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Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT

ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 10

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Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION —Today is February 13, 2012. We are in the Jewish Center of Bensonhurst, in Brooklyn, meeting with a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Please introduce yourself. Tell us how you lived before the war, in what family you grew up, what happened to you during the war.

My name is Iosif Lvovich Fridman. I was born on October 10, 1925, in the village of Lipovets [Lypovets'] in Vinnytsya Oblast. But my parents were not from Lipovets. My father was from Bugaivka and my mother was from Pohrebyshche. My father's name was Lev Yakovlevich. My mother's name was Klara Isaakovna; her maiden name was Kaplun. I wasn't born alone. I was born with my sister. There was also an older brother, three years older than me. Our life in Lipovtsy wasn't bad. My father was a cooper. He was a very capable person. He taught himself how to read and write. When he was a prisoner in Hungary, he even learned Hungarian during those two years. At first they lived in Zozovo, in Lipovets District. Then they moved to Lipovets where we started working at the machine-tractor station [MTS]. Because he was a literate man, he was put in charge of the warehouse. It was hard for him there. He had to know every detail of every machine that existed at the time: tractors, combines, automobiles. We had nowhere to live and my father bought an old house. Some lawyer lived in that house. The house was falling apart, especially the first floor. The MTS helped him buy that house. His grandfather and his brother lived in the village of Lipovets. They helped him fix the house. They added stone on the first floor for stability. There was a piece of land. He liked gardening and planted trees there. The house ended up being big. On the first floor we kept a cow, geese, turkeys—it was a whole small farm. There was space for them to roam. Our life wasn't bad. I went to the Lipovets Secondary School.

—Was the school Russian or Ukrainian?

It was a Jewish school. I went there until 1939, then it was liquidated. A Jewish school in Ukraine! That won't do. I was transferred to a Ukrainian school. It was on the outskirts of Lipovets. I studied there until the ninth grade. My sister didn't want to go there because it was too far. She found a job. These are my childhood years. What did I do? I liked swimming in the river, fish, and especially catch crawfish. I supplied everyone I knew with crawfish. I used to take two buckets and go to the river, which wasn't too far. I walked along the river, dove, and pulled crawfish out of their holes. They bit my fingers but I didn't care. I would have two buckets full of crawfish and treat everyone I knew. This was a great pleasure for me. I had many relatives in Lipovtsy. My father was the oldest, but my grandfather had lots of children. He had fourteen children, but only seven were alive. [My father had] three sisters and three brothers. When the war began . . .

—Excuse me. Those children in the Jewish school and in that Ukrainian school . . . Did they get along? Did ethnicity matter?

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Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

Not at all. We played soccer together, went to the river, swam, dove, and simply were friends. It didn't matter.

—Were you acquainted with the concept of anti-Semitism?

No, I had no idea. They didn't teach us about it in the Jewish school. It was a very good school. We had Jewish and Russian doctors. There was a doctor who treated both adults and children. He built medicinal baths there. There was a Russian doctor, Pristupov, he was an obstetrician. My brother finished a Ukrainian school and then entered the medical institute in Kiev. He managed to complete two years before the war.

When the war began . . . It was June 22, and at night of 21st after my classes . . . My father said, "Alright, go to Kiev [Kyiv] to visit my brother. They will host you, you'll spend time with my brother and see the city." They bought me a ticket. The train station wasn't nearby. There were carriage drivers. The railway station was 12 kilometers away. I went to Kiev and at night I heard explosions and the hum of airplanes above. When I arrived at Boyarka, a station before Kiev, it was announced that Germans were bombing Kiev. They were bombing Kerosinka Street that is now Vozdukhoflotskaya Street. There was smoke because of the bombing. My uncle met me in Kiev. He said, "Why did you come? The war has begun." My uncle had a son ten years younger than me. I was already fifteen, and he was five. Now he lives in Israel. I said, "I am already here. Where am I supposed to go?" He took me with him to his place, of course. He said that everyone was evacuating because of the war. The telephone connection was damaged. We had to call my parents and tell them to get my grandfather and my sisters, and that they should leave. They didn't want to go anywhere. My grandfather said, "I'm not going anywhere. I know Germans. They were here during the Civil War. They are very nice people. They were helping us and didn't hurt anybody. This is all propaganda." My grandfather didn't believe it. He refused to leave and convinced my sisters to stay as well. And my uncle persuaded me to go back and convince everyone to leave. While I was on my way back, my train was bombed, the rail tracks were destroyed, and the trains couldn't run. So went through Vinnytsya. What was happening there at the time was terrible. They were looking for spies everywhere. They took me for a spy but I showed them my papers and told them that I was just a schoolboy, that I went to school, that I only finished nine grades, and there was no way I could be a spy. They let me go and I made it home. My parents weren't there. They left with my sister.

My father worked at MTS and he was told to leave. He was convoying some machines. He took my mom and sister with him. But my grandfather didn't want to go and stayed behind. My father built a big house. We lived on the top floor and the ground floor was for the animals and firewood. Our life wasn't bad. My father was well-respected. He knew every detail of every car and how to change them. He had good technical skills. During the Civil War he had served in the army and was a corporal there. He spent two years as a prisoner of war and then returned. But before that he used to live in Bugaivka. He was married

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Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN and had two children. But when he came back, there was no wife and no house, there was nothing. The mob drove the Jews with their children to the synagogue and burned them alive. They set the synagogue on fire and didn't let anyone out.

—When did this happen?

This happened in 1917, when the revolution was happening and chaos spread in Ukraine. That's when he left for Lipovets. My grandfather and his three daughters lived there. So my father went to live with my grandfather, found a job in Zozovo, and married my mother. My mother used to have a fiancé but he died and she married my father. In 1922 my brother was born. So my father started building the house. When the war began, I came back to Lipovets through Vinnytsia. When I arrived there, everyone had already left. My father's sisters and my grandfather moved to our house. There were three bedrooms, a big kitchen, and a cellar. So they moved there. The older sister had three little children. Her name was Surka.

When I got there, they were in shock. In Lipovtsy the military committee started drafting young men, because soldiers would be needed. Alright. We left. I was given a ration. Two people were escorting us. They received lots of money from the bank on our behalf, brought us somewhere far away in the forest, left us there, and ran off. With the money. We were left alone. I went back to Lipovets, so did other guys. The Germans were already there. There was such a massacre. In the beginning of August, they gathered all the young men . . . They didn't take me because I'm on the short side. But they took all my friends from the Jewish school and the Ukrainian school, forced them into a ravine, and shot around 200 people. Everyone realized that if those 200 people had been shot, there would be no pity for the rest of us. That's how I stayed in occupied territory. I couldn't leave anymore. We were surrounded right away. There were huge battles outside of Lipovets. So many Slovaks died there, around 300 or maybe even more. There was a monument erected to those Slovaks right away. It's a huge, tall gated monument. In the beginning of May the SS arrived.

—In the beginning of May . . .

May of 1942. The SS came and in the morning they started driving everyone out onto the road, in the direction of the Lipovets Station, to shoot them. But before that, we got moved to the other side, where we lived in a peasant house with a big stove. It was a big stove for baking bread. My grandfather said, "Crawl into the stove, you have to hide. But lie on the side of the window so that the shadow falls on the stove." I listened to him and got inside. A polizei came in and grabbed my grandfather. "Where's the kid?" My grandfather replied, "He left yesterday to get bread." "Alright, we'll find him later. He won't get far." That's how I stayed alive. I stayed in the oven until it got dark. The next day I crawled into the stove again and for one more day. When they started gathering people and driving them out, my friend and classmate Grisha and . . . I don't remember the other guy's name . . . They started running away and got shot. We realized

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Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN that this was the end for all of us. For me . . . it's hard to talk about this. At night I got out of there. We had lots of acquaintances around. There is a village of Srutynka, that's where I went. We had an acquaintance there, Chaban; that was his last name. I knew where he lived so I thought that's where I should go, to that village. But when I was walking there . . . Lots of Jews lived there as well, and in the place where they lived, there was shooting. They were being gathered as well. I knew there was nothing for me three, so I walked to Napadovka, which was in the opposite direction. I had to cross the bridge and the river again. After I crossed, I met the combine operator Vasyl, whose last name I don't remember. I stayed with him a little bit. He was our close friend, visited us frequently, and worked with my father. If he needed a part, he came to my father and they went to MTS to get spare parts in the middle of the night. The combine operators held us in high regard. So I spent some time at his place. I spent . . . nine days with him. But he said, "You know, it's getting dangerous for you to stay here. Somebody already noticed that I have company. I got you an identification paper that says that you are Ivan Nikolaevich Velenchuk, from the village of Khorosheye, also born in 1925." This was a village on the way to Illintsi. It was 18 kilometers away. He said, "Just make sure the Germans and polizeis don't stop you because they don't check papers, they pull your pants down. So make sure they don't stop you." I tried to stay out of their sight, went around the villages I knew, and stayed with the tractor drivers I knew. My mother sewed, she was a seamstress, so she also knew lots of people. When I was born, my mother breastfed my sister because my sister was weak and I was breastfed my a different woman, who also had a baby and fed me as well from time to time. So I knew her and I went to her. But I couldn't stay there too long, so I went to Oratov District. A woman we knew, a distant relative, lived in that district. She had an older son. She said, "We can't stay here in the town. I'll move to the countryside . . . There is the Sologubovsky sovkhoz [state-owned farm] not too far from there, and you'll be able to work there." That's where we went. I started working there. We plowed the soil: I led the horse around and walked behind the plow.

One day some Ukrainian lads gathered and said, "Let's find out who he is." They caught me, threw some punches, pulled my pants down, and said, "Aha, this isn't one of ours hiding here," meaning, that I wasn't a Ukrainian hiding from Germany, but a Jew. And I had to run from there. I went to the neighboring village of Raskopannoye in the same area. My family's friend let me stay with him as well. So I went on hiding like this . . . in the fields, especially when the wheat was tall and I could hide there. Sunflowers, corn, wheat helped me hide in the summer. In the winter there was nowhere to hide. Also, there were prisoners of war working in that sovkhoz. They also had an underground . . . They would gather some prisoners and go collect weapons. They went to dig up graves of Soviet soldiers, who were buried with their guns. They would retrieve the ammunition. I remember that in Lipovtsy the ammunition was thrown away by the dam right in the zinc cases. It was deep there, probably around 6 meters. So the boxes with the ammunition were sunk down there. I would dive there, I was a good diver. The ammunition was heavy. I told them that I needed help because I couldn't lift all of that myself. We pulled out 4 boxes of ammunition. We already had rifles and ammunition. But a rifle without ammunition is useless. In the summer, when I was hiding in the wheat, suddenly I was caught, "Here is one. Get out." Those people turned out to be partisans. We

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Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN knew those people from the village where the sovkhoz was. And we went to join that detachment where Sopha was at the time—the Kirov Regiment. That's how I met Sonya. The partisans accepted me. One time I went on an assignment with a Georgian guy to Lipovets to kill . . . what's he called . . . a commandant. He was a former teacher, his last name was Rachok. He was so mean!

—Was he the head of the village or a commandant?

He was a commandant. He had an SVT rifle that could shoot ten bullets at a time. It was semi-automatic. We knocked on the door, he looked out of the window, and we just . . . [Then] we went down . . . He lived right near the police. We walked down along the vegetable gardens to the river, where there was a boat waiting for us. We went to Gaisin [Haysyn]. Lipovets was surrounded by the river from three sides. The Sob River, a tributary of the Dnieper. And of course we got out of there. We accomplished our mission. That guy wasn't the head of the village because that was a town. The head of the town is called something else.

That's how I joined the partisans. We went to the sugar plant to procure sugar. We procured food and everything we needed. When the Germans surrounded us, I took part in battles. I was still just a boy. It was 1943. I was eighteen-and-a-half then. When we merged with the army, I already had a gun, a pistol, and grenades. I was very armed and very dangerous, as they say. I also gave Sopha a small pistol for protection. When we joined the army, I went to the military recruitment office that was nearby. I asked them to send me to the front as soon as possible because I was already trained how to shoot. I was sent to a cavalry unit. I had papers, too. They said, "You're a partisan, so you should know how to ride a horse." I said, "I do." So I was sent to reconnaissance. I had my share of trouble there also. They thought that since I was a partisan, I was bulletproof. Whenever there was an important assignment, they always sent me. If the assignment was reconnaissance by fire, to check whether there were any Germans ahead, I was always at the front. And it turned out okay: the bullets whistled right and left, and even got some of my friends. Let's say two people were sent. I would always survive and the other would be injured or dead. It was as if I was charmed. One time when we took up defensive positions, a shell fell right into my trench and didn't explode. Apparently there really was some kind of a spell on me. Our commanders' attitude was that we need only victory, at any cost. In Romania I participated in the Jassy-Kishinev Offensive. We took part in the annihilation. When we were crossing from Romania to Hungary, in Transylvania, there are mountains there, and the mechanized units had trouble getting through. Especially when it was rainy. It would get so muddy that the horses got stuck. It was only the cavalry going around, because we could get through. In Transylvania, I remember when the Germans were already retreating, I was riding with a partner. I was in front and he was 30 meters behind me. If I got killed, then he would go back and tell the commander that there were Germans there. Thank God I didn't get shot. I rode around the hill. There was a clearing there, and some kind of a thicket behind it. All of a sudden I heard a motor rumble. A tankette appeared and started shooting large-caliber tracer bullets right in my direction. I was going around the hill, but there was a thicket and a ravine nearby. I jumped in there with my horse and went back along the ravine. I went back

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Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN to my partner. He saw me I jump down into the ravine and did the same. The tankette turned back and left. We waited until our patrol squadron arrived. We weren't the patrol; we had to determine if the enemy was there or not. The squadron and the regiment's commander arrived. They went to that clearing, got off their horses, and set up the 45mm guns there. These were enough to destroy a tankette. Here's what the regiment commander did: he told squadron to get off the horses; the stablemen took the horses back. He told the reconnaissance to form a chain and advance to the thicket on horseback. Meanwhile, the soldiers walked behind us with the machine and submachine guns. Of course we, the eighteen people from reconnaissance, were the target. We were 10 meters away from the shooting began. We immediately lost six people. The reconnaissance team was sent as a target. Many were wounded. The next day we complained. We also had a division reconnaissance. The captain . . . we complained to him. He said, "Don't worry, he'll answer for it." And, really, after a few days he disappeared. He was transferred. That's how the Red Army fought. And then . . . This is how I fought. Then we were sent to capture an informant. We sat there for two days, writing down the time when the guards changed shifts, so we already knew everything. But when we were about get him, [we heard the] Katyushas . . . they opened fire at us. We barely managed to get out of there. We brought two wounded from there. So much for the informant. That's how we fought. But that's not all. We were surrounded near Balaton. I mean Lake Balaton, Szekesfehervar. Good thing the Germans didn't have much infantry there. Had they had infantry . . . We were surrounded by tanks. They were afraid to move there because we were peppering everything with grenades.

—Where were you on Victory Day?

On Victory Day we were in the Alps.

—In Austria?

In Austria. We met Yugoslav partisans in the Alps and joined them.

—What awards did you get during the war?

All the awards that I have were given to me in the army: the medal "For Courage" . . .

—When did you get the medal "For Courage"?

Back in 1944.

—Where were you then?

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Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

I was in Romania. It must have been a general award for some operation. Because I was always in the reconnaissance.

—What was your next award?

The Order of the Red Star and the Order of Glory 3rd Class.

—The Order of Glory! What did you receive it for?

I received it for Lake Balaton. Our regiment headquarters were surrounded. They were trapped and bombarded. There were a trench about 150 meters away from the headquarters building, and the Germans took up defensive positions there. There were about fifteen people, I think. We started talking about what to do. We only had one self-propelled gun, a 105mm cannon, which was meant for tanks.What were we supposed to do? You can't just shoot at a trench from a cannon. And we decided . . . we considered our options and decided to use the gun to go to the edge of the trench, drive along it, and throw grenades at the German soldiers and fire at them from a machine gun. Five of us from the reconnaissance unit got in, including the SPG driver. We took two machine guns: one was is the front, the other was in the back. We took all the grenades we had. We drove out there, threw in all the grenades, then, after we turned around, opened fire from our machine guns at those who were still alive so that no one would shoot us in the back. We all got an award for this.

—When were you demobilized?

I was demobilized in 1947.

—Where did you go?

My parents had already come back; they lived in Lipovtsy. But our house was destroyed, it had been bombed. My brother was demobilized as well and living in Lipovtsy. I came back there and in 1947-1948 finished my secondary education. I finished ninth grade and got my diploma. In 1948 my friends and I went to Kiev to enroll in the Polytechnic Institute. In the very beginning of 1951, I went there to get the schedule for the exams . . . I was told, "Dear fellow, you've been expelled from the institute." I had no idea where that came from. I saw the memo on the board. It said: "As we have recently found out, Ivan Nikolaevich Velenchuk is not Velenchuk. He is Iosif Lvovich Fridman. He used someone else's papers to enter the KPI, so we expelled him." I couldn't take the exams anymore. I was expelled. And they organized a Komsomol meeting at the institute to have me expelled. There were speeches, "How dare he have done this! He probably killed someone or stole the documents. We should transfer this matter to the prosecutor's office so that they can sort it out. We have to expel him from the institute." There were front-

Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN line veterans there who knew me. They said, "Fine. But let him speak, too. At least at the end. How can you expel him without knowing what he has to say?" They let me speak. I told them that it was true that I had changed my last name but I did it during the occupation. I had to do it. But I hadn't killed anyone and I wasn't hiding anything. In their report, they wrote that I hid everything. I told them to get my entrance questionnaire, which was the size of a newspaper spread, and my autobiography that I had to write as part of my institute application. But they were told that when I was applying I didn't write my bio and didn't fill anything out. That, of course, caused a commotion: How could it be that I didn't fill anything out? That wasn't possible. I wasn't expelled. But they didn't restore my status, and transferred my case to the prosecutor's office. I had to go there every day and write my biography. I wrote the same thing for the whole month. I couldn't write anything different. So they sent my case to Lipovets, where I come from. There were still people there from my partisan detachment, who knew me. And in the district Komsomol committee, there were . . . not quite friends but acquaintances who knew me from school as well. In the end the prosecutor's office wrote my . . . what should I call it . . . exoneration. They couldn't find anything wrong.

—You have children.

One daughter.

—When she was a schoolgirl, did you tell her what you are telling us now?

She knew a little bit.

—A little bit . . . You didn't want to tell her or she didn't want to hear about it?

No, she listened to everything.

—Maybe you didn't want to tell her everything in detail?

I didn't want to scare her too much.

—Thank you very much for this meeting.

Iosif Fridman. Full, unedited interview, 2012

ID NY086.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4h41jp4x

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

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