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Ilya Osherov. full unedited interview

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ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 11

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TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION —Today is March 27, 2008. We are in Jerusalem meeting with a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Please introduce yourself, tell us about your childhood, how you ended up in the Red Army and how you spent the war.

My name is Ilya Markovich Osherov. I was born in July 1924 in Pochep, Bryansk Oblast. Pochep is a small town, one might even say, a Jewish shtetl. The town had unusual origins. When the ancient Poles sacked it, they hanged all the inhabitants. In the Polish language, the “gallows” is pochep [this is a misconception]. Hence the town’s ominous name. It used to be Count Kleinmichel’s estate; he was Minister of Transport under tsar Nicholas I. We were told in school why the Moscow-Petersburg railway in the Torzhok area had a bend: Count Klenmichel was German, he presented the project which swerved. The tsar didn’t like it: I am the tsar, I must travel in a straight line. He took a ruler, held it with a finger, and penciled in a line. The finger protruded, resulting in a rounding. A rule-abiding person, Count Kleinmichel built the road with this bend. And so it remains until this day. The Count did not allow people of low social standing, the homeless in our parlance, to stay in Pochep. The city was clean and beautiful. Count Kleinmichel’s manor house boasted marble columns, a park, chestnut alleys leading to the river. It was a three-story estate, and that is where our school was located.

The palace had an atrium that led to a cathedral. A large, beautiful cathedral. After the revolution, a library was set up in Count Kleinmichel’s vestibule. Two elderly relatives of Count Kleinmichel looked after the library. When my brother and I discovered it, we started coming there. The women encountered a very nice boy, neat and diligent, who enjoyed reading. They would ask me about the books I read afterwards. So they gave us books the type of which I would never see again: thick gelded tomes by Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev . . . I once came across a book on architecture. I found Pochep in it, and it was from there that I learnt what I have just told you. Turns out it had a photograph of the Count’s estate and the cathedral. It said that even at the time it had already been a world heritage site. From the yearly years I remember that the palace and the cathedral were built by architect de la Motte, who together with Rastrelli constructed St. Petersburg. The town also boasted two more stone churches and eight wooden ones of extraordinary beauty, fairytale edifices. The Nazis burned everything down. The cathedral remained, but the Count’s palace—our school—was blown up by the Germans.

I was born in this town, in the family of a dentist and a dental technician. Father received his education in Poland, in Warsaw. He first became a dentist, but after arriving and working for a while in Bryansk he realized that a dentist and prosthodontist should be one and the same person. We had two surgeries at home: a dentist’s office and a dental prosthetic one. Mother was a surgical nurse and used to work in a city hospital. My father was in charge of the dental office at the outpatient clinic and had a private practice. The first to be born was my brother Abram, who had a penchant for history and literature, and he was very

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ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN good at drawing. I was born two years later. Abram had enrolled at the Moscow Institute of Literature, Philosophy and History, completed his first year, came back on vacation, and that’s when the war began. He was in the infantry, a envoy between the headquarters and the troops.

Parents got two death notices for him. He participated in the battles near Kharkov [Kharkiv], Leningrad [St. Petersburg] and Konigsberg [Kaliningrad]. He had a medal “For Courage”, the Order of the Red Star and the Order of Soldier Glory, 3rd Class. He died in Israel: an Arab truck ran over him.

I graduated from high school with honors. I liked reading and at the same time was very much into engineering. Father had a good set of tools, and from the eighth grade I started helping him with dental prosthetics, and even manufactured dental caps for my classmates. I constructed my own radio. In ninth grade I already knew decent German, because our teachers were mainly former nobles and tsarist officers. We received solid education, and all the pupils in our school went to universities. Once I caught a broadcast of Hitler’s speech in a sports palace in Munich [likely one of his other speeches]. At first, I was puzzled, because I heard German: a German man speaking in a clear, firm voice. Then the voice rose, toughened, became agitated and turned into a scream; when that happened, instead of applauding listeners ostensibly stamped their feet; and then—“Heil Hitler”. I listened for an hour. He spoke mainly about the bourgeois plutocracy of America and England.

Then my sister was born, and life went on. Count Kleinmichel’s palace had two rear wings. In one of them he set up an agricultural school, where the children of nobles were taught to become agricultural experts in harvesting wheat, vegetables, as well as husbandry. They had a veterinary education and became estate managers. Both of my grandfathers were rabbis. Asher was a rabbi during the reign of Alexander, when the first census was conducted in Russia. This is how they did it: tables were set up in the town square, where military clerks sat. They went systematically street by street. When it was the Jewish street’s turn, the officer said: “Jews, approach. Who will go first?” People grew anxious. Jew were generally aloof around officers and soldiers. So they began to shout, “Asher, Asher, you go”. My grandfather and his family went first. At the time, Jews had no last names, only names and monikers, like the rest of the population of Russia—only names and nicknames. Only the nobles had family names. So, the officer suggested the last name “Osherov.” Grandfather agreed. The other grandfather was also a rabbi, his name was Gilya. He was highly educated, intelligent, and often acted as a deputy of the estate manager. Grandfather had two sons. The manager suggested that he enrolls his children at that agricultural school. They graduated and found employment with two landowners. When the Revolution happened, one of the sons—Mendel—kept his estate very well managed. The landowner himself lived in Paris with his entire family. Mendel had a good rapport with local peasants, and was well respected. Just before the Revolution, the smart landowner came back, sold his estate, and gifted all the furniture to my grandfather Mendel and remunerated him for good service. Mendel bought a two-story red brick house in the shopping arcade. The family lived upstairs, and downstairs was my father’s practice and his brother Israel’s watchmaking business. Then Soviet power arrived, the house was confiscated. They had to buy a wooden house with a garden in the city center. We

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ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN lived there until the war, and life was good. We survived the famine relatively unscathed, because Mother had by then stopped working as a surgical nurse, we had a servant, a cow, geese, ducks, hens, a vegetable plot, and a garden. It helped us survive.

I graduated from school and applied to Moscow Aviation Institute to the faculty of instrument engineering. My application came back with a postscript that, owing to the hostilities, we were advised to apply to local institutes. In August, the Germans approached the city. There was a distillery in the village of Zhitnoye. One day we heard an artillery salvo. After the war, we found out that the Germans had dropped a landing party, but our military commissar thought the German army was closing in. So, they broadcast across the town that all men aged seventeen to forty-five should arrive at the military recruitment office with a four- day supply of food and identity papers. They were to be marched towards Bryansk. I was seventeen. My brother was on vacation, and he thought that he could still return to Moscow. I was a stout guy, athletic. The military commissar’s orders also stated that town residents were allowed to evacuate individually and that all the relevant papers could be obtained from the town council. We had a 101-year-old grandmother. So, I couldn’t just leave. Father fought in the First World War, as a warrant officer in the artillery; he had beautiful military decorations. He said, “Go, because if you don’t show up and the Germans do not take the town, you will be considered a deserter”. I went and the family stayed behind.

So, we marched. Day and night crowds crossed the town, horse-drawn, and families of party workers on trucks. Refugees from the Baltic States and Belarus. They stopped for rest, we fed them in our house. They told tales of Germans killing Jews. Immediately local militia had sprung up in the Baltics surpassing the Germans in their bloodthirstiness. So we already knew what the Germans were like. A group of sixty people gathered. A senior sergeant took our papers; he was to be our leader who had to take us to Bryansk to fight another day. Initially we walked along the road together with refugees until a German plane appeared in the sky. It had a double hull and two tails at the back. It looked like a frame, and he was immediately nicknamed the “frame.” It was a German Focke-Wulf reconnaissance aircraft. It made a round, dived, dropped leaflets that read “Beat the Yid politruk, he’s had it coming”. It also said: “People, don’t leave, take care of the harvest . . . Wait for us”. On the heals of the “frame” came a front-line fighter, a single-engine Junkers aircraft. It had a landing gear that didn’t retract but was covered with fairings. He began firing at us. Immediately people fell dead or wounded. The road went along the forest, so we all ended up in the woods. The Bryansk forest . . . You have no idea the wonder the Bryansk forest is, which the Germans would later fell and send trainloads of timber to Germany. The forest closely surrounded the city . . . We walked through this forest. The forest protected us from above, but was terribly dangerous. The Red Army retreated through the forest, leaving their guns behind, though they had pulled the locks out. They drowned them in the swamps. Shells were strewn about, horses roamed the land—at that time, the artillery was mainly horse-drawn. And there were bandits from Russian villages wandering around and robbing the unfortunate refugees. There were also a different kind of goons: men in quilted jackets and boots, carrying carbines and calling themselves partisans as they tried to press gang young male refugees.

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In addition, the forest was teeming with German scouts. Our leader . . . The older ones began to demand that he gave them their papers back, they wanted to return home, because they couldn’t leave their families behind. The sergeant handed us our papers. I got my school certificate and passport. He disappeared, just vanished. The oldest guy said, “We have our papers and no leader. I’m going back to Pochep to be with my family”. The three of us—we went to school together—continued towards Bryansk. It was unthinkable for Jews to return. I was very anxious about my parents’ fate. They had neither a horse nor a cart, nothing. And saddled with grandmother, Sima-Hannah, who was 101-years old. We went to Bryansk, tried to join a military unit.

We got some food from the locals. Once we came across several women picking raspberries. We asked where we could go in the countryside to earn some money to buy food and move on. They told us, “Go to our farm.” It was a forestry. We went. It was so beautiful, flowers everywhere . . . Suddenly, a Red Army man stood up from under a bush and whispered, “Hide behind the bushes right away and don’t lift your heads until I tell you to”. We lay low. The place was cordoned off by soldiers. Presently we saw German scouts. This was my first sighting of the Nazis. As the crouched, the wore helmets and grey camouflage, and carried submachine guns. Suddenly, came a burst from a Degtyarev light machine gun, PPD. The Germans lay low, but our soldiers threw two grenades in their midst, and then a handkerchief tied to the barrel of a submachine gun went up—they were surrendering. Turned out eight of our scouts had set up an ambush. They told us to approach. We did and saw three dead Germans and two still alive, gagged and tied, their guns lying on the ground; all of them had their boots removed. Then one of the killed Germans twitched. Red Army servicemen carried sheathed bayonets from automatic rifles. The Germans were finished off with the bayonets. The commanding officer told us: “Take the boots and the weapons, and help us bring them to the unit”. We went. When we arrived in the unit and handed everything over, an elderly officer in a leather jacket approached and began to interrogate us: who we were, where from, where our parents were. Then he brought us to the headquarters and put us on the muster roll. Later we learned that he was a SMERSH officer [might have been an NKVD officer or a political commissar, because SMERSH was established only in late 1942].

The battalion was making a fighting retreat and we moved together with them. Our task was to help medical orderlies drag the wounded and the killed, as well as their weapons, to wash bloodied, dirty bandages, because there was a great shortage of medical supplies. We would then hang them up to dry and rolled them back again. With the battalion we survived artillery shelling, mortar attacks, and bombing. Single-engine Junkers flew in formation, their engines, single and double, produced a very specific sound, so we would know that an air raid would soon commence. When the aircraft approached the target, they would form a circle and begin diving one after another, dropping their load, strafing, and moving out of the way. One after another. Having dropped their bombs, they would fly away in formation.

Near Bryansk the battalion joined others, and we were put on a lorry and taken to the recruitment office.

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They gave us a recommendation letter, saying that we had diligently carried out all the assigned tasks. The recruitment office decided our fate: “Since you have already done some fighting and have proved yourselves, you will be immediately sent on an evacuation train to Tatishchevo.” This is a city on the Volga, which housed a huge training base for the front reserve. First, we were sent to Krasnoarmeysk to a recruitment office. There, we got enlisted and asked in which army branch we wanted to serve. I immediately said: artillery. There was a sturdy guy among us, Itzik Zuckerman, he asked to go to the navy, and was assigned to the marines . . . I ended up in a training regiment. It was terrible, because they brought us to a clearing, far from villages. A town, then called “earthy town”, was being constructed there. We dug huge, long trenches, and these later became the barracks for the artillery regiment. Some materiel lay under tarpaulins, while everyone was engaged in construction. Some of us dug with shovels, for there was no other equipment, other knead clay with bare feet in a pit. They gave us boots and puttees. The puttees would unravel. So with our bare feet we would knead the clay until our feet froze. Our chests and heads and necks would get sweaty, but the feet would get very cold. The regiment commander, a portly, red-faced guy atop a stout stallion, would show up frequently, crack his whip and pepper us with obscenities. He made us anxious, livelier but also hateful. We carried the clay in wheelbarrows, made the roof with reeds, and cover them with clay.

It was terrible, what I’ve gone through. There was almost no food. Two posts were driven into the ground with two rough boards on top. This was our canteen. A field mess would arrive from somewhere and poured some grub. We didn’t have any mess tins, so had to use anything suitable. It was lucky I had a tin can. They even poured the grub into caps and threw a piece of bread in. The grub was lukewarm, not nutritious at all. That was all the food we had three times a day. There was nowhere to sleep. We had several small capacity army tents. After dinner, everyone tried to grab a place to sleep and literally lay on top of one another. Frosts had already set in. It was very hard. Thus I survived the winter. In the early spring, they suddenly selected fifty people with secondary and higher education and began training them in the art of artillery. I received my initial training and was sent to the Southwestern Front as a gunner. It was already the end of 1942. I got assigned to an artillery battery, 120 mm howitzer guns. In that area, the Southwestern Front deflected German troops to prevent Hitler reaching the Caucasian oil reserves. We participated in skirmishes, fired a lot of ammunition, but were shot at, as well.

Suddenly, I was summoned to the regimental headquarters and given an assignment to go to Tambov, to an artillery school. The battery commander said that I was a good gunner. I even helped him with calculations. Senior Lieutenant Gorobets, a Ukrainian. He said that amid scarcity, Stalin gave orders urgently to train artillery commanders. So I went to Tambov. I studied for six months at that school. Not much joy there, either. We were billeted in a former stable, which smelt of manure. There stood bunk beds with straw mattresses, and it was extremely cold, but there were no stoves. We were told to wash the floor. The water would freeze immediately, and the soldiers would slip on the ice. There was a terrible episode. A cadet, a tenth grader who lived near Tambov disappeared from our training battery. He just vanished. They searched for him for three days in the vicinity of the school, until his relatives informed the authorities

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ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN that he was at home. They went to bring him back. Turns out, his girlfriend had been cheating on him, so he escaped to put things right. He was caught drunk. He was absent for a week and was court-martialled. The entire school—all the cadets and instructors—lined up. The NKVD arrived and sentenced him to death by shooting for desertion. And he just stood there, very calm—his hands were untied—he even smiled at other cadets. But when told that he would be shot, he fell to his knees and sobbed . . . It was terrible. But the NKVD were after his blood. They shook him, propped him up, three of them gave a volley, and it was over. He was thrown in the back of a truck. But they could have sent him to a penal battalion.

We were longing to go to the front, because they fed us poorly and drilled us in the middle of winter: my ear and toes got frostbitten. And suddenly, we were lined up again in the stables and told that on the order of the Supreme Commander, a group of thirty people would be transferred to the Leningrad School of Anti-Aircraft Artillery, then located in Tomsk. On the spot, we were introduced to our training platoon commander, a lieutenant from that school, who would take us there. He did, and we found ourselves in Tomsk on the campus of the Institute of Technology. Tomsk is an academic city, very old and beautiful. We studied there for three months. There is no comparing anti-aircraft guns with field artillery. An anti-aircraft gun had a fire control device with a four-meter marine rangefinder with two viziers, which determined the elevation angle and the target range. People with “special” vision were chosen to operate them. It had a grid with crosses. I had the required stereoscopic vision, that is, I could see three-dimensionally. One had to turn this knob and follow the cross when it aligned with a plane and went behind it; and when this cross coincided with the plane, one would press the button and a signal was transmitted to the control device serviced by six people. Two gunners sat on an 85 mm anti-aircraft gun, and aligned handles in azimuth and height . . . I graduated from this school, and the two of us were sent to Gorky [Nizhniy Novgorod], to the 784th Anti-Aircraft Regiment, which stood on the defense of the Gorky Automobile Plant and other sites: the nearby town of Dzerzhinsk where gas masks were manufactured. The regiment was part of the 3rd Air Defense Corps, which provided air cover for the entire Gorky Economic Region.

I came to the headquarters with a partner, and we were assigned to divisions.

The chief of staff was a tall, slender, handsome dandy, dressed in a new uniform, Major Levitsky. He had seen our files, so after he sent away my partner who came with me, he said to me, “You are a Jew and I am a Jew, let’s agree that you don’t come to me and you don’t ask me for anything, because there are many persistent, arrogant officers, who demand this and that. Don’t come to me lest I am accused of favoring you”. I didn’t like it a bit. He called a messenger and sent me to the peat swamps. There stood an artillery division: three batteries, which were quite far apart, dugouts . . . He sent me to the Gorky Automobile Plant to a battery of small-caliber twin anti-aircraft guns, which were loaded not with a separate shell that went into the barrel, but with a clip. They had a spinning platform and two guns firing simultaneously; hence, two gunners. The messenger brought me to this battery that was located on the roof of a huge workshop. The battery was divided into two platoons. The battery commander remained with one platoon, “and you

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ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN will command the second platoon”.

The platoon commander turned out to be a Jew, named Cherny, from Moscow, a university educated senior sergeant. He was the gun commander. I assumed command. After a while, the battery commander came and said, “You are young but clever, you’ve got it.” He said that the platoon was in good hands. Once we were attacked from the air, and that’s when I was wounded: got a shell fragment in the back and in my arms. In addition, I was thrown onto the iron roof and was concussed. Both gun crews had wounded among them. That night a very large formation of Junkers came. The foundry was disabled. Zhdanov flew in urgently to rebuild it. At that time, I was transferred from this battery to an 85 mm gun battery, with instruments. The division commander sent me to the battery, and there I became commander of the platoon and then senior officer of the battery. We fired our guns, defending the area. By the order of the Supreme Commander, this air defense area was equated with the frontline. They gave us a daily ration of 100 grams of vodka . . . Officers were killed there, there were many saboteurs.

Finally, a new order arrived. I spent 1943 there. As the summer of 1944 approached, our regiment was transferred to the 1st Belorussian Front under Zhukov’s command, and our Corps was to be under Zhukov’s personal command. It took two trains to get us there: 37 mm anti-aircraft guns on top of the locomotives, in the middle and in the tail. Besides, we engaged six more guns, as well as heavy 14.5 mm anti-aircraft machine guns. I manned one of those machine guns. We drove on, firing back. First, we arrived in Smolensk. The city had been destroyed. We were transported around the perimeter of the railway station. We guarded the railway station, because troops were moving through. Then we reached Minsk. Minsk had been devastated. Only the station building and the neighboring Communist Party building remained; the rest was smoke, fire, blackness—everything was ablaze. After Brest had been taken, we transferred there. Finally, we arrived on the Vistula, in Warsaw.

Warsaw is located on the western bank of the Vistula, and its suburb is called Praga. We arrived and unloaded there. Our troops had already crossed the Vistula. It was in the fall: black water, wind, freezing cold. Our battery deployed near a destroyed bridge. On the remaining piers someone wrote in large red letters: “Where Zhukov goes, Victory follows.” Stalin would make Zhukov pay for these words. In his view, it should have been: Where Stalin goes, Victory follows. There, we also fired at tanks across the river. Then, when Warsaw was taken . . . Stalin didn’t let Zhukov take Warsaw on the run; Zhukov hated Stalin for it. Many people died.

Then we ended up in the city of Poznan. In Poznan, our battery deployed near a huge three-story building—a concrete pillbox. We drew a short straw with that place. When we got there, I immediately alerted the battery commander: “Look, there are embrasures ...” We were yet unaware that it was one of the many pillboxes of the Poznan Citadel. All the bunkers around Poznan were connected by underground tunnels, with an electric trolley running the length of them. I discovered it later. Once we had dug in and

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ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN prepared for battle, I told him, “Let’s fire several rounds at the embrasures with shrapnel shells”. It was about 150 meters away. He immediately called the division commander. Two self-propelled guns SU76 and a company of infantry on vehicles and, of course, NKVD men were moving in our direction. When we opened fire, white sheets went up from the embrasures. At the same time, the gates of the bunker area opened, and several hundred soldiers with their hands raised came out. The commander of the pillbox, an SS man, said, “I have long known that this war is lost and it makes no sense to waste our lives; the men and officers support me”. He handed us the blueprints of the entire fortress, which helped to clear it quickly. Down there they had a hospital, a radio station, even their own power station. We shot at the planes that dropped supplies and ammunition to them. I used a megaphone to give commands. In the center there stood an anti-aircraft machine gun in case a fighter aircraft approached us. It so happened that a fighter did approached that day. This was already after the pillbox had been taken. But I was an old hack. I knew that he would approach and then dive to bomb the battery. And so he did, while I waited until he came close enough for a bullet to do the maximum damage. He flew close and released a bomb. A bomb is clearly visible at first, like a drop of water. And then it picks up speed and is no longer visible. He hit the crates of shells. Those were very dear, we treasured them. It hit the crates, and I got hit on my legs, lost lots of blood, and was taken to the regimental hospital. I stayed there for ten days. When I returned, our battery was already packing up, as we had been sent to the Oder. Our forces had already approached the Oder and engaged the enemy.

—Where did the war end for you?

In Berlin. We deployed on the Oder. I had been sent on a mission at the beginning of the final assault on Berlin. The Seelow Heights. Our regiment, which remained in Poznan, had sent four spotlights. They say it was a staff officer’s idea, a Jew. There were 120 spotlights. I was appointed commander of this group. When they brought me back, they sent the entire battalion to Berlin. We shot at fortified buildings, aircraft, and tanks. My war ended there. For my idea to fire at the embrasures, I was awarded the Order of the Red Star. Before that, I was appointed chief of the train carrying anti-aircraft shells.

The whole lot was being transported to a seaport on the shores of the Baltic Sea. The train moved across enemy territory, not yet cleared by the Soviet army. We were dressed in German uniforms. I was the echelon commander, and the driver and stokers were Germans. My soldiers in disguise manned observation platforms. Upon my return, I found our regiment preparing for shipment to Japan. I was ordered to look for our anti-aircraft installations in a cavalry division. To that effect, I had to walk 300 km from Berlin to Tilsit [Sovetsk], where the headquarters of this division was located.

—What happened to your family, to your parents?

They left on foot. Friends took Grandmother on their cart. They left everything behind. They managed to leave. Grandmother was killed by a mortar shell in some village. Father, Mother, brother and little sister

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ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN made it. They came to the Volga Germans. Then Stalin drove the Russian Germans away. When I saw them again, they were decrepit old people.

—Many thanks.

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