1 Soviet Jewish Oral History Project Western Reserve Historical Society

Soviet Jewish Oral History Project Western Reserve Historical Society Interviewee: Isay Auguston Interviewer: Lisa Powers Date of interview: July 14, 2014 Location of interview: 2020 Taylor Road, Apartment 209, East Cleveland LISA POWERS: Today is July 14th, 2014. I am Lisa Powers and I am here with Isay Auguston in his apartment on Taylor Rd, East Cleveland. Isay, thank you very much for letting me interview you! I want to ask you a few questions so you can share your experience emigrating and adapting to this country. Tell us where you were born, who your parents were, whether you consider yourself Jewish! ISAY AUGUSTON: The fact is, telling someone’s biography and episodes from their lives is very interesting, but I would be happy if my interview helped young people make use of my life’s experience and the unusual paths it’s taken. LP: I understand. So, tell us briefly about your family! IA: My father was a mechanic, my mother, a homemaker. I was the only child in the family. We lived in Riga [Latvia], but I was born in Narva, Estonia, so I also know Estonian. On around June 10th, 1941, right at the start of the war, I went to Young Pioneers [translator’s note: A summer camp for children operated by the Communist Party] camp, which was 60km from Riga. LP: How old were you at the time? IA: Somewhere around 17. I was a camp commander. I had no idea of these things at the time, but there was already the Soviet regime, and they appointed everybody who didn’t steal and was honest. On June 27th, the war started. I was far away and didn’t know about it. The entire camp of 500-600 children was evacuated then by the Central Council of Trade Unions, and I was getting ready to go home, but I couldn’t already —everything was blocked off. I couldn’t return home and didn’t know what was happening with my parents. It was only in 1943, while I was on the front, that I happened to read a message from the Jewish Agency in New York, which said that all of the inhabitants of occupied Latvia were exterminated. I was very crushed, and I did not know what to do, and I decided to take revenge on Germany. But alone, there was not much I could do—the entire army was fighting against them, and even they couldn’t manage. In those same days, I read another notice, which said that the Moscow Institute of Foreign Languages was calling for everyone interested in an education. I decided to take revenge on Germany by not letting them break my will and by continuing my education, in spite of the firefights and whatever else—this was my hobby. I wrote to the Institute, and they politely answered that, if I was demobilized and lived in Moscow, then they would accept me, but nobody was being called back from the front. Then I went to the command of my division and asked for assistance. They wrote that, in the entire division, there wasn’t one person who spoke another language, even German—we were at war with a country and did not know its language. They also guaranteed 1 that nobody [there] would be able to help me with my education. That is how, as an exception, I was given permission to enroll without documents—I didn’t have any of my documents, or knowledge of English. They decided that if a soldier was going to study hard and pass everything, then he would be considered a student, and if not, then they would drop him—they had nothing to lose. Every month, I received a special brochure, which I had to send back immediately within two weeks. There were questions in the brochure, and articles, and after two months, I would have to take an exam. I didn’t have the brochures, I didn’t have a copier, I didn’t have paper, and I didn’t have a dictionary, either, but I had to take the exam. I came to the conclusion that I needed to know everything by heart; there was nothing else to do and nobody to ask. I had to study a lot, which was extremely difficult. They didn’t like foreign languages in the Soviet Union—you were considered a spy if you learned them. I was in the Latvian army, which was half Jews and half Communists. This was a very brave and combative division. We fought near Moscow, and there is a memorial there to this day, and my things are in a local museum, also. After two injuries, they sent me to the Russian region, and I immediately understood that I needed to hide my intelligence, because my entire troop had an education up to 3-4th grade. The troop captain, Firyulev, had only a 5th grade education. He was wonderful at fighting, orienting himself, and was an exceptional shooter. I could not reveal that I studied English, because I would have seemed like an obvious spy to everybody, which would have led to immediate SMERSH [translator’s note: SMERSH is a Russian acronym that stands for “Death to spies” and refers to three counter-intelligence agencies in the Red Army]. Only the division’s high command knew that I was studying. Somehow, I needed to manage everything at once. During breaks in the fighting, I wrote out words. There was no paper, but I had pieces ripped from newspapers and various books that I found. I wrote out words between the lines and folded it all in my pocket, but when to learn all of these words? There was constant bombing, so I studied when I stood guard at night. I was young and desperate then—I had good vision, and I wasn’t afraid of anything. I stood at my post, kept watch on everything I needed to keep watch on and worked on my studies. I gave myself a rule to learn 25 words a day. I counted the words on my fingers. One time, I made it to 18 words, and past that, I just couldn’t remember. I cracked my brains for a long time and couldn’t think of anything. It was already time for a change of guard, and my replacement came. I decided that I wouldn’t go—though I wanted to sleep very much—until I remembered the 19th word. I stepped to the side, into the woods, and started thinking. That’s how I forced my mind to check 25 words every night. LP: You have exceptional willpower! IA: How did I ever see at night, if I didn’t have a light or matches? At the time, I remembered that I’d read Gorky as a child, where he’d described, in an interview just like this one, what he did in these situations when he was little. He very much loved to read. He was very poor, and at 10 years old, he worked as a substitute chef’s assistant on a barge. He managed to read, even though the chef really didn’t like him reading, and hit him with a ladle over the head for it. Then, Gorky decided to read at night. He took a pan, went to the edge of the broadside, polished up the bottom of the pan and, using the reflection of the moon, read “Montigomo, The Hawk’s Claw.” I made use of his experience. You could get plenty of pans from the ravaged farm collectives, but there was nowhere to put them. Such contrivances were also considered to be 2 signs of a spy—SMERSH was with us constantly, sniffing around, checking and going over everybody. I needed to find a way out of my position. The point of my interview now is to show that you always can and must find a way out of a [difficult] position, even, for that matter, with unusual methods. If I couldn’t use a pan, then I needed something small. What could it be? I had everything I needed—I didn’t think of it right away. It was the Kalashnikov. It has a circle that can be polished up and it will shine. For damaging military property, I would be under threat of immediate shtrafbrat [Soviet penal battalions] and death. I needed to find a way out of my position. There was fighting every day. Once, the fighting was very bad—it was a very large field and tons of people lying dead with their weapons. You could take a rifle from one of the dead. I couldn’t go in the daytime, and it was risky at night, too, since they could see me and open fire, because if I was walking there, then it meant that I wanted to surrender. Ultimately, I risked my life to learn English. When my friend replaced me at my post, I seemingly went back, but really made a semi-circle and, crawling on my belly, moved in the necessary direction. I made it to the nearest dead man, took his rifle, told him “Thank you!” and headed back. It’s possible that I moved too loudly, because the duty officer heard a rustle and called out, “Halt!” I fell silent and didn’t say anything. He fired a shot in my direction. I lay face down deep in the snow, like a dead man. The Germans heard the shot and also fired their own.

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