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Table of Contents Item Transcript DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Stanislav Severinovsky. Full, unedited interview, 2010 ID RUS052.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4cn80 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 18 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 1/18 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Stanislav Severinovsky. Full, unedited interview, 2010 ID RUS052.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4cn80 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION —Today is October 28, 2010. We are in Nizhny Novgorod, meeting a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Please introduce yourself, tell us when and where you were born, tell us about the family that raised you, about your life before the war. Please also tell us about the beginning of the war and what happened to you during the war. My name is Stanislav Mikhailovich Severinovsky. I was born on October 22, 1925 in the city of Odessa [Odesa]. About my family? My mother was promoted from the lowest ranks and later, as I was told, she became a social worker. I attended the school no.44 until fourth grade. My father left us when I was two or three years old. My mother was probably searching for a way to make something of her life. That is probably why she married a man who graduated from Odessa University. He was sent to work in Berdichev [Berdychiv]. From 1939 until the war began we lived in Berdichev, where I finished eighth grade, and where I saw the beginning of the war. —I apologize for interrupting you, can you describe Berdichev? What was Berdichev like? This was a Ukrainian town, though people say that the majority of the population was Jewish. Everyone mainly spoke Russian. Of course, the names of some places had a certain Jewish sound. For example, the name of the market was “Yatke.” —Did the children of the town get along with each other? Yes! There were no divisions based on nationality. I sat at a desk with a boy from a Jewish family. My wife, my future wife, I went to school with her, we were in the same grade. She also came from a thoroughly Jewish family. When we started talking about making our own family, her grandfather who used to observe all the Jewish traditions was set against it. Why? Because, he wondered, “what do you need to be with a lieutenant for?” —Her grandfather? Her grandfather. But this was in 1949 and young ladies already had an independent mind, and they didn’t always listen to what grandpa, mom, or dad said. Though she loved her father very much. Her father was a lawyer in Berdichev, her mother was a housewife. I kept visiting her, and continued visiting until we finally became husband and wife. At the time, I was serving in Eastern Prussia, I got her a permit, because it was a restricted area. 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 2/18 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Stanislav Severinovsky. Full, unedited interview, 2010 ID RUS052.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4cn80 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN Let’s return to the beginning of the war. On June 22 we were no longer in school. But because mama was the only wage-earner in our family, she worked two jobs, and I was left all day on my own. So imagine this scene: I was hanging out with my friend at his house—I remember this moment for all my life—we were eating something when we heard some whistling sound. For the first time in my life I heard the wail of a bomb. Then we realized what was happening. We jumped out of the house, but, at first, we couldn’t open the door, our hands were shaking. Where do we go? To mom! Yes, to mom, to mom. The first bombs, fragmentation bombs, something was struck on the main street, someone got killed. This went on from June 22 to July 5 or 6. But we had been raised like patriots, and on the third day I volunteered for a destruction battalion. Wearing a gas mask marked me out. I was in a destruction battalion, and our headquarters was located in school no.1. The school was on the main street of Berdichev. Finally, my mother, a very strict and strong-willed woman grabbed me by the hand: “Get out of here.” Now I understand that had she not led me away, my life would have panned out differently. Since she was a state employee, evacuation from Berdichev for state employees was more or less organized. At first, we were seated in a train car, and then we were kicked off and told that Communists should be the last to leave the city. Then we got out of the city together with her friend on a truck. Riding in the truck, we reached the suburbs of Kharkov [Kharkiv]. Then the truck was taken away from us for the benefit of the army, and we continued our journey by trains. We reached Penza, Stalingrad [Volgograd] . We returned to Kharkov once again because we found out that our troops had gone on the offensive, and we needed to return. So we returned to Kharkov where bombardments were ongoing. Once again we evacuated, reaching the city of Chelyabinsk with the last transport. Berdichev is a city in Ukraine where the climate was warm. I don’t remember now the things we brought with us, but in Chelyabinsk, in the Urals, we didn’t fare very well in the beginning. We had to get settled somehow. I was wandering the streets and saw an announcement about electric welding courses. I signed up. They fed us there and issued us a worker’s ration card. A worker’s ration card meant 800g of bread daily. Mama got 450g, and I got 800g. It turned out that these classes were under the auspices of an organization called “Stalkonstruktsia” [Steel Constructions company]. Defense production was expanding, and near the tractor plant ChTZ, the famous Chilyabinsk Tractor Plant, they started building the tank repair plant no.200, where we, the future electric welders, were to be trained. We would then work on the construction platform of the new plant. So I, an eighth grader, skinny with my pencil neck sticking out, arrived and announced, “I am an electric welder.” I got some looks: ok, if you are an electric welder, show us what you can do. What could I do? I poked at the electrode . “Look here, when you’re on a smoke break, you can learn something, but for now assist Yakov.” Yakov was a handyman. What did “assisting” entail? I had to carry cylinders with oxygen. We made trusses for overhead coverings. First we had to straighten the steel profile. My “teacher” asked me, “Are you going to work with the sledgehammer or are you going to hold the steel?” "I’ll do what you tell me". “Ok, hold it then”. He had to straighten the structural corner. It bends when it is transported. You 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 3/18 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Stanislav Severinovsky. Full, unedited interview, 2010 ID RUS052.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4cn80 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN have to place the corner on a flat metallic surface and hit the protruding bulge with a sledgehammer. I was supposed to hold it, and he was supposed to hit the bulge. A simple job assuming you know what you are doing. With the first strike of the sledgehammer my hands felt like they were going to fall off. I should have held the structure tightly on both sides, and I merely touched the surface, so I felt the full force of the strike in my hands. “Ok, that didn’t work, you work the sledgehammer.” I was supposed to strike the bulge with the edge of the sledgehammer, but I struck it with the handle. Time passed, several months. I became an electric welder. I never started smoking. I brought bread home, though never a full loaf, because while travelling home I would tear pieces and eat half the loaf. But I learned how to weld, and when the girls came to take over our shifts I was able to train them. I was then admitted to a construction technical school, the construction school at Verkhnaya Salda, Verkhnaya Oblast [Sverdlovsk Oblast], in the Urals but the school’s affiliate was in Chelyabinsk. We spent a couple of months at the construction school. Only two guys stayed in our group. War was raging, all the guys left for the front, and there were just two of us among all the girls. So the other guy and I decided that we also had to go to the front. We went to the enlistment office. This was 1942, we were not yet eighteen. When they found out that I had completed eight years of school they referred me to a military school. I was sent to the Zlatoustovsk machine-gun and mortar school. After a few months I became a corporal and then a sergeant, and then we were supposed to graduate. This was the end of 1942, beginning 1943, during the Battle of Stalingrad. Half of our cadets were sent to reinforce our troops in Stalingrad; they were not sent as officers, but as privates. The military school gathered all the sergeants from all our battalions and formed one regiment. The school sent everyone else to reinforce our troops in the Battle of Stalingrad.
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