• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Ilya Osherov. full unedited interview ID IS064.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b45d8ng96 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 11 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 1/11 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Ilya Osherov. full unedited interview ID IS064.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b45d8ng96 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN 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 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 2/11 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Ilya Osherov. full unedited interview ID IS064.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b45d8ng96 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 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 3/11 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Ilya Osherov. full unedited interview ID IS064.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b45d8ng96 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.

Load more

  11

Copy Link