DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Evsey Epshtein. Full unedited interview, 2009 ID LA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4s756n0f ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 13 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 1/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Evsey Epshtein. Full unedited interview, 2009 ID LA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4s756n0f ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION Evsey Epshtein introduces himself and recounts what he calls his father’s “interesting fate.” - Today is March 9, 2009. We are in Los Angeles meeting with a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Please, introduce yourself, tell us about what you remember about your childhood and prewar life, about the family you grew up in, what schools you attended, what did your parents do, how you ended up in the Red Army and your war experience. Please. My name is Epshtein, Evsey Semyonovich. I was born in Kharkov [Kharkiv] on April 6, 1923. My parents were Lyubov Evseevna and Semyon Faddeevich. My mother was a dentist and my father an accountant. My father had a very interesting fate. He was born to a large Jewish family and was the only boy among his siblings. All except one of the women had an education. My father also did not receive an education. He had a tense relationship with his mother. My grandmother – I do not remember her last name – but I do remember her as a very strict woman. My father fell in love with a very beautiful woman. She was very poor and my father’s parents were very rich – his father was a merchant in the first guild in Romny, in the Poltava oblast [now Sumy Oblast]. When my father said that he would marry this woman, my grandfather – this is from my mother – took a hundred rubles to bribe a local official – this was the 1880s – and my father was drafted into the army. He was not in the army for long, he caught a cold somewhere and returning home he knocked at the gate. My grandmother asked, who is it? It is me, Semyon. Are you going to marry her? Of course. Then I will not let you into the house. My father turned around, came for his beloved, and they got married in Kiev [Kyiv]. They had a daughter named Marietta, but unfortunately my father’s first wife soon passed away. She was a very sickly woman. He was left all alone with his daughter. Some time later my father was out for a stroll and found himself at the Kharkov train station, this is according to my mother, as my mother was passing through on her way to the Southern Front along with Red Army soldiers. She was a medic. He saw her and asked “Lyuba, what are you doing here?” She said she was going to the front. “Lyuba, get off the train.” He took her home, married her, and together they raised Marietta. This is how I have a half-sister, we are both my father’s children. Years went by and my father had all sorts of jobs. First he was a welder, then an accountant. He worked with Anton Semyonovich Makarenko in the Dzerzhinsky Commune. He would bring me to Anton Semyonovich. I’ll tell you honestly, I was not well-behaved. He talked to me, threatened me, I was a little scared that he would take me to [a children's] colony and began to understand that it was unnecessary [to behave this way]. I studied at the 36th school in Kharkov. This school was where children of Ukraine’s entire government usually studied. There were children of Zatomsky, Petrovsky, Postyshev, Yakir, famous singers – Patorzhinsky and Litvinenko-Volgemut. I spent time with them all, although my closest relationship was with Petya Yakir. We lived on the same street, got together, visited each other, as usual. 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 2/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Evsey Epshtein. Full unedited interview, 2009 ID LA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4s756n0f ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN We had some adventures…Petya took his father’s “Colt, we put two glasses on top of a fence, and opened fire. Guards came running and I received a good beating, but they were not allowed to touch him. Petya knocked [on my door] in the evening. I lived in the basement on the street – it was Veterenarna street, later Ivanov – he knocked on the window and said, “my dad is calling you.” I said, I’m afraid, I won’t go. He persuaded me. We went. He asked, did you shoot? I said, it was not me, it was Petya. We were boys. “Do you like shooting?” We wanted to try. “Then come on Sunday, we will go to a shooting range.” He put us in his car, he had a car from the GAZ AA, it was called “Kozlik.” He took us to a shooting range for Red Army men in Kharkov. He gave us small-caliber rifles and we could shoot as much as we wanted. We shot off a mountain of ammunition. In ’33 the government moved to Kiev and Yakir's mansion was taken over by [Ivan Naumovich] Dubovoi, a [Red Army] commander. He had four rhombuses [designating rank – equivalent to a Colonel General]. He had an enormous red beard. However, he was also repressed. Like Yakir, he was executed. Instead of him, Timoshenko commanded the troops in Ukraine and Crimea, later he was a marshal. His daughter, Irina, went to this school and studied with us. I read about her only after the war, she did not behave very well, especially with Stalin’s son, Vasily. So they wrote, I do not know. I was transferred from the 36th school to school number 100 on Chaikovsky Street, which I graduated in ’41. June 21 was the graduation party. [We were] boys, we drank a little, of course, danced, we talked…In the morning my mother woke me up and said, “Son, get up, war.” I had no idea what war [really] meant. However, since my year – the ’23 – was on the draft list, I went to the military enlistment office. This was the Kharkov Kaganovichsky military enlistment office. They told me to wait a while and they would send me to study in a military school. They referred me. They gave me documents, a pass to Sevastopol, they referred me to the Sevastopol Anti-Aircraft Artillery School, where I, an eighteen-year-old boy, went from the Southern Station to the Crimea. My mother, father, sister and my friend saw me off. Along the way, I was first bombed at the Sinelnikovo Station. This was my baptism of fire. Disappointment came soon [after]. When I arrived in Sevastopol on the Ship’s Side, where the school was located, the school as such was no longer there. It was a two-year school. Graduates went into the ranks as lieutenants. Those who transferred for further studies were loaded onto trains and sent somewhere. Those who arrived they did not know what to do with them because the railway, according to some of those in charge, was already cut off by the Germans in the Zaporozhye region. Well, where [should they] put us? We were thin eighteen-year-old boys. I found myself on the cruiser “Chervona Ukraina.” In general, they could not make a sailor out of me. The old-timers, they served for five years, were physically strong, their fists were like my head. Healthy guys. Naturally, they laughed at us, go up the flagstaff and bring down the steam. The flagstaff was the highest point on the mast. From there we were quickly written off to the naval infantry – the 5th brigade of naval infantry. I received a bullet wound in the arm near Balaklava, was in the hospital and heard a conversation between doctors that they needed to amputate. I understood what amputate meant, my mother’s a doctor. When they came up to me, I said no, 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 3/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Evsey Epshtein. Full unedited interview, 2009 ID LA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4s756n0f ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN I would not let them amputate. They did something, operated on me, then they put me in a cast. Then – it was a cast up to here. The hand was like this (shows at the shoulder level) and that’s how I was sent to Novorossiysk, where there were many wounded, on a destroyer. Then I went to through several hospitals and found myself in Ufa. In Ufa was the Sevastopol Anti-Aircraft Artillery School. - What year was this? This was ’42. This was in Ufa, the capital of Bashkiria. When they discharged me, they said that…we were given these papers that said we were cadets of the Sevastopol Anti-Aircraft Artillery School and one witty guy said, if you survive, you’ll find the school and they’ll take you. With this piece of paper, I arrived at the school, which was near the prison in Ufa. I was accepted but told that graduation was coming up soon. Four months later I put on a lieutenant’s uniform with two cubes [designating rank]. I brought a picture. A skinny…boy. That is how I began my officer’s life. Initially I went to the 750th Anti-Aircraft Regiment, where 80% were girls.