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DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Leah Feldman. Full, unedited interview, 2007 ID EST008.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4833n25t ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 12 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 1/12 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Leah Feldman. Full, unedited interview, 2007 ID EST008.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4833n25t ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION —Today is October 28, 2007. We’re in the city of Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. We’re meeting with a woman who took part in the Great Patriotic War. Please tell us your name, how you spent your childhood, what your family was like as you grew up, and what school you went to. Also, please tell us what you were doing when the war began and how you spent the war years. Go ahead. I’m Leah Iosifovna Feldman. I was born on March 30, 1926. I’m from the Urals. From the city of Shadrinsk. My whole life and childhood before the war were spent in the Urals. My parents were students when I was born. After my dad graduated from Moscow State Medical University, he was assigned to the city of Nizhny Tagil in the Urals. That’s where I spent my elementary school years in the seven-grade school. On March 9, 1938, my father was called in to the NKVD and arrested. I never saw my father again. Some time later, my father was shot. They didn’t give us the details, and for many years, we didn’t know where my father was buried. We learned where he was buried only after Stalin died. At first, they said that he had died in exile in ‘42, but in fact—I learned this only in ‘89—he was shot outside Sverdlovsk [Yekaterinburg]. They [couldn’t] show me the place, because people were shot in several places around there. Now it's part of the greater Sverdlovsk area. My mother worked her whole life as a nurse. She never graduated from the institute because I was born. She died in Sverdlovsk in 1975. A year before the war started, I was accepted into the communications school in Sverdlovsk. Having completed the first year of study, I arrived in Nizhny Tagil on June 21, 1941. And the next day, the war began. I never went back to the communiations school, because after some time, I received a notice that I was to enter a trade school to learn a worker’s profession because the majority of people had begun being drafted into the army. People who were almost children, like me, had to work. For several months we were trained on semiautomatic devices and lathes. Then they sent us to the factory. I worked in Nizhny Tagil at an aircraft factory in the chassis workshop. I spun and turned the lathe handles at the semiautomatic device. Then they started driving the Germans away from Moscow. I was too young. I wanted to join the army. In our family, my parents had two sons. They were twins, Iura and Lyova, but they were still very little. They wouldn’t have accepted me into the army, either, but my three friends and I decided to join the army, regardless. Since we were working at a military factory, they wouldn’t let us leave it for the army. They said that we had to work at the factory. But we really wanted to, and all the more because I had no one at the front. And my three friends and I found out . oh, we had already been sent to work in Moscow at that time, and we were working at the factory across from the Dinamo Stadium and the Dinamo subway station. The factory where Chkalov had worked before the war as a test pilot. We found out that the military commissariat of the Leningrad [St. Petersburg] regional military commissariat did not have enough female personnel for the army. And we decided to go there. He took us with pleasure, and added two years to my age. I became nearly eighteen. He did the same for another girl. Two 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 2/12 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Leah Feldman. Full, unedited interview, 2007 ID EST008.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4833n25t ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN of us already were eighteen. Only three of us came back from the war. One of us, Nina, was killed at the front. I was wounded. My two friends went back to the Urals. When we were accepted into the army, we were privates at first. But [the army] needed signalwomen. As we knew, they only drafted those who were designated as medics on their cards for the war. So we were volunteers. We spent three days in transit to the area that had been liberated . I forget what oblast it was. It was near Belorussia [Belarus]. —What year was that? That was ‘43. I had to be at the front for two winters. We all ended up in the infantry. There was a saying that went “Mother-infantry has walked 40 versts and is ready for more.” And we walked on foot for the entire war at the 2nd Belorussian Front. Rokossovsky was our commander. We had to walk through Belorussia. Our division got the name “Mogilev” for its participation in the liberation of Mogilev. Then they started giving names to divisions. And so, we went forward. We weren't involved in the taking of Minsk. We passed by Minsk to the north. Then we ended up in Poland. I was wounded for the first time at the Narev River. There’s a river with that name. And the city Bryansk. —That’s before Poland? Yes. I was wounded in the arm there during a river crossing. I probably would have drowned. I didn’t know how to swim. But some soldier saved me. I didn’t want to go to the field hospital. They bandaged my arm, and I kept going, along with the others. We went through Poland, almost up to the border of East Prussia. Then we went to the Baltic Sea, and I was wounded in the head in the city of Gdańsk. That time, I had to go into the field hospital. But everything started healing well, and when they came from the front lines to pick up the soldiers who had gotten well, we also got into the vehicle and went [with them]. I found my unit, which was approaching Germany. I didn’t end up going into Berlin. We passed to the north of it, and on May 3 we met with the Allies. We hugged and kissed. For us, the war was already over. We went to Berlin as tourists, to see what was left of Berlin. On May 9, I was manning the telephone [lines]. My training was as a radio and telephone operator. Whatever the commander said. During battles, I worked at the radio transmitter, and during my shifts, I was at the telephone lines. On May 9, I was manning the telephone at night. The phone rang. It was a message from the highest levels of command that the war had ended. [I was told to] wake up the commander and tell him that the war had ended. That’s how the war ended for us. Some time later, the discharges began, and they offered to have me stay to work at headquarters. [They said I could] sit at a typewriter and learn to type. I wrote to my mother to ask what she thought. She replied that she really wanted to see me, but said that if [by staying] I would get professional training, and if I liked it there, I should stay for a while, but come home when I could get leave. They let me go on leave, I went [home to see my mom], and until ‘47, I worked at headquarters as a typist. Then I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I wanted to go home and go to dances. We didn’t fraternize with the locals. When I put on civilian clothes, people called me “Fraulein.” I didn’t like that, and I went back to Russia. Since then . yes, 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 3/12 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Leah Feldman. Full, unedited interview, 2007 ID EST008.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4833n25t ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN I lived for a while in the Urals and worked at a factory where they processed base metals. But then we found out that a new factory for base metals was being built near Moscow, and people were being recruited for it. I went there [to work], and worked there for the rest of my working life, until ‘85, as a typist. That was the end of my working life. —You learned in ‘38 that your father had been shot? No, I found that out when I lived in Tallin. My son and his wife went to a cousin’s wedding in Sverdlovsk. I decided to write to the public prosecution office. [My son] Iura went on the first day, and the district attorney spoke to him and sent him to the Archive of the NKVD. They handed him a rather thick folder. On the first page was a denunciation of my father. He had worked as a doctor in a railroad clinic. He was the only man there and the only person with a higher education.

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