there. Later they employed me as a secretary and my knowledge of Ukrainian proved to be very useful. Here is the full name of this company: Association for Popularization of Scientific, Technical, Social and Political Knowledge. This was an ideological organization of the regional party committee. I was very grateful that my boss employed me without knowing of my Jewish identity. Later, when he found out the truth, he supported me and treated me with deep respect.
We didn’t buy matzah and my parents didn’t talk about Jewish holidays. We celebrated Soviet holidays: 1st May and October Revolution Day 27. The biggest holiday for us was Victory Day. Our fellow comrades visited us and we recalled the past days and sang songs of those years.
My husband graduated from university and got promoted to chief of the militia department in the rank of colonel. He had his hard times. He worked at nights being a forensic detective. He captured criminals. There was a big case of counterfeiters, forgery of bonds. Unfortunately, he had to pay his cost for this job. This kind, decent and honest man began to drink.
Our boys studied at school. They were well aware that their mother, grandfather and grandmother were Jews, but they got no Jewish education. We didn’t observe any Jewish traditions and spoke Russian in our family. Our sons identified themselves as Soviet people. They don’t understand what it means to be a Jew. They don’t know any traditions. They don’t care about national origin and value personal merits. However, when they heard abusive words at school or in the street, whether addressed to Jews or gypsies [Roma] they would even fight against it. They are just boys.
We had a quiet life. We worked, went to the cinema and theaters. My husband was a football fan and often went to the stadium in summer. In summer we spent vacations at the seashore. We liked cruising down the Dnieper to the Crimea. It didn’t cost much. In the evening we enjoyed having a stroll in the park.
I visited my cousin Rosa in Moscow and she sometimes visited us.
I visited my cousin Rosa in Moscow and she sometimes visited us.
We were horrified about perestroika 30. We couldn’t believe that this avalanche of things published in newspapers and spoken on TV could have been possibly happening in our quiet lives. We felt some uncertainty. We, dedicated communists in the past, felt like criminals, but we didn’t know anything like this and lived a common life like everybody else. Big shots of party officials found their way promptly and became millionaires and the majority of the population became poor in a jiffy. They lost their savings. Our pension is not enough to pay for utility services, not to mention medications. When I see intelligent people searching for food leftovers in the garbage and eating whatever they find, I feel terrible. It was out of the question in the USSR.
Hesed 31 is very important. I like to socialize with people and Hesed offers very interesting subjects for discussions and I like to be there. For the first time in my life I identified myself as a Jew. I haven’t become religious, of course, and I never will, but Jewish history and traditions are very interesting and I enjoy learning them. It is wonderful that they provide assistance to poor people. They provide medications and food and take care of us.
Lilly Lovenberg
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They put us to work cleaning up ruins. We had to dig out the rocks with a pick-axe from the dilapidated and bombed houses. It was horribly heavy work. We had to load the big rocks into a coal tub. When the tub was full, 18-20 of us pulled it by the thick ropes attached to the side.
He said, whatever happens, Lilly is going to survive. We had to leave our belongings there. ‘Everyone move calmly, everyone will get their belongings,’ they said in German. Everything was in German. We understood; my parents spoke German fluently. And for those who didn’t understand, someone translated to them.