When the Great Patriotic War began grandmother and younger children tried to escape from Riga. Grandmother was ill and they carried her on a stretcher. She begged her children to leave her in Riga and escape while it was possible to escape, but they couldn’t leave her. They all perished. I don’t know any details: I got all this information from their neighbors when I visited Riga.
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Displaying 46981 - 47010 of 50826 results
Tsylia Liatun
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Aunt Nadia, her husband and their five children perished in the ghetto in Riga.
When fascists were not far from Riga grandmother Rosa, aunt Slava, her husband and son, uncle Izia and Frida and her husband tried to escape, but were killed by Germans.
My father Mendel-Leib Kats, born in 1889, was the oldest child in the family. When grandfather died my father was 12. He realized there was nobody, but himself he could rely upon. Around 1901 he left Lithuania for Riga where he became a courier in a haberdashery store. He had no profession, but he had a good conduct of German and could read and write well. His master liked him a lot. Father was honest and hardworking and soon became a trade agent traded with haberdashery. He traveled in the country executing trade deals. He also studied at the Russian grammar school. He finished grammar school by passing exams without attending classes. He was eager to start his own business, but he could only dream about it since he had no money. He even found a small store in the center of Riga that he liked. He showed it to us later. He went to walk past this store pretending he was an owner, but there was a long way to go before he could become an owner. My father worked and sent his mother some money to support her.
Father met my mother in 1912. They started seeing each other, when in 1914 World War I began and my father was recruited to the army. My father didn’t like to talk about his service in the army that lasted 7 years [Because of World War I, October Revolution 2 and Civil War 3]. But thank God, the war was over and he returned home around 1921.
My father talked with my mother’s father Shymon and they appointed the day of their wedding. My parents had a traditional wedding with a chuppah in 1921, but there was no wedding party since they were so poor that they couldn’t afford one. My father was 32 and my mother was 34 when they got married.
We lived in a beautiful 5-room apartment with a bay window. We had a big dining room with carved furniture. Chests of drawers and cupboards were decorated with beautiful carvings. There was a big roundtable and 12 chairs there. There was also a big living room and an expensive German grand piano that my sister played on it. There were two children’s rooms: one my sister’s and one mine, and our parents’ bedroom. There were many beautiful things at home. There were few pictures. Father bought only originals that were way too expensive. I remember one picture. It was ‘Appassionato’ hanging above the piano in the living room. I don’t know its painter, but I liked it tremendously. There were polished parquet floors in all rooms. We had two housemaids. At first, Julia, she got married and left. And after Julia was Manya. Manya was my mother’s classmate in grammar school. They were close friends and Manya was almost one of us. She was strict and my sister and I obeyed her even more than our parents. She spoke Russian to us and I learned Russian from her.
We had a traditional family that observed all covenants of the Torah. We only bought kosher food and had kosher dishes and utensils. Our housemaid Manya watched that kashrut was strictly observed in our house, although she was a Russian woman. She told us off if we mixed dishes for meat and dairy products. Poultry and meat was purchased in special Jewish stores. We had a Torah, tallit and siddurim at home. All accessories for Sabbath were silver. We had beautiful dishes for Pesach that were kept on the attic. Before Pesach there was a major clean up of the house. We gave away all bread products left to other, non-Jewish people. There was not a single breadcrumb at home during Pesach. There was matzah and a matzah cake made at Pesach. My father made special wine. There were delicious dumplings that I make nowadays, too. Mother and Manya made Gefilte fish. My father put on his tallit on big holidays and went to pray at the synagogue. All big holidays we celebrated at home and all our relatives came to us while my father was the richest among them. We spoke Yiddish in the family and said prayers in Hebrew. My sister and I had our small siddurim. Our friends were children from a Jewish school. We spoke Yiddish with them and they were allowed to visit us at home. We spoke Yiddish in public places as well, although it wasn’t quite common in Latvia. Letts are anti-Semitic, I believe, but since they are so reserved I never heard any abusive comments addressed to Jews.
In 1930 I went to the same school that my older sister studied at. This was a Jewish state school for girls. There were 40 pupils in a class. The subjects were taught in German. We studied Latin, English, French and Hebrew. At our religious classes we studied traditions and history of the Jewish people. We also studied prayers. Every morning we said a prayer in Hebrew and then sang the anthem of Latvia.
In 1934 I became a member of ‘Betar’ – an organization for Jewish boys and girls that studied Hebrew, history of Palestine. We dreamed about going to the Promised land to build the state of Israel. We sang songs in Hebrew. We had blue and white uniforms and spent vacations in camps at the Baltic seashore. After the Soviet troops came to Latvia 5 father burned my Betar uniform [in the USSR all Jewish organization were forbidden].
Lidia Lieberman
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Grandfather Yakov had a small business of some kind. He had a good conduct of accounting. My grandfather told me that in Zvenigorodka they had a small house and an orchard.
I remember grandfather Yakov well: he was a round-faced man of average height. He had thick dark hair with streaks of gold and a small beard. He wasn’t religious. I don’t remember him praying at home. He wore plain clothes like other men of his age in Odessa. Grandfather Yakov had fluent Yiddish, Ukrainian and Russian.
My father Moisey Lieberman was born in Zvenigorodka, Kiev province, in 1893. He finished the Commercial College in Kiev in the 1910s and became an accountant. He worked as an accountant for his father in Zvenigorodka.
All I know about his relatives is, that my grandfather’s brother David Ostrovski and his wife and their son lived in Zhytomir. During the Great Patriotic War David couldn’t evacuate since his wife was paralyzed. During the war they were in the ghetto in Zhmerinka. David was a very religious man. He was one of the leaders in the Jewish community. The community collected money that they paid Romanians for permission to go out of the ghetto. When the front line was coming close to Zhmerinka a Romanian acquaintance informed David that Germans were going to liquidate the ghetto. When inmates heard the car engines in the morning they thought those were Germans coming, but they happened to be Russian troops that broke through the front line and came to liberate Jews from the ghetto.
Grandfather Shama lived in Shpola. [Shpola is in Zvenigorodka district, Kiev province. According to the census of 1897 the population of Shpola constituted 11,933 residents; 5,388 of them were Jews. In 1905 there was a charity society, an almshouse, 4 prayer houses and a big synagogue. In 1910 there was a Talmud-Torah and private Jewish schools for boys and girls.] My grandfather owned a small feather pillow and mattress factory. There were few employees working for him. Grandfather’s family was wealthy. They lived in a house with a garden. My grandfather wanted to give education to his children.
Grandfather Shama died of a lung disease in 1947. He bequeathed his religious accessories to the synagogue: a tallit, a tefillin and probably something else. I don’t know the details. For this grandmother Surah was granted a seat of her own at the synagogue. My grandfather was buried at the Jewish cemetery in takhrikhim (cerements) according to Jewish traditions. His old friend recited prayers in our house through the night.
Grandmother Surah was a wonderful housewife. She was an excellent cook. I liked hamantashen with poppy seed filling and fludn [pies with nuts and jam]. On Friday evenings grandmother always lit candles. They observed kashrut in the family. Grandmother Surah and grandfather Shama observed Pesach. I remember a big dish in the center of the table, a decanter and special wine glasses around it. Wine was poured in glasses and matzah put on a linen towel. My cousin sister Asia or I were to steal a piece of matzah so that nobody saw us. Of course, they just pretended they didn’t see us. I was always shy and so was Asia and we kept pushing each other to avoid doing it. There was a chicken bone, horseradish, a carrot or beetroot and something else – I don’t quite remember. Matzah was to be dipped in wine. Adults had to drink four glasses of wine. I also remember that the door was left open for Elijah the prophet to come into the house.
My parents got married in Moscow where my father got a job in 1928. They had a Jewish wedding with a chuppah on 6 November, in Moscow. They also had a civil ceremony.
Then we moved to Odessa. We lived in a room in a house on the corner of Malaya Arnautskaya and Soviet army Streets and then we moved into a 3-room apartment in Proviantskaya Street that was later renamed to Astashkin Street. We had two connected rooms with a balcony and one separate room where my paternal grandfather Yakov lived. I liked to come to my grandfather’s room and look at his desk. My father was an accountant. My mother was a housewife.
My parents observed some of Jewish traditions. They always observed the Day of Atonement [Yom Kippur] and fasted every year. On Friday evenings my mother made delicious dinner and lit candles. At Pesach we used fancy crockery. Mother cooked gefilte fish and cooked dishes made of matzah. We often visited my mother’s parents on high holidays. Grandfather Yakov went there with us. We spoke Russian at home. Only my father and grandfather spoke Yiddish sometimes. At that time Yiddish was called a ‘jargon’.
I liked going to parades with my father on October Revolution Day 4 and 1 of May. He bought me a balloon and a small flag on such occasions.
There were no members of the Party in our family and arrests in 1937 [during the Great Terror] 5 had no impact on us.
In 1937 I went to school # 35 in Komsomolskaya Street. I finished elementary school before the war. I only had excellent marks at school. I became a young Octobrist 6.
When the Great Patriotic War began my father went to the army. We accompanied him to the gathering point in the yard of the Water Engineering College on 25 July 1941. My father didn’t think we needed to evacuate. He said there was nothing for us to fear while if we left home we might not be able to get food on the way – everything was expensive and we might die.
My mother’s younger brother Pyotr Ostrovski – he was a military – was packing for his family and his brother Michael’s family to evacuate to Tajikistan where his wife’s relatives lived. Uncle Michael said ‘If we leave and Vera (my mother) and her daughter stay, we shall be responsible for their deaths. Go take them here’. Therefore, the issue of our evacuation was resolved. I remember this day in late August. In the morning grandfather Yakov went to see his older daughter Raisa. I was playing with my friend Rita when uncle Pyotr wearing a hard hat and a military uniform took me by my hand and we went upstairs quickly. My mother had packed two bags: one with winter clothes and another one with summer clothing. She had kept these bags to save some belongings in case of fire emergency. Uncle Pyotr picked the bags, took me by my hand and with my mother we went downstairs, where a truck was waiting for us at the front door. There were other families in the body of the truck. The truck drove us to the harbor where we boarded a ship. In the last minute one family changed their mind and got off the boat. They happened to take our bag with winter clothes by mistake. Later they gave this bag to uncle Pyotr and he took it to our apartment. My mother and I needed those clothes so badly in evacuation. Our boat headed to Novorossiysk, but since there was bombing or something else, we got off either in Nikolaev or Kherson – I can’t remember.
We arrived in Stalinabad where Pyotr wife Tsylia’s relatives lived. One of them worked at the Central Committee of the Party in Tajikistan. They met us, gave us hot water to wash and accommodated us in a room in a kindergarten. Pyotr’s wife Tsylia became a teacher in the kindergarten. She was a young beautiful woman full of life. She designed costumes for Soviet holidays and made preparations for celebration in the kindergarten. My mother went to a military registry office to ask for accommodation. She received a big room in the grain supply office in the center of the town. This was a one-storied building with barred windows. There was a shelf, a table and some other piece of furniture in the room. There was also a part of a hallway that we could occupy. Soon there were 8 of us in this room: my mother and I, my mother’s brother Michael and his wife Tsylia, grandmother Surah and grandfather Shama, Fira my mother’s brother Solomon’s widow, and her daughter Musia.
I went to the 5th form of a Russian school where we also studied the Tajik language. I was good at my studies and got along well with my schoolmates. I had a chore helping one Tajik boy to improve his Russian and he helped me with the Tajik language. I can still remember few Tajik words. I liked the town. Its center resembled Odessa a little. There were mountains covered with snow surrounding the town. There were aryks with cool water even at the temperature of plus 40 degree Celsius. One summer was so hot that the town authorities even issued an order to make a long interval in the afternoon. I saw women wearing a paranja [a fine black grid of horse hair]. I was surprised to see men wearing cotton wool robes and fur hats. The local residents explained that it was the most comfortable outfit for such heat. I also drank green tea for the first time there. Tajiks are very hospitable people. There were many kishlak [Tajik] villages around the town. We often went out of town after school and when we went across the kishlak local residents, they often invited us to a meal. They traditionally invited all travelers to share a meal with. We sat on the floor where they were eating plov with their hands. They teased us when we couldn’t eat with hands. They were mild rainy winters in Stalinabad. We wore ichigi, fine leather boots, and galoshes. Before going inside a house, we left galoshes near the door.
Grandfather Shama wrote a letter to the fur factory in Odessa where he worked before the war and received an invitation to return to Odessa. He went there alone and settled down in his room in a communal apartment. We followed him and moved in with grandfather and grandmother. We celebrated Victory Day [9 May] at home. I went to Deribassovskaya Street [main street in Odessa]. It was a big holiday.
y mother went to work at a haberdashery shop where they manufactured brooches, buttons, clips, etc. She earned 600-700 rubles. I went to study at the 8th form in school for girls #36. In the 9th form I joined Komsomol 7, but I never took an active part in the public life.
After finishing the 9th form my friend Galia, a Jewish girl, and I decided to go to study at the Dentist Faculty in medical school. Galia’s father was regional chief rontgenologist. He explained to me that there was high competition for this faculty and the course of studies was 3 years. He advised me to try the Prosthodontic Faculty. I did and received a diploma of a dental technician. I got a job assignment in Novaya Vorontsovka, Kherson region.