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Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT

ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 11

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Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION —Today is April 27th, 2009. We are in Detroit, meeting a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your childhood, your schooling, and the family you grew up in. How did you come to serve in the Red Army, and what was the war like for you?

My name is Yuri Dubovitsky and I was born in Pryluky, Chernihiv Region in 1923. My parents, grandparents, and I lived there until 1929 when we moved to Simferopol in the Crimean ASSR, as it was called before the war. In 1930 I started first grade at Simferopol High School No.14. On June 18th, 1941 I passed the state exams and finished tenth grade.

As you know, the Great Patriotic War began on June 22nd. All of my plans for continuing my education were indefinitely put on hold. I dreamed of studying at the Dzerzhinsky Leningrad Technical Academy, but the war cancelled all of our plans. When the war began my father, a Party member, joined a Communist battalion and stayed in Simferopol, if you can imagine. He was not allowed to leave. My mother and I were evacuated to Kharkiv and could not return. We thought that the war would be over quickly and that we would soon return home to Simferopol. My cousin and her husband found space for us in a convoy of trucks that was heading east. We reached Tambov and were supposed to continue on to Toshkent. When we arrived in Toshkent in November 1941 we received one telegram from my father; he wrote to our friends, asking if we had reached Toshkent safely.

We could not register in Tashkent because the evacuee registration window had already closed by the time we arrived, so we had to move to Fergana in the Uzbek Republic. We did not spend a long time in Fergana because in February 1942 many of my classmates from School No.14, who had also evacuated to Fergana, were drafted into the army since they were born in the first half of 1922. I was not drafted since I was born in November, but I decided to volunteer for the front at the draft office. I was sent to the Toshkent Mortar and Machinegun School. I trained there for six months and then took my military and political tests during the month of July.

One night in August we received an order from Stalin to send all 3,500 trainees from our school to the front. We had already passed our exams and were supposed to become either junior lieutenants or lieutenants, but we were not assigned these ranks. Overnight we were all issued uniforms and sent to the station of Akhtuba in the Stalingrad Region. This is how I came to the Stalingrad Front.

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Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

I was trained as a machine gunner and was first assigned to a machinegun company. We had two companies, a machinegun one and a mortar one. I was initially in the machinegun company, but was retrained on location and learned to use an anti-tank rifle. It was only effective against light tanks and could pierce the armor on the heavier ones.

The anti-tank rifles could not pierce the German armor. I was assigned to an anti-tank unit and spent August-January there. We were stationed on the approaches to Stalingrad and stopped the Germans, Hungarians, and Romanians from taking the city. We protected the Stalingrad Tractor Factory for several months. In December Marshall of the Soviet Union Konstantin Rokossovsky ordered us to send the Germans, Romanians, and Hungarians a New Year’s greeting. It was an unforgettable sight. We fired all our weapons into the air, not at the German positions, and the sky lit up as if it were daytime.

Once we pushed the Germans away from the factory near the station of Beketovka, it was our regiment’s turn to go on the offensive. We traded our anti-tank rifles for submachine guns and were ordered forward, “For the Motherland and for Stalin” as we used to say. We advanced on a German lodgement. Our advance was halted by an artillery battery which was set up in a building and fired onto the street, preventing our infantry and light artillery from breaking through. We were ordered to destroy this German fortification. We burst into the house with our submachineguns and grenades and began figuring out from where enemy was shooting at us… It was dark and he threw two grenades. One blew up behind us and the other exploded on the staircase landing. My right arm was wounded by shrapnel from one of the grenades. A comrade helped me descend the staircase and reach our nurse, who was hidden behind the building to protect her from stray bullets and shells. She bandaged my hand. Then our commander came up to me and said “Yuri, you will now carry two submachineguns, a Soviet and a German one and go down to the river. If you manage to cross the Volga, you will be safe. Tracers were constantly flying above the Volga and the surrounding hills.

I bid him goodbye as he carefully helped me reach the riverbank… It was January 1943 and the cold was intense, down to -50 Celsius. I was dressed in a trench coat, a cotton jacket, and boots. My feet were frostbitten and I barely managed to cross to the other bank. However, I did not walk on the ice, but rather on frozen bodies. There were dead bodies… of our troops, Hungarians, Romanians, and Germans, with carts of wounded men driving over them. It was an awful sight. Even though my feet were frostbitten I managed to cross the frozen Volga. I reached an armored brigade and they took me to a first aid station which was set up in a trailer and manned by a male nurse. He asked me what had happened to my hand and I explained as well as I could. He cut open my trench coat and my cotton jacket before injecting me with Bohomolets Serum, which saved my hand from amputation. He was older than me and said “Well sonny, now get to the field hospital if you can.”

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Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

I set out on unfamiliar snow-covered roads, but nonetheless managed to find the field hospital. The hospital was mostly for soldiers who had been hit in the leg or the abdomen. It was a grizzly sight and it is difficult to think about it even now. I managed to convince a sleigh driver who shipped coal to and from the station to help me board a medical train bound for Saratov. I said to him “Brother, please help me get to the station.” He took a liking to me and even helped lift me into the train. Soon the train car was loaded with other wounded men and I was registered as one of them and was issued a ration card.

It took us two or three days to reach Saratov, where we were housed in the Pioneer Palace. There was a sort of… hospital there. I had to share a bed with another soldier because there were so many wounded men coming in, mostly from the Stalingrad Front.

—You faced different directions on the bed.

Yes, you are correct. I was to have surgery, but then the Germans launched an air raid on Saratov and the surgery was cancelled. I was in poor shape and began developing a high fever. The doctors decided to send me and other soldiers who needed surgery to the town of Verkhnyaya Salda in the Sverdlovsk Region. We were brought there and assigned to Hospital 1845, I even remember its number. It was a Moscow-based hospital, but they did not have a neurosurgeon. I had to have surgery on my hand where the nerves in my fingers ran very close to the many pieces of shrapnel embedded in my wrist.

Two other wounded soldiers and I were sent to Tomsk by airplane. Our hospital had found a neurosurgeon there by the name of Professor Markuze. I still remember his name. The surgery took three and a half hours. I slept for seven days straight because the Novocain they gave me for the pain put me under. I gradually started to come to and when my wound healed up a bit I decided to find my mother. I traveled from Saratov to Novosibirsk in order to catch a train to Central Asia. I thought that I would find her in Toshkent or Fergana. I began asking the station staff in Novosibirsk if they had seen any evacuees from Simferopol.

—In Novosibirsk?

Yes. I was there in order to catch a train to Toshkent. I was told that many refugees from Simferopol were in Fergana, so I traveled there. I knew that I could find evacuees at the local market and sure enough, I found some people I knew from home. My friend Sima Orlova, whom I knew from Simferopol, told me that my mother was indeed in Fergana.

They did not bring me to my mother immediately because they did not want to shock her, but instead

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Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN began preparing her to see me. She had visited a gypsy who told her that a loved one would be arriving soon, but that he was wounded. She had been waiting for me the whole time. When she was ready to meet me I walked in, but only saw an Uzbek woman cooking on a clay stove. Then the door opened and my mother exclaimed “Yura!” You can imagine our reunion. We were in Fergana for a year until 1944. Kharkiv was liberated on August 23rd, 1943 and my sister discovered that we were in Fergana. She sent us an invitation, which was necessary to travel to Kharkiv then. In 1944 my mother and I moved to Kharkiv.

I went to work at the Malyshev Factory. It is a factory that produced military hardware and some of my father’s friends were working there. We were issued a room in a communal flat and I was given a job as a forwarder at the cafeteria since I had no specialized trade. I worked there for two years before someone noticed my artwork at the Metallist Palace of Culture. I was nominated to serve as the factory’s deputy Komsomol organizer. I worked in that capacity for four years before being offered another position. I graduated from the Cultural Enlightenment Department at the Institute of Culture in 1950. The work was interesting, but also very difficult. Kharkiv was recovering from the damage that the Germans had done during the war. I found work as the chief of cultural events at the factory trade union committee.

I married in 1949 and we had our son in 1952. My wife was a music teacher at a preschool. I went to work in manufacturing in order to help support our family. I completed supply warehouse management training at the Kharkiv Institute of Economics and worked as a building material supply manager. I was an active amateur artist and even had two exhibits of my work in Kyiv. I also took part in a production of The Free Wind at the Matallist Palace of Culture.

After working at the Malyshev Factory, I was invited to work at a firm which builds power plants. I was the head of the supply department. I worked there for 12 years before retiring. Disabled veterans are allowed to retire at 55, so I worked until 1988 when I retired and started helping out around the house. My son completed 10 years of school and then got a good education at the Physics Department of the Polytechnic Institute. However, he did not have the opportunity to work as an engineer because in those years work at a table with blueprints was not valued. Instead he was sent to oversee construction at kolkhozes and other construction sites. He took part in building the metro system. In 1994 we submitted a complete application to immigrate and in 1994 we arrived in this wonderful land, America. We received a warm welcome and have been here for 15 years. My son works for Ford as an engineer where he oversees steering and brake system development. His supervisors respect him and we are proud of him. All of our needs are taken care of and the doctors take good care of us. We can only be grateful. When we came here Clinton was President, but then we had to live through eight years of Bush. Now America has an unsurpassable President in Obama. We voted for him and we trust him. He is a talented man who will make America the best in the world again.

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Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

That is all I can say about myself. At the front I was just a private, I was not an officer.

— Please tell us about you Order of Glory...

The Order of Glory was issued to six of us for capturing a German soldier. This soldier was a senior lieutenant and had memos and maps that we needed in order to break through the German lines at a particular section of the front. We were given these awards personally by Marshall Rokossovsky.

—How did you capture him?

We snuck up to a dugout where the fascist HQ was located at night. We took up positions in a way that covered the dugout from all sides and waited for the senior lieutenant to come out and answer the call of nature. When he emerged I jumped out along with another guy and we put a bag over his head and gagged him with a rope. We dragged him to our positions. We gave him a good licking before sending him on to the security services. The mission was over quickly, but it had been a very dangerous one. If anyone in the dugout had sounded an alarm we would have all been shot. For this mission all six of us were awarded the Order of Glory 3rd Class.

—These six people were Russians, Ukrainian, Kazakhs...

Let me think. There were two other Jews there including me, as well as a Tatar, two Russians, and an Uzbek.

—At that point you probably did not care much about people’s ethnicity.

There was none of that in the army; we trusted one another completely.

—You have three Order of the Patriotic War medals, this is quite rare.

I received the 2nd Class one after a general order by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet and disabled veterans also got a 1st Class one. One of the medals I received for combat achievements, but I gave away the documentation at a meeting with tenth grade students in Simferopol. I was asked to bring some documents, but I did not have any pictures because we were in the trenches the entire time, even in the winter. We had a man in our platoon who wrote down how many tanks we destroyed. I had six light tanks to my name and was awarded with the Order of the Patriotic War 2nd Class. The last Order of the Patriotic War was awarded to me in Kharkiv for breaking the enemy lines near the tractor factory in Stalingrad. This was when we picked up our submachine guns and broke through the enemy lines. I received after the archives proved that I took part in that mission. I also have a For Combat Merits award. This was for

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Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN destroying a German bunker.

I was given an objective and two anti-tank grenades, so I destroyed the bunker. The bunker had been covering an entire street in the city. For my actions I was awarded the For Combat Merits medal.

—Could you please tell us what average day was like? We often hear about Stalingrad and the Battle of Kursk… but what was an average day at the front like?

We were in bunkers by our cannons. We never exited the bunker unless we really had to.

—What was the bunker like?

A bunker is a shelter which is bulletproof. It is dug into the earth. We were always on guard and took turns sleeping. We always kept an eye out for what was going on around us. One time there was an attempt to supply us with food, but a sniper killed the guy who was meant to bring us the food. We were left without food, but lucked out because a field kitchen had been hit by a shell nearby and one of the horses had been killed. We would go down to the horse every morning before the sun came up and chop off a piece of meat. We would bring it back, make a fire out of the used ammunition crates, and eat hot horsemeat. It did not go bad in the Cold. We ate this for several days before we were resupplied. Of course now it is difficult to remember those times when we all thought that we would be killed, but we made it out…

Stalingrad consisted of a series of rings, each controlled by the Germans, the Romanians, Hungarians, and our forces. We broke through those rings. The wound I told you about was the third one I received. One time a piece of shrapnel hit me in the neck, but missed the bone. Another time my leg was injured. It was only after my third wound that I became Disabled Group II. In Stalingrad it was light both in the evening at night from the shells, bombs, and flares. It was a horrendous meat grinder. I am lucky to be alive.

—Did you... suffer from nightmares…

When I was on the hospital train I kept waking up and feeling myself over to see if I was still alive. This kind of crazed state continued for several years until I got used to being alive again. Statistically speaking, 1 of 100 privates survived Stalingrad. It was a terrible battle.

—What happened to your father?

My father was drafted into a Communist battalion. Crimea was inhabited mostly by Crimean Tatars. My

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Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN father was drafted into this battalion… what came of him? I returned in 1945 to find out because we had not heard anything. One of his coworkers mentioned that she saw him in Simferopol with a yellow star on his chest. I do not know anything about him, only that he died with the rest of the battalion after being betrayed by the Tatars. They were buried with honors in a mass grave in Simferopol. Their grave is on Karl Liebknecht Square and my father’s name, Boris Davydovich Dubovitsky is inscribed there.

—How did you find out that the Tatars betrayed him?

People who knew told me this. The Tatars wanted the Germans to get through Syvash, but when they reached it, they had to overcome Soviet resistance at a fortified district in Perekop. They say that it was the Tatars that told the Germans how to bypass Perekop. That is how they got in. I found out that the Tatars had betrayed us and that my father died as a result. I was not able to find any details, but I do not think that it is necessary.

—What was your artwork like?

I sang Soviet songs. I want to tell you a story. When I came back to Kharkiv there was a women’s meeting on June 1st1944 at the Palace of Culture. I was walking along Plekhanivska Street and decided to come in. I walked up to the second floor and the pianist stopped me and said “Young man, what do you want…” I said that I could sing a bit… I had learned two songs from a man at a train station over a bottle of wine. They were “Bring Me a Parcel to My Dugout” and “Dark Night.” The later was performed in the film “The Two Soldiers” by my relative Mark Bernes.

—Your relative?

He is a cousin once removed. His mother Fanya Filippovna and my father are cousins. They also lived on Drahomanivska Street along with my parents and grandparents. I said that I knew these two songs and that I could perform them at the meeting. They immediately found an accompaniment and I performed right in my military uniform in 1944. The war was still raging because Kharkiv had been liberated on August 23rd, 1943. You can imagine how the audience responded…. I could hear crying during my rendition of “Dark Night.” There was nobody that could remain unmoved by that melody and those words. I was then invited back as an amateur singer and took part in shows and operettas. I played a little piano before the war, but after my wound I could no longer play.

—Did you sing in the bunker at all?

No, that is not possible, there is no time to sing there.

What was the mood like? Did you talk about anything other than...

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Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

We were surrounded by a nightmare… We were focused on stopping the enemy from taking the territory that we were holding. There was not much conversation there. We did joke, but I do not recall what we joked about. We supported one another, but there was no singing.

—Is “Dark Night” your favorite song?

Yes. I want to organize a Mark Bernes memorial event at the Jewish center and perform a few songs like “Dark Night” and “Cranes.”

—Could you please sing a few lines from a song?

His song?

—Your favorite.

Sings:

(Dark Night [from the movie "Two Warriors"

Dark night, only bullets are whistling in the steppe,

Only the wind is wailing through the telephone wires, stars are faintly flickering...

In the dark night, my love, I know you are not sleeping,

And, near a child's crib, you secretly wipe away a tear.

How I love the depths of your gentle eyes,

How I long to press my lips to them!

This dark night separates us, my love,

And the dark, troubled steppe has come to lie between us.

I have faith in you, in you, my sweetheart.

That faith has shielded me from bullets in this dark night...

Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

I am glad, I am calm in deadly battle:

I know you will meet me with love, no matter what happens.

Death is not terrible, we've met with it more than once in the steppe...

And here it looms over me once again,

You await my return, sitting sleepless near a cradle,

And so I know that nothing will happen to me! )

—Thank you for keeping us alive.

Thank you, I am very grateful to you.

Yuriy Dubovitsky. Full, unedited interview, 2009

ID MI002.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47z63

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

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