My father didn’t share my enthusiasm and was hostile to the Soviet regime, especially when the arrests began in 1937. My mother always tried to smoothen down my father’s moods. They began to be particularly concerned after uncle Grigoriy was arrested in Moscow in 1937. My father never wanted to join the Communist Party, but he never interfered in my Komsomol activities. Our family was entirely secular and had nothing to do with Jewish tradition.
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Displaying 41221 - 41250 of 50826 results
Semyon Goldwar
I remember the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. It was Sunday and I was going on a visit to my favorite aunt Clara. I went across the town park when I saw a group of people listening to Molotov’s [10] speech. He announced that the night before Hitler attacked the USSR without declaration of the war. On the first days of the war the young people were full of enthusiasm to win a victory within about a month.
My father was mobilized to the army on the first days of the war. He was on a construction site in Novosibirsk [3,700 km from Odessa] to construct facilities for the factories evacuated from Ukraine. Later he was sent to the Leningrad front where he was throughout the period of the blockade [11]. After Leningrad was liberated he worked at the restoration of ruined buildings in Leningrad and was demobilized in 1945.
My mother and I moved to our summer house where it seemed to be safer. I insisted that we evacuated. I didn’t believe that Germans were cultured people. We needed a special permit for evacuation. The logistics department of the army occupied one of our two rooms for some time. After the evacuation began one of the officers named Gankevich obtained a permit for my mother – he told the authorities that she was his wife and I was his son, and we managed to leave Odessa.
On 8 October 1941 we boarded a ship called Armenia and on 16 October Odessa was left to the Germans. Near the cape Tarkhankut [south-east of the Crimean peninsula] the boat was stranded in the night. The boat was overcrowded – there were over 3 thousand people including wounded military. In the morning two trawlers pulled us off the strand. My mother and I got off in Tuapse [port on the Black Sea shore]. My mother’s friend Sopha Pikelis lived in Kislovodsk [1,200 km from Odessa]. We got to Kislovodsk by train. I entered an artillery school there. We studied general subjects and some artillery subjects. I lived in a barrack.
On 8 October 1941 we boarded a ship called Armenia and on 16 October Odessa was left to the Germans. Near the cape Tarkhankut [south-east of the Crimean peninsula] the boat was stranded in the night. The boat was overcrowded – there were over 3 thousand people including wounded military. In the morning two trawlers pulled us off the strand. My mother and I got off in Tuapse [port on the Black Sea shore]. My mother’s friend Sopha Pikelis lived in Kislovodsk [1,200 km from Odessa]. We got to Kislovodsk by train. I entered an artillery school there. We studied general subjects and some artillery subjects. I lived in a barrack.
In 1942 the front was close to Kislovodsk and I convinced my mother to go on to Djambul, Kazakhstan [3,200 km from Odessa]. I was to enter the army in August 1942.
In May 1943 I finished the school in the rank of lieutenant. I was sent to the First Ukrainian front. My first big action that I took part in was liberation of Kiev in November 1943. Our battery was taken to the right bank of the Dnieper River and we were to distract attention of the enemy. It was a miracle that we survived. I was commanding officer of a howitzer battery. My howitzer cannon weighed 3 tons and was pulled by ten horses. I remember battle near Proskurov [town in Ukraine]. We didn’t have enough shells. A Churchill tank (an assistance from Great Britain) was near my battery and I begged him to pull my howitzer, since my horses were killed. Later I participated in the battles near the Dnestr. I was only twenty years old, but I was already a first lieutenant. I was wounded in the autumn 1944 in Germany, where I went with the offensive army, shell-shocked. One splinter injured my eye and another one hit my right side where it got stuck in my bag with papers. The bag saved my life. I kept that splinter for memory for a long time.
At the beginning of 1945 in Germany I became a member of the party. It was quite a natural step for me, a Komsomol member. I made a little pocket on the inner side of my shirt to keep my party membership card.
We were heading for Berlin, but later we were ordered to turn to Prague, where an uprising [13] began. We covered 90 km per day. We sat on the cannons which were drawn by horses, this is how we traveled. We reached Prague after our tanks entered it – it happened on 9 May – Victory Day [14]. We were so happy and rejoiced in our happiness. We laid a table – about one hundred meters long. Commander of our regiment appointed me to be on duty to take care of drunken officers just in case, since I didn’t drink.
My mother returned from evacuation in 1945. She found our apartment occupied by a militiaman – major Urbanskiy. She even went to see the commandant of the town, but it didn’t work. Then I came to Odessa for ten days. I gathered my friends and we came to my home. I told him to move out before the following day or, I said, I would throw him out of the window. The major moved out and I helped my mother to move in. My father was reconstructing a big plant in Leningrad where he was deputy director and returned home. When he returned home, my father went to work as foreman at a construction site.
I demobilized from the army on 26 August 1946. I returned to Odessa and went to see the rector of the Construction Institute – he was also a war veteran. He ordered his subordinate to enroll me on the lists of students. That was how I became a student of the faculty of architecture at the Construction Institute.
When we were 3rd year students the campaign of the struggle against cosmopolitism [16] began. I remember a meeting of our faculty attended by second secretary of the town committee of the Communist Party. Galia Golota that was at the front near Sevastopol took the floor and said: ‘Bortnik has just told me to vote for the resolution of the Party or I would be expelled from the Institute.’ We, veterans of the war did speak our mind regardless of the party politics. At the meeting we argued and talked a lot, but, alas, professors Zeiliger and Zametchik were fired from the Institute.
I graduated from the Institute in 1951. I got a job assignment at the design department in Nikolaev. I went there with my friend Grinberg that lives in Los Angeles now. There was another architect from Kiev working there and the three of us received a 3-room apartment in the main street of the town. I was among developers of the design for the Palace of Shipbuilders, a cinema theater and few residential buildings.
My wife was born in Odessa in 1925. She graduated from secondary school. She was a photographer when we met, but later I helped her to get a job at a design institute where she was a registrar. She worked there until she retired.
Both of our sons were raised the way all Soviet children were at the time. We taught them to love their family, and to be honest and industrious people. They got their share of the communist ideas in school. There was no religious influence from their grandparents on any side. They had both Jewish and non-Jewish friends and they never noticed any difference. I do not recall that they ever experiences any anti-Semitism in school.
Robert finished Navy School and sailed on ships as electrician. He was married to a Jew, but they had no children. Robert died of a heart attack at the age of 36, in 1982. Alexandr entered the Faculty of Sanitary Engineering at the Odessa Construction Institute. He studied 3 years there and then worked as a foreman at a construction site.
In 1952 during the period of the Doctors’ Plot [17] I didn’t believe the official propaganda any longer. I had become disillusioned back when I saw the struggle against the cosmopolites in my own institute. I don’t think many people believed Stalin during that period. Persecutions didn’t touch our family – there were no doctors, but this was an anti-Semitic campaign that made establishment of the Jewish state in 1948 even more important. During the war I was aware of the anti-Semitic attitude towards the Jews both within the USSR and in other countries. So, when the country that defeated fascism declared anti-Semitism as its state policy it was like a blow for me. Israel is like the promised land for me. This is the land of Jews. I am an atheist and I wasn’t raised religious, but I’ve read the Bible. During the Soviet period I took an interest in the history of Judaism since I wished I could understand where the roots of anti-Semitism grew from.
I took Stalin’s death in 1953 easy. I don’t wish evil to anyone, but here I was glad that he died. All I was concerned about was what was going to happen next. But I was fully engaged in my professional activities and had nothing to do with politics.
In the summer of 1953 I returned to Odessa and got a job at Giprograd [State Institute of Town Planning]. I was an architect and then chief project architect. On 17 August 2003 it will be 50th anniversary of my work at this organization. Forty five years I was Chief architect of the project. I’ve designed many buildings in Odessa. I worked at the department of industrial planning for ten years. I designed hydrolysis factories in Belgorod-Dnestrovsk, Svaliava [Zakarpathiye region], Zaporozhiye, tyre repair plant in Odessa. I also designed residential buildings. I worked with nice intellectual people. There were a number of Jews among us but there was no ‘Jewish question’, we valued each other for their professional qualities. Somewhere in 1960 I took part in development of design for a school building in Illichevsk. [Illichevsk is a port on the Black Sea in 25 km from Odessa, which became a town in 1973.] This school was a beginning of my career as chief of general development of Illichevsk.
In 2000 the director of Giprograd called me for a meeting with the representatives of the association of the former inmates of concentration camps and the ghettos of the Odessa region. He was not Jewish but he knew that I was and realized that the subject was a concern to me. They offered me to take part in a very interesting project: the development of the design for a memorial complex dedicated to the Jews who perished in Odessa in the course of its history: the victims of pogroms and the victims of the Holocaust. It was to be installed in the former place of the 2nd Jewish cemetery, which was removed back in the 1960s. I gave my consent and began to work. There already was a memorial to victims of 1905 pogroms at the cemetery when about 400 Jews perished: women, elderly people and children. 14 granite slabs were on this common grave. There were names of over thirty people on each slab. There are missing names as well. When the cemetery was to be removed the town architect inscribed numbers on these slabs and they were transported to Jewish cemetery in Slobodka. They are still there – many of them were stolen or decayed, but there are quite a few left. I did my land survey and did some additional work about granite. The memorial based on my projects shall be erected in its place. Minkus, a well-known architect from Odessa, developed a project for this memorial and I took part in the development. We followed the design of Minkus for two portals and the temple wall and my design was based on an old photograph. During the Great Patriotic War about two hundred thousand Jews perished in Odessa and Odessa region. The second memorial of the Memorial Complex shall be dedicated to the victims of Holocaust. There will be the monument called ‘The Righteous Woman Among the Nations’ holding a Jewish baby in the kippah. [The Righteous Among the Nations were the non-Jews who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.] I spend all my time doing this very interesting work. Public Jewish organizations and mayor’s office provide all necessary assistance to us. My work with the Jewish Memorial is very important for the Jewish community in Odessa.
Bertha Isayeva
She lived in an old house in Odessa in 114, Bazarnaya Street. There was a terrible staircase to her apartment on the second floor. I remember a common kitchen, therefore, it must have been a communal apartment [6]. I don’t remember her furnishings: just a table, a chair, a bed and a cupboard. I only remember that it was a light room.
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Before WW2
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She wore a thin glaze cotton dress. It was an electric blue dress with slight white stripes. Wearing this dress and a hat, with her hair gray, she looked as proud as a queen.
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Before WW2
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From what my father said my grandmother Doba owned a grocery store before the October revolution [5].
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Before WW2
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Therefore, my grandfather was a wealthy man.
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Before WW2
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However, I doubt it since two older sons of my grandfather Yoina studied in Germany.
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Before WW2
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In my father’s birth certificate my grandfather was called a townsman from Bendery. I read in my father’s autobiography that my grandfather was a loader.
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Before WW2
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My mother didn’t have any dowry: she came from a poor family.
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Before WW2
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I don’t know how she was growing up or whether she got any education. I don’t know anything about her childhood or youth.
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Before WW2
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Fania’s daughter Henrietta finished the Piano faculty in Odessa Conservatory. She didn’t go to work being very ill.
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After WW2
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Now Lyonia and his family live in Germany.
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After WW2
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Then he got married and went to work at a plant.
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After WW2
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