Mother didn't mark Jewish holidays after the war. Our family marked Soviet holidays such as 1st May, 7th November [October Revolution Day], New Year's Day, Soviet Army Day, Victory Day [50]. I spent Victory Day with my family only in the morning, when we went to the Grave of the Unknown Soldier to lay down flowers. Then I met with my front-line soldiers. Some of them lived in Moscow; others came here on the holiday. We remembered the past, drank to the victory, commemorated our comrades who didn't make it, and sang military songs.
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Displaying 7021 - 7050 of 50826 results
Naum Kravets
Meanwhile, my daughter was growing up. She finished the secondary school where my sister and I had studied and entered the Moscow Culture Institute, the Library Studies Department. My daughter wasn't raised Jewish; most Jewish children back in that time weren't. After her graduation, she became a librarian at the State Library of Technical Science. She got married in 1986. I don't want to dwell on her husband. Stella kept her maiden name Kravets. We exchanged our apartment for another one: three rooms for my daughter and one room for my wife and me. In 1987 Stella gave birth to her daughter Olga, and in 1991 she gave birth to a son, Mikhail. Stella left work after her daughter was born.
When perestroika [51] began, I believed Mikhail Gorbachev [52] at once. People always hope and I hoped that the situation in the country would change for the better. Things guaranteed by the Constitution, in actuality were not enforced in the USSR, but with perestroika we obtained our liberty of word, press. There was no censorship. The truth was revealed about real things that had taken place in the USSR during the Soviet regime. So, I had hoped that life would turn out for the better in our country. In the USSR religion was persecuted and during perestroika people were free to profess religion. Not only the elderly, who had nothing to lose, but also young people could go to the church, synagogue without fearing that it would be known at work. The Iron Curtain [53], separating us from the rest of the world, was removed. Now we had a chance to correspond with foreigners, go abroad and invite foreigners for a visit.
Life was harder for us after perestroika: prices escalated, there was a lack of products in the stores, even primary goods were missing, the currency devaluated... - probably it isn't Gorbachev's fault, and the enemies of perestroika are to be blamed for that. Everybody knows what perestroika was crowned with: the breakup of the Soviet Union [in 1991]. In spite of all shortcoming of the Soviet system I still miss the former Soviet Union. We lived in a big and powerful state and took pride in our country. And what is left of the USSR now? - A group of poor and weak countries. I understand that sooner or later there is an end to any empire, and from the point of view of historians there is conformity in that. I think the regime should be changed, introduce a multiparty system and do away with the leading role of the Communist Party and keep the Union. The process still remains unfinished. Russia in itself is imminent with collapse. If all republics become independent, what will be left of Russia, Moscow oblast?
I was happy to have been in Israel for several times. I went there for the first time when the USSR still existed. The Israeli Committee of the Veterans of War invited 30 front-line soldiers to go to Israel. The chairman of the Council, Marianovskiy, assigned me the leader of the group. I stayed in Israel for a month. Apart from the official program I had the chance to buy tours throughout the country. I was captivated by Israel. I liked everything: kibbutzim, towns and the desert. The country is beautiful and people made it beautiful. It was an unforgettable trip. Later I went on a few more trips to Israel and was getting more and more fascinated with the country and its citizens. When I was in the Israeli airdrome of the armed forces the army commander gave me a tiny Torah. He told me that each officer, each soldier of the Israeli army is given such a Torah. He said that I should always have it on me for me to be protected. There is a special small pocket for the Torah in the uniform of an Israeli soldier. I don't have a pocket in my uniform, so my daughter made one for me. I keep my Torah close to my heart. If I put a jacket on, I put the Torah there. It is always with me. I don't think I'm religious, but I'm sure the Torah is taking care of me.
,
After WW2
See text in interview
I took part in two parades in Moscow in 1995 and 2000, devoted to Victory Day. Recently I found out that I passed the medical examination and was permitted to take part in the Victory parade in May 2005. They are even fixing the ceremonious uniform for the occasion. This is my last parade and I'm happy to take part in it. Frankly speaking I had a forlorn hope that I would make it.
I attend the Jewish cultural center. There, very interesting thematic events are held such as meetings with outstanding people, performances of actors, art exhibitions. I try not to miss those. There are also different gatherings, where people meet each other. Men and women of different age come over, meet each other and chat. I feel very comfortable there. I don't feel ill at ease as it usually happens with people you do not know. Not only single people attend such events, but also married couples. It's always nice to mix with people and look for new friends; there is also a chance to find one's love, who knows ...
After the Finnish campaign the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact [26] was signed. Even now I cannot comprehend how Germany, the enemy, turned into our friend and ally. All our favorite antifascist movies that had been shown in the USSR for a long time, were banned, namely 'Professor Mamlock' [27], and 'The Oppenheim Family.' [The feature film 'The Oppenheim Family' is about the tragic fate of a Jewish family in Nazi Germany. The film was shot by Russian director and producer Grigoriy Roshal and screened since 1939.
In 1937 Grandfather Pinhas Kravets died in Odessa. My parents and Lev went to the funeral. My sister and I were left with Lidia. Grandfather was buried in accordance with the Jewish ritual in the Jewish cemetery in Odessa.
My elder brother Lev lived with us. At school my brother took an active part in Komsomol work and after finishing school and his army service Lev entered the Supreme Party School [28]. He was sent to the district party committee in one of the remote districts in Moscow for that time, Sokolniki. Having returned from the army Lev went to Uman to visit Grandmother Etl and he married a Ukrainian girl there and brought her to Moscow. First, they lived with us, then Lev was given a room in a house constructed for the employees of the party committee. They moved into the new apartment.
. Before the very outbreak of World War II, Lev sent his pregnant wife to Uman, to her parents. Her son Vladimir was born in August 1941 in Uman. Lev didn't live to see his son. He went in the lines during the first days of the war and perished in 1941. In January 1942 his wife was notified that Captain Lev Kravets was reported missing in November 1941.
Mikhail Gauzner
My great-grandfather on my mother's side was named Haim-Shmul Kurland. He was born about 1860 in a Jewish settlement of present-day Vinnitsa region, the name of which I don't know. He owned a pharmacy in the settlement and was deeply respected both as a professional and as a very devout person.
My great-grandfather was a religious person. I can't say whether he went to the synagogue, but at home he prayed, put on his tallit and tefillin. In 1941, when the Great Patriotic War [1] started, he flatly refused to leave Odessa. He was very old and said, 'One has to die at home'. We are unaware of the circumstances of his death. The neighbors said after the war that 'he vanished, like all of yours.
My grandfather, Moisey Vainshtein, was born in 1880 in Tomashpol. He was the manager of a sugar factory. The people who brought sugar beet to the plant and worked at the plant were mostly Russians and Ukrainians. They treated my grandfather with great respect and called him 'our Moshka'. The extent of his religiosity is completely unknown to me. Most likely, he observed all traditions and laws required of a Jew; as for me, religion seemed to be a certain moral pivot in his life.
In Tomashpol my grandfather's family lived in an allocated apartment at the works. My grandfather certainly wasn't a poor man. When gangs [2] entered the settlement during the Civil War [3] and started pogroms [4], the men took a stand in front of his apartment and said, 'Leave Moshka alone. Moshka is a good man, you must keep him out of it.' And really, neither him nor his family were ever disturbed although the regimes constantly changed in Tomashpol. My mother told me about this when I was a boy.
My grandparents had four children: Asya, Mark, Boris and my mother Riva. All of them were born in Tomashpol. They had a nurse, either a Polish or a Ukrainian woman. They affectionately called her Darunya. Darunya was part of the family. She and my grandmother brought up the children and ran the household. Theirs was a large, united family; children were raised austere, without over-indulgence. The girls started working as bookkeepers at the plant accounting department from their earliest years. I know that the boys didn't go to cheder.
During the Great Patriotic War my grandmother evacuated to the town of Andizhan [3,500 km from Odessa, in Uzbekistan] with Aunt Asya's family. She died of typhus in evacuation in 1943, at the age of 57.
My mother, Riva Gauzner, nee Vainshtein, was born in Tomashpol in 1909. She didn't receive religious education. She studied at secondary school. From the age of 14 she earned her own small income by working at the accounting department of the sugar factory where her father was the manager.
After my maternal grandfather's death and my family's moving to Odessa, my mother started working as a bookkeeper in order to help my grandmother. Later, she finished a bookkeeping course and became a bookkeeper.
My grandparents got married in 1903. After the wedding my grandfather moved to Mogilyov-Podolsk where he owned a dry goods store.
Following the October Revolution of 1917 [6] they eloped, so to speak, from being persecuted by the authorities for being bourgeois people. They moved to Odessa in the 1920s and settled down with some relatives. Grandfather David put an end to his business activities. Along with his best friend, an undergraduate smatter physician, he created some device to produce long- playing gramophone needles that didn't go blunt as quickly as conventional ones. My grandfather worked as a metal craftsman and found a market for those needles.
Grandmother Sofia was one of the most adored and beloved persons in the whole world for me. She was a housewife, but what a brilliant one! She was an exceptionally organized person, very strict, accurate and composed. I remember that she was magnificent in cooking sour sweetbread with red sauce; and the hamantashen she baked for Purim were simply delicious! She told me the story of Haman and Mordecai and what the meaning of hamantashen was. And the boy I was then, I bit off Haman's 'ear' and said, 'Now he gets what he deserves!
As far as I remember, my grandparents didn't observe any Jewish traditions. It never occurred to me to ask if they prayed or believed in God. Outwardly nothing was manifested.
At home they spoke Russian and changed to Yiddish when they wanted to hide something from me. Maybe they spoke to each other in Yiddish when they were in their room. I guess Yiddish was their native tongue when they were still children and lived with their parents. But once they became immersed into the life of such a civilized and international city as Odessa, they changed to Russian.
Uncle Yuzya got enlisted to the army in 1941 and perished at the front.
My father, Yakov Gauzner, was born in Mogilyov-Podolsk in 1907. He wrote in his biography that he had completed a secondary school; this must have been when he was still in Mogilyov-Podolsk. Then my father graduated from Odessa Machine-Building Technical School and started working as an engineer at some plant. Very soon he was recognized as an organizer, him being a born leader. While working at the plant he graduated from the evening department of Odessa Industrial Institute [today's Polytechnic Institute] as a mechanical engineer. Before the Great Patriotic War he worked as a mechanical shop superintendent at Odessa's well-known Kinap Plant [cinema equipment producing plant].
We lived on the third floor of a house in Lanzheronovskaya Street in the city center. It was a rather dark, dull apartment, but a large one. There were four rooms, a kitchen, and a restroom. Two rooms had windows; the other two were dark. Both my grandparents' bedroom and our room - I stayed with my parents - had windows with a look out over Lanzheronovskaya Street. The rooms were furnished with old furniture. I remember a huge dining table. There was also a cute little table on bentwood legs, with a marble table-top, on which I often hit myself.
When the Great Patriotic War started, the plant where my father worked was evacuated. However, my father was left behind with a group of workers, and they organized the production of mine housings at the machine shop, which was necessary for defending Odessa. About a month after the war began, in the middle of July 1941, Odessa started to be bombarded. There was a bomb shelter in the basement of our house. I remember how the older boys ran out into the streets after a night air raid to collect bomb fragments. I remember the bomb fragment with torn edges they gave me to play with. I remember how the mothers of those boys stormed out from the shelter and pulled them back in. When Odessa was bombarded excessively, and one of the bombs exploded somewhere nearby, in our street, my mother said, 'If it's our destiny, let us perish all together.' My mother and I moved into the little room beside my father's office at the plant and lived there until our evacuation.
My family, that is my father, my mother, me and my grandparents, was evacuated from Odessa, along with the last escapees, at the end of September or the beginning of October 1941.
My family, that is my father, my mother, me and my grandparents, was evacuated from Odessa, along with the last escapees, at the end of September or the beginning of October 1941.
From Mariupol my family went by railroad in a heated boxcar to Yoshkar-Ola [1,600 km from Odessa]. The whole group of evacuated people was housed in the exhibition hall of the former Museum of Regional Studies, which, to me, a five-year-old boy, seemed simply enormous. About forty people lived there. Living space for individual families was partitioned off with sheets hanging down from ropes. Under these living conditions it was no surprise that I got membranous pneumonia.
We lived in a small flat in Yoshkar-Ola until 1944. I actually didn't see my father during that time. He was busy at the plant day and night. It was a fusion of the Leningrad Optical Engineering Works and Odessa Kinap Plant, which also produced optics. The plant manufactured tank ordnance gun sights. Like all the plants associated with the People's Commissariat of Armament it was supervised by the infamous Laurentiy Pavlovich Beriya [8]. My father, who was present at the meetings in the director's office, told me that quite often he heard Beriya shouting, 'Where are the sights? Penal battalions - that's where you'll go!'[Editor's note: Penal battalions were subdivisions of the Soviet Army to which people were sent for punishment during the war. They were used at the most dangerous frontlines, basically sent to sure death.]
Soon my father was appointed superintendent of the engineering shop, which was under intensive construction. The work stopped neither at day nor at night. He came home from time to time, had a nap for several hours and returned to the plant. It was my father who made sure the work in this shop went ahead, and it was for that reason that he received the 'Order of the Red Banner of Labor' in 1943.
Soon my father was appointed superintendent of the engineering shop, which was under intensive construction. The work stopped neither at day nor at night. He came home from time to time, had a nap for several hours and returned to the plant. It was my father who made sure the work in this shop went ahead, and it was for that reason that he received the 'Order of the Red Banner of Labor' in 1943.