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DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Leizer Selektor. Full, unedited interview, 2009 ID MI011.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4xg06 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 15 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 1/15 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Leizer Selektor. Full, unedited interview, 2009 ID MI011.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4xg06 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION -Today is April 26th, 2009. We are in Detroit, meeting a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your childhood, your school years, what kind of family you grew up in, and what your parents did for a living. How did you come to serve in the Red Army and what were your wartime experiences like? My name is Leyzer Levikovich Selektor and I was born on April 16th, 1921 in the town of Lokhvytsia, Poltava Region, Ukraine. Dunayevsky and I came from the same town. A year later, in 1922, my parents and I moved to Romny where we lived until the start of war. My father held views that were progressive for that time. He was highly erudite despite having had only two years of religious schooling. He did not have the opportunity to attend school because his father, grandfather Iosif, had a lot of children and did not earn much money as a religious teacher. He was self-taught. At 13 he was sent to work as an apprentice in a clothing accessories shop. He worked there as an errand boy until he was 17, but he did not waste his time and kept honing his skills. By the time he was 17-18 he had mastered his trade. The owner began paying him well and he finally could afford books, which he could no longer live without. His children remember him either at work or with a book in his hand. He never did anything else. When my father came home from work my mother would turn to us children, who had already been fed, and say “Go play outside. Your father is tired after work and I need to feed him.” My mother was an amazing cook, but unfortunately this was wasted on my father. She would put the food in front of him, but he would open a book and paid much more attention to what was on the pages that in the plate. He was fluent in Russian, Ukrainian, Polish, and Yiddish, and had a profound knowledge and love of their respective literary tradition; a trait that he passed on to his children. Whenever he had free time he read to us, often from memory. He recited Pushkin, Mickiewicz, and Shevchenko for us. He knew many large works by memory. My mother was from a different kind of family. Her father had been the owner of an alcohol factory in the village of Nedryhailiv, Romny District [now a district seat –EB], Sumy Region. Her family also had many children, but all of them were given an education. My mother graduated from a gymnasium, which was as far as a Jewish girl could get at the time. She met my father after graduating, and even though he was six years older than her, he managed to convince her to marry him. There were four children in our family, two boys and two girls. We also had a stepsister. She was the daughter of my father’s elder brother Zalman, who passed away in 1900. In 1902 his wife went to America and said that she would be back for her children, whom she left with her parents. Of course nobody ever came back, so my father took his niece Sonya in and raised her. His other brother raised Zalman’s son Zinoviy. That pretty much sums up our 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 2/15 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Leizer Selektor. Full, unedited interview, 2009 ID MI011.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4xg06 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN family. Our parents loved each other and we never heard our father raise his voice, or our mother chewing out our father for something he did. I was the third child in our family, which embraced us with love. My eldest sister, who was nine years older, was like a second mother to me and spent all of her free time with me. My elder brother, who was seven years older, protected me from all of the trouble of the streets. We lived happily and supported one another as best as we could. When I turned five a religious teacher began coming to our home in order to teach me prayers, Yiddish, Russian, and arithmetic. By the time I turned eight I had completed the elementary school curriculum. The religious teacher was named Mr. Tsiriulik. He was a tall and strict man, who demanded that I learn everything that I needed. Fortunately, I was a capable student and my studies progressed smoothly. When I turned eight I had to start school, but there was the question of which school to attend. The schools nearest to us were Russian School No.4 and Yiddish School No.5. Since my older siblings had attended the Yiddish school, it was decided that I was to follow in their footsteps. However, I was bored because even though I enrolled directly into the second grade, I knew everything that the teacher was teaching us. This was true in third and fourth grade too. This made me restless and I would often come to school with a baby mouse, frog, or whatever else interested me in my pocket. I was on good terms with my classmates. In fifth, sixth, and seventh grade we began studying in earnest and the work became much more difficult. I cannot omit a mention of my teachers. At our school the teachers went above and beyond what was expected of them, and treated each pupil as if it was their own child that they had to educated and share all they could with. We were taught everything with great quality and depth. They not only imparted us with knowledge, but also taught us how to learn and how to achieve what we wanted in life. When I finished seventh grade… I forgot to mention that we lived on a military base. The 21st Rifle Regiment of the 7th Red Banner Division was stationed in Romny and the barracks were in the building of the former seminary school. Our home was not far from the former seminary and the synagogue. A man named Polotskiy had owned a group of buildings and we lived in one of them. Slowly but surely the base commander began requisitioning those buildings, and soon we found ourselves surrounded by the military. This made me want to join the military, so after seventh grade I applied to the Odesa Cavalry School. That same day the base commander met with my father and said “You need to get that dumb idea out of Leyzer’s head. Braiding horses’ tails is not for him. Let him finish a ten year school, and if he still wants to join the military, we’ll find a better school for him.” My father talked to me about this. Later the principal of our school invited me and a few of my classmates and said “Kids, there is a chance that we could open an eighth grade at our school and turn it into a ten-year school. However, we need at least 20 pupils in eighth grade.” He invited the most popular students in seventh grade and they managed to 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 3/15 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Leizer Selektor. Full, unedited interview, 2009 ID MI011.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4xg06 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN facilitate the creation of grades eight through ten. All the subjects such as math, physics, chemistry, and geography were taught in Yiddish. Only Russian, German, and Ukrainian were not taught in Yiddish. We were very lucky when it came to Russian because our teacher was a former literature professor at Moscow State University. She had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and had to relocate to a more favorable climate. She was originally from Romny and the principal invited her to teach at our school. We were also lucky with our German teacher. He was a real German named Ludwig Zamrau. He had been taken prisoner during WWI, married a Ukrainian woman, and never returned home. He was extremely demanding of us. All of our teachers were demanding, but within reason. I graduated from high school and had to figure out what to do with my life. My brother was studying at a flight school in Perm and said to me “We already have one pilot in the family, and that is enough.” My father said to me “You can do whatever you like, but please do not go into trade. I would give my right hand to make sure that you don’t go into that field.” He worked in trade himself. My family and I deliberated. In 1933 the fascists came to power in Germany and even though I was 14, I already understood that a fight to the death is inevitable, so I must prepare. I was the first secretary of our school’s Komsomol organization, and I used my influence to rally the boys in my class. I said to them “Lads, we must be ready for battle.

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