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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT

ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 13

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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION My name is Yuli Kutner. I was born in 1925, April 17, in Moscow. I am a native Muscovite. I was born, lived, and studied in Moscow. I lived in the center of the city, on Pushkin Square. Every Muscovite knows that spot.

The war encountered me, or rather I encountered the war, in its very first days, when the Germans were bombing Moscow. At night, we would go on the roof of our building and throw down the firebombs dropped by the Germans in an attempt to burn Moscow down. Moscow was engulfed in flames. I vividly remember how it felt to look down from the roof at our beautiful city, our capital, our beloved city, and see it burning on all sides. This is how I was introduced to the war. In the first days of the war I went to work at a military factory. Actually, before working at the military factory, I went to work as a sailor on a steam tugboat that was transporting valuables out of Moscow. These included Gosbank [State Bank] assets, the paintings and property of Tretyakov Gallery and [other] renown Moscow art museums. When the Germans came close to Moscow, the Moscow-Oksk steamship company—where I worked as a tugboat sailor—stopped functioning. So then I worked in the military factory, from where I was almost immediately sent to build fortifications outside of Moscow. There I received my first “combat wound” when a reinforced- concrete beam was dropped on my leg and broke a few bones. After that, I had to return to Moscow on crutches. In the meantime, the factory [where I was working] was evacuated and I no longer had any ration cards, or any other means of living a normal life in Moscow. So I had to leave. I left Moscow and headed to the place where the Kiev [Kyiv] film studio had been evacuated, because my uncle worked as a director at that studio. The studio had been evacuated to Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, the capital of Turkmenistan. So that is where I went. On the way there, I made a stop in Almaty because I knew that my father, who by that point already had a different family with young and infant children, had evacuated to Kazakhstan. I didn't know where exactly in Kazakhstan it was. The first thing I did was go to the market on my crutches to buy something to eat. At the market, as strange as this seems, I ran into my father. Such incredible coincidences happen sometimes. He came from the village where he was working, which was about 35 kilometers from Almaty, in the mountains. He also came to buy food, to exchange some things for food. That's how it was usually done at the time.

—[People] bartered instead of paying with money?

Yes, usually people exchanged things for food because money really didn’t have any value at the time. You just couldn’t buy anything with money. Naturally I went back with him and for a while worked at the lumber factory where my father worked. I worked as an electrician there. I stayed there until I found out that in Ashgabat, the city where I had intended to go, they were recruiting students for a navy school. They would train long-distance navigators. This school was located in Kherson at the time, in Ukraine, and I wanted to

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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN enroll. All my life I dreamed of being a sailor. I quickly left everything in Kazakhstan and traveled to Ashgabat. I went to the military recruiment office. They accepted me as a student, put me on a train, and sent me toward Krasnovodsk so that we could cross the Caspian Sea and get to Kherson, where the enrollment was taking place. But when we got to Krasnovodsk, we found out that Kherson had already been captured by the Germans and there was not going to be any enrollment. So they gave us their blessing to go wherever we wanted. I returned to Ashgabat and worked for the Kiev film studio, which was working at full capacity. I met many interesting people there, including Yuri Karlovich Olesha, the famous author, and many others.

From there I was drafted to the army. I volunteered when I was seventeen years old. I had finished ninth grade in Moscow and had already taken my entrance exams and enrolled in the Kharkov Hydrometeorological Institute, which was also evacuated to Ashgabat. I completed one year in this Kharkov Hydrometeorological Institute, after which I went to the army. As a fairly educated person, I was immediately and in accordance with my wishes accepted to the airborne forces. I was trained in a reserve unit as a paratrooper; we were trained in the art of sabotage work, in addition to jumping with a parachute in different conditions. I liked this a lot. As my friends were still completing their first jump, I would already finish folding my parachute and then get back in line for another jump. I liked it and would eagerly repeat it even now, but unfortunately this is America, and it isn’t so easy to parachute here as it was there at the time.

—I'm sorry, was this in 1941?

This was in 1942. I received complete training as a parachutist-saboteur and was sent to an airborne brigade. There weren't many of these around yet; this was a new type of army formation, composed of parachutists-saboteurs trained in reserve units. This was a reserve unit of General Command. It was a kind of a Guards unit enagaged in high-stakes special assignments, in times of dire need. As a parachutist- saboteur, I took part in small-group operations. Our missions included setting explosives in the enemy's territory and other difficult tasks. One such mission, for instance, was blowing up a power station in the town of Svidevok [Svydivok]. It's a hub in Ukraine, not far from the city of Kanev [Kaniv]. Kanev, Kiev—Ukranians know these cities. And a host of other operations where I also participated as a saboteur. After my first injury I was dismissed from the paratroopers, declared unfit for such duties. From then on, I fought on the ground. I fought in the artillery, an anti-tank artillery unit. It is, I would say, a very inconvenient [form of combat], because you had to repel tank attacks with a small cannon, and that cannon simply could not pierce the German tank armor. So you had to somehow come up with a way to damage the advancing tank before it got to you.

Then I was in the heavy self-propelled artillery unit which was a completely new formation, organized and

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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN launched during the war. In this unit I served in the Guards Kirovogradsky regiment. I was assigned to reconnaissance because of my paratrooper experience. For some reason I always found myself in these reconnaissance missions once in ground forces.

—But you only went through training that one time and that's it? There was no new training in the new units?

I was trained in the beginning as a saboteur. Afterward I was in reconnaissance, where no other special training was needed. I had a sufficient general education. I was mostly working in artillery reconnaissance. We had to gather intelligence on the enemy’s objectives, plot them on the map, and prepare firing-target data. It was easy for me to learn, because I basically already had a secondary education and was studying at an institute. It was mostly trigonometry. In addition we had missions like reconnaissance by fire. In other words, we would get in our command tank, armored vehicles, and motorcycles armed with machine guns and go toward the enemy and engage in combat. When the enemy retaliated, we recorded their firing positions, locations, and other relevant data, fulfilling our main objectives. At first I participated in the battles of the 1st Ukrainian Front, and then I was transferred to Karelia with the heavy self-propelled artillery unit. There I participated in battles and performed reconnaissance work on the shores of Svir River. We were getting ready for an offensive and had to cross the river. I had to swim across that river—in winter. This river has a very fast current, so I had to go up by about half a kilometer from where I had to cross; otherwise I would have been carried too far off. As I said, the river has a very fast current, and this took place in winter. Despite the freezing temperatures, the river does not freeze fully, only near the banks. I had a radio transmitter with me. When our artillery was firing at the Germans' firing positions, I was supposed to note and adjust our target coordinates as I was lying there in the snow. Naturally, while I was swimming across the river I froze, or rather I got frostbite, because it was very cold and my cotton-padded uniform was wet. And so when I was swimming back, I couldn’t pull the radio transmitter onto the ice and had to drop it in the water. After this I was greeted very warmly by my comrades in reconnaissance. They bundled me up in a sheepskin coat and laid me down by the stove in the dugout, and I slept for twenty- four hours straight. Right before I fell asleep, they gave me a whole mug of alcohol, which I drank with great enthusiasm and enjoyment. It was only later, when I smelled it as I was nearing the bottom of the mug, that I realized that it was alcohol. I just gulped it down.

But that’s probably not the most interesting story. The most interesting story is the following. Having served in the airborne forces, after the war I read the memoirs of Marshal Zhukov. I discovered that on his initiative, our airborne brigade, which was included in the three corps with approximately ten thousand parachutists in each that participated in the operation to cross the Dnieper . . . Zhukov devised a maneuver in which this colossal airborne force would be dropped on the right bank of the Dnieper, in the Germans' rear. These paratroopers were supposed to draw the attack of the German forces, offering our troops, commanded by Marshal Zhukov, the opportunity to cross the Dnieper and liberate Kiev. Everything would

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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN have been great had Marshal Zhukov not forgotten that some of us could survive that operation. Apparently—this is completely clear to me now—Marshal Zhukov assumed that no paratrooper would walk out of there alive, because we were, so to speak, sent to our deaths, and no one expected that any of us would return. Therefore, Marshal Zhukov did not bother to inform our troops about the fact that there might be parachutists who find their way through the German positions and return to our side. Unfortunately that’s what happened. On this mission, we were flown by a women’s aviation regiment. When we were flying over the front line, the anti-aircraft guns must have made them nervous, and on top of that, the markers that were supposed to indicate our drop-off location were completely off. The partisans had been tasked with lighting bonfires in the shape of a triangle. This was supposed to serve as a marker. When we flew into that zone, it turned out that these bonfires were burning all over the place, as far as the eye could see. Evidently, the Germans had somehow found out about this plan, so there were no markers. So they just dropped us wherever. I, for instance, got stuck in a pine tree and had to cut the lines of my parachute so that I could go find my comrades. But because we were dropped totally randomly, we couldn’t gather into any kind of military formation and each person acted on his own, by himself. I happened to run into two of my comrades in the woods on the shore of the Dnieper, and from then on, the three of us were our own independent unit. Naturally, we didn’t have any ammunition or food. That is to say, we were left entirely to our own devices and acted at our own discretion. Later, when we completed our mission and started making our way back to our own side, we found ourselves in various difficult situations. And by the time we made it out, we were dressed in German uniforms and carried German weapons, because we had to abandon our own arms since we had no ammunition and couldn't use them. So we used what we managed to take from the Germans. So imagine the following scene: three young men show up speaking Russian, wearing German uniforms, raising their hands that hold German weapons, and saying in Russian that they are parachutists and must be taken to the soldiers' unit immediately. Instead of taking us to their unit, they beat us, accusing us of being Vlasovites, scum, traitors. And they didn't just use their boots. They used everything they had—their boots, the butts of their guns, whatever they had. Well, you could understand those soldiers that beat us. It turned out that no one had been informed these units about us. And that is why I have a personal grievance against Marshal Zhukov, a personal score, so to speak. He sent me to my death, and I survived. In this situation, you could say our goals diverged. I have to say that I do not have a high opinion of Marshall Zhukov, not as a military specialist, because he didn’t even have a full elementary education. In this particular situation, which I can judge from a modern perspective as more than sixty years have passed since then, I think Marshal Zhukov did not prove himself to be a truly great military leader.

—I read that it was in relation to that particular battle that Hitler himself said that he respected Stalin for being able to sacrifice so many lives, for issuing such an order.

You mean for how he conducted this particular operation?

—For his indifference to human losses.

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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

Oh yes, no one had any regard for our lives, because, excuse my rudeness, they thought that women would birth many new soldiers and everything would be just fine. In reality, as you know, there were too many unnecessary losses in combat. No one was concerned about that.

During the battle where I received my last injury, which was my third serious injury in my military career, I was left . . . I think that everyone who went through the war knows and remembers the book “Spring on the Oder.” It was spring on the Oder then. It was the spring of 1945 when I found myself on the Oder with my anti-tank gun and its crew. The gun was the ZiS-3, a wonderful weapon that could hit the target you were aiming for.

—Was this an unusual characteristic?

In general, artillery weapons typically have deviations, rather large ones, but this cannon, this long- barreled gun, was very accurate. At the time I was a gun commander. I had the rank of senior sergeant by then. At first, and for most of the war, I fought as a private, but by this time I was a gun commander. And I had two other crew members with me: the gun layer, who was killed when a tank shell hit our anti-tank gun, and the loader, who said that he was running to get ammunition and never came back to the front line. [After the loader left,] I was left along with the layer. Then the layer was killed. I couldn’t get the gun out by myself; we probably wouldn't have been able to pull it out of the mud together either. It was spring on the Oder. Everything was melting and muddy, and the cannon sank up to its shield. I got into a duel with a Ferdinand. The Ferdinand was a heavy, heavy German tank, deployed toward the end of the war, with a thick front armor that couldn’t be pierced by our guns. It was more than 20 centimeters thick. So the only thing you could do was hit the tank’s track; then it would start spinning in one place. Or you could try to hit the space between the tower and the main body, jamming the weapon. And that's what I was doing. There were already six tanks burning in front of me, and when one of them finally engaged me in a duel, a completely uneven match, it hit my gun head-on. The shell exploded close to me and I sustained a shrapnel head wound. To this day I still have metal in my head, a piece of shrapnel. So when I am at the airport and they check me for weapons, they are very surprised when their machine starts beeping near my head. And every time I have to explain that I have a piece of metal there. But fortunately nothing terrible happened because of it, and the piece of metal just stayed in my head. I carry it to this day. I also got a shrapnel arm wound at the same time. All the bones were broken. When I got to the hospital, the first thing they proposed was to amputate my arm at the elbow. They said that if I did that, I could at least get a prosthetic. I asked the surgeon, What will happen if you don’t amputate? He said that in that case I would get gangrene and they would amputate at the shoulder. Luckily my arm is whole today and I can write with it and do everything with it, so nothing terrible happened. This is the photograph from when I was in the hospital, in the city of Lvov [Lviv], where I was recovering after this third serious injury.

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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

Then I returned to the front line, this time near Berlin.

—Was this already 1945?

This was already 1945, April 1945. We were moving toward Berlin, through Germany. I participated in the storming of Berlin and received awards for all those bad things I did to the Germans. I killed many of them during my military career. I received full satisfaction, getting to sign my name on the walls of the Reichstag. I left my signature there on May 2, which happened to be the day that Berlin capitulated—May 2, 1945. There they put us on tanks and we moved south, through Dresden, toward Prague, to liberate Czechoslovakia. By this time the war was over. We entered Prague on May 9. They hugged us, dragged us off the tanks, and gave us wine, milk. It was a very moving event. Our tanks were going through the main street of Prague, through the Wenceslas Square; we were driving over flowers. We were greeted like family, like liberators. And this is why I was very much opposed to the events of 1968, when our tanks were on the streets of Prague once again. Fortunately I was not part of that disgraceful thing. I had no connection to those despicable actions. So the war did not end for us on May 9. We fought for two more weeks, because General Schermann [?], a German general, started leading his army, or what was left of it, to surrender to the Allies. He started moving back, in other words. So we had to go after them, surround them, and destroy them. We sent peace envoys to them, two lieutenants, with an offer for an honorable capitulation. They shot our envoys with a machine gun. So because they did not want to accept an honorable capitulation, we totally annihilated them. We only captured Schermann and his staff. The rest were all killed. This took two more weeks. In other words, the war had ended on May 9 but we still fought for some time. This was very unpleasant. After this we remained in Hungary. First in Czechoslovakia, then Hungary, where our weapons were placed in a beautiful hunting park at the hunting palace of Count Móric Esterházy, a famous Hungarian magnate. On the first floor of palace, in the entrance hall, there hung antlers of deer shot by his famous guests. These included Joachim von Ribentropp, who would later become foreign minister in Hitler's government, Marshal Goering, and a whole series of famous [men]. In Berlin, because I participated in the storming of Berlin, I was fortunate to find myself in the courtyard of the Reich Chancellory, where, with great enjoyment, I viewed the burnt corpse of Goebbels. You couldn't mistake him for anyone else. Even though it was a burnt corpse, it was easy to recognize him because one of his legs did not bend. He had been doused in gasoline and set on fire, according to his instructions.

—Maybe this is not a good question, but did you have a moment when [you thought,] “I won and I survived?”

Well, you know . . .

—You didn’t think about it then?

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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

We didn't think about that. My personal experience was that none of us fighting in the war believed that he could be killed or even wounded. I myself, for example, also didn’t believe that I could be wounded or even killed. We acted consicously and it didn't occur to us that we were also mortal. When it turned out that we were mortal, once I got my first wound, then second, then third, I realized that I was born again when the war ended. I realized then that I was born for the second time. Though I had another rebirth later as well, when I got to America. I got to America in '92 and was completely astounded by what I saw here and all the great things I received here, which I didn't deserve. That's when I started to realize that America has played a major role in my life, not only because I am now going through my third life, but also because during the war, at the front, we always felt America’s hand. In particular, I have to tell you, the assortment of food that we were eating mostly consisted of American products, because our own supplies were always insufficient. We had a concentrate of peas, a powder, not tasty and unpleasant, which we used to make soup. There was wheat, wheat porridge, and lots of potatoes. There was pretty much nothing besides this. And therefore, what we ate during the war was wonderful American spam and egg powder and a whole range of other products. And besides, I fought using an armored vehicle known as Dodge 3/4. You now buy cars made by Dodge in the United States; back then they made great armored vehicles that they shipped across the ocean. Also, Soviet pilots were bringing American fighter planes, Airacobras, from the Far East to the front. That's what they used. In addition, we wore American uniforms. When I arrived at the hospital, I was immediately clothed in American cotton undergarments, which were of excellent quality. That's what I wore when I was staying at the hospital. So everything—from food to clothes to ammunition and planes—was American. Our things couldn’t compare in quality or suitability. So it was only years later that I understood how colossal the help we received from our allies, especially America, was.

I have to say that, to this day, it bothers me that no one remembers the enormous role of the soldiers' political-moral condition, which did not depend on official propaganda. So, for instance, when we received newspapers at the front, our main hope was finding a new article by Ilya Ehrenburg. To this date, I have not seen anyone fully appreciate the importance of Ilya Ehrenburg as someone who inspired us. The thing is that people looked up to the Germans to a certain extent. They were considered a very cultured, highly educated, scientific, and inellectual nation—which is true, generally. There was even this humorous saying: “The Germans are quite something; they even invented the moon to have light at night.” So it made sense that when Germany began their offensive, which was very well planned and organized, our soldiers, our troops, dropped their weapons and ran as fast as they could, seized by panic, precisely because they thought that the Germans could do anything, that the Germas were all-powerful. So they ran because of this totally wrong impression. It was only when Ehrenburg began coming out with his articles and exposed the Germans as marauders, as scum, as rapists, as people who totally lack any noble human qualities that differentiate men from animals, that our soldiers began developing the sense that we could beat the Germans. And from this point on, after Ehrenburg's contribution . . . I can show you, if you don't mind.

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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

—Yes, of course.

I still have this book. I still have it. It has Ehrenburg’s articles from the war, which were printed in newspapers and later assembled into this little pocket-sized book. I’m not going to read out loud from this book so as not to waste your time, but there are many interesting things in here. And if anyone gets a chance to read it . . .

—What year was it . . . ?

This book was published in 1944. So it contains articles and speeches dating to April 1943–March 1944. It is, by the way, not a coincidence that when Hitler was advancing on Moscow and believed he would capture it, he demanded that the first order of business was to tear out the tongue of Levitan. Yuri Levitan was the immensely popular announcer of Soviet radio. And the next thing was to cut off the hands of Ehrenburg. Tear out Levitan's tongue and cut off Ehrenburg's hands. There was a clear reason for this. Hitler understood the role Ehrenburg played in shaping the perception of German troops as marauders, enslavers, and rapists, as completely amoral, completely emotionless machines raised and educated in the frame of a fascist dictatorship, who had only these qualities and no others. My own experience confrimed that that really was the case.

After the war a completely new stage of life began for me. I have to say that during the war I didn’t feel any anti-Semitism from my comrades. Maybe it was because I was rather large at the time and physically a strong man. Besides, I was well trained, so no one would dare mess with me, so to say. But it also didn’t exist at the time. And there was no hazing, the kind of abuse of young soldiers that appeared later. We were all equal, and each one of us understood that we will have to carry our friend out of battle if he gets wounded and can’t make it out on his own. Our relations during the war were completely different than in the modern army, Soviet and, later, Russian. We were friends. We were all representatives of different ethnicities. So it is difficult for me to understand when the role of Jews in the war is portrayed as somehow different. I never experienced this myself. The only thing is that I knew about the German atrocities towards the Jews. I felt that I had a special score to settle with Hitler, and I would stick my nose where another [soldier] wouldn’t. So in that way, I thought that I was in a special position, in the sense that I could never try to avoid particularly difficult missions and always showed initiative in combat and so on.

—So you felt this way because you found out what was happening to the Jews?

Yes, in particular because I knew about and witnessed firsthand the results of those German actions. I saw it: I was present during the liberation of concentration camps. And I already knew a lot about it. I also learned a lot from Ehrenburg’s articles; he wrote a lot about that.

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Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

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ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

—So you mentioned earlier that your name wasn't recorded as Abraham . . .

Yes. I wanted to draw your attention to the fact that in my Red Army booklet, I am not listed as Yuli Abramovich. "Abramovich" was simply unthinkable for the clerk filling out these booklets. And also, I am listed as a Russian, not a Jew. I guess this was needed for the statistics. The scribe probably had . . .

—I don’t understand: You told him that you are a Jew and he wrote down "Russian"?

Yes. I am a Jew and my patronymic is Abramovich. But they wrote down "Andreyevich" and "Russian." But I want to repeat, again, that I felt absolutely no anti-Semitism from my fellow soldiers, my battle comrades, not once, never during the war. No one would even think to insult me, call me a zhid [Yid], and so on, because our relations were war relations. If someone offended me, he wouldn’t live to see his first battle. I think that everyone understood that we were all equal and one could get a bullet in the back during battle if he offended anyone. And this was normal; our relations were normal. On the other hand, there could be anti-Semitism coming from the leadership. For example, in the battle that I described earlier, where I received my third and last serious injury, what I did was worthy of the title Hero of the Soviet Union, but instead I received the Order of the Patriotic War 2nd Class. By the way, I found out about this order of the 2nd class from a letter from my platoon commander. He wrote to me when I was in the hospital. I will not read you the entire letter, but here he writes, “I am writing back to you on the move. We are in combat all the time, except for a period of six days after you went to the hospital. What we lost was replaced.” He is referring to artillery weapons that were destroyed. “Young submachine gunners were brought in as replacements. Gone from our group"—meaning in the same battle where I was wounded—"are Podobin, Zhisupov, Radionov, Yutkin, Mozhaitsev, Kim: they were all killed." He listed everyone who had died. "Baulin, Matusevich, and five new guys whom you don’t know were wounded.” In other words, this was a fierce battle against a tank attack, in which many of our friends perished. But I want to direct your attention to the following: Here we have Radionov, Mozhaitsev, Zhisupov, Podobin, and me, Yuli Kutner, a Jew. We have a Kazakh, a Ukrainian, a Russian. We were all like a single family, and we all behaved with respect and common hope toward one another. No one hurt anyone’s feelings or disrespected anyone. That did not happen. Then he goes on, “Now allow me to congratulate you for being awarded the Order of the Patriotic War 2nd Class. Make a note of the decree number." It was a decree of the Supreme Soviet. "I received the same award. Zhomogaleyev got a star, Kutrebtsin got the same thing as you, Azernov the Order of Glory 2nd Class. All our guys got awards, with the exception of Kirpa.” Kirpa was my gun layer who was killed while performing his combat duties. “Everyone says hello. Goodbye for now. I’m going into battle.” He writes, “I’m going into battle. If there is a free moment, I will write again.” This was March 27, 1945. Here is his letter. Here is the letter that is more than sixty years old today; [it was written] sixty-one years ago.

I still keep this letter, and it's always an emotional experience for me when I hold it or reread it.

—Thank you.

Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

This letter was delivered to the field postal address of my hospital from the field post office of the unit.

A different life began when I was demobilized. I was demobilized by the order of the Supreme Soviet and granted the right to get into any university without having to take entrance exams. And so when I returned to Moscow, the first thing I did was go with my documents to the university where I had always dreamed of going, which was the Institute of International Relations. I wanted to become a diplomat and work in the field of diplomatic relations. I was immediately turned away. I was told that I was not a representative of the indigenous ethnicity. I guess the indigenous ethnicity would be Russian. They said that they would not accept me because they train diplomatic workers, who have to belong to the indigenous ethnicity. I still don't know why that was the case. They very graciously explained this to me and said that, despite the order of the Supreme Soviet, they would not accept me to their university without entrance exams. I asked, but how can you obstruct this order? If I don't take exams, how can you fail me? They said that in addition to the exams, they conduct an interview with the applicant, after which I might not be recommended. They also said, young man, don’t waste your time; hurry up and apply to some other institution that will accept you. We will not be able to accept you. I immediately foolishly set out for the Moscow University, where I wanted to join the Department of History. Moscow University also rejected my documents, this time without any explanations, after a quick review of my newly issued passport, which listed my ethnicity. By the way, the US passport does not include this information.

—No.

But back there, everything was clear right from the beginning. So I was quickly turned away from there as well, and I had to leave Moscow because by that time my apartment was occupied by the family of a Leningrad engineer, survivor of the blockade, who cried on my shoulder, saying, “You’re a young man and yes, you can take the apartment away from me, but I have a family and kids, while you still have time to set up your life.” So I left Moscow and went to Ashgabat, where I enrolled in the Turkmenistan State University. I finished my education in the field of history in Riga, where I later moved and from where I eventually emigrated to America. But because I graduated from a history department and had a diploma in history and political economics, I could not find a job for three years because I was not a member of the party. I was unemployed for three years. Fortunately, I was able to work as a journalist and earn money for myself and my family during those three years. After that, I continued to work as a journalist for newpapers and devoted a fairly large part of my life to this profession. Because I wasn’t able to make use of my first diploma, the one in history, I entered a university for the second time. This time, I studied engineering in the Department of Marine Engineering of the Kaliningrad Technical Institute of Fishing Industry. I figured that I would be able to make use of this diploma. And I mentioned that I'd dreamed of naval service since I was a child. But when I finally received my diploma, I was denied the visa necessary for sea travel, so I wasn't able to get a job with this diploma either. I couldn't be a marine engineer because I didn’t get the visa for sea travel. The KGB would not issue it to me. I don’t know why: at the time I wasn’t even thinking

Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN about leaving the country and staying abroad and so on. I guess they could see the future better than I could.

Today I have a good life in America. My sister, who is in Lvov [Lviv], is a professional artist and she sends me albums of her work. I have to say that now, after the Perestroika, she finally has the opportunity to work with Jewish themes, something that she dreamed of doing for many years. These are the albums of her drawings. She is a professional graphic artist; she graduated from the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow and was sent to work in Lvov as a teacher in an art school. Her husband was the dean of the Glass and Ceramics Department at the same arts college, the same art school, while she was a teacher of painting and drawing. These are her works. She fell in love the city of Lvov. This album here also has her drawings of Lvov. She sends these to me. It was just my luck to be her talentless brother. We are both the descendants of the famous Antakolsky, who was a well-known Jewish sculptor who is generally referred to as a Russian sculptor and artist. This is her biography, which mentions that she seems to have inherited his wonderful talent to some degree. I did not inherit any of it, so I just look at her work with much pleasure, and I value it deeply, especially because for the first time in her life she can finally pursue these Jewish themes. She is enjoying her work very much and continues to live in Lvov, in Ukraine.

Yuli Kutner. Full, unedited interview, 2006

ID CA006.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b42b9g

ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN

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