DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Arkadiy Minevich. Full, unedited interview, 2007 ID OH008.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47688 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 Arkadiy Minevich. Full, unedited interview, 2007 ID OH008.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47688 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION —Today is June 7, 2007. We are in Cincinnati, meeting a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Please introduce yourself and tell us about your childhood, how you came to serve in the Red Army, and about your wartime experiences. I was born in 1924, but this was later changed to 1923 for reasons I will explain in a bit. —Please introduce yourself. My name is Arkadiy Naumovich Minevich. I was born in Kalinkavichy, in what was then the Polesia Oblast of Belarus. My mother was a housewife and my father worked in the forestry industry. In 1941 I finished tenth grade and had my graduation ceremony on June 21, the night before the war began. We were all celebrating in the woods when a guy ran up to us around noon and said “War! Molotov just said that we are at war.” We immediately ran home. Since I was a Komsomol member, the following day the district Komsomol committee summoned me and assigned me to a civilian militia. The militia was housed in a school building and we were issued Polish rifles and ammunition. We were all young guys . I was just seventeen. There was one thing that happened at that time that I cannot omit. This happened for sure, I have even read about it in a book. I do not remember whether this was on June 24 or 27, but we were all woken up by an alarm, grabbed our rifles, and were loaded onto trucks. The Germans had landed paratroopers near Kalinkavichy and we were drive there. We opened fire until we heard an order to cease fire over the loudspeaker. There were militia units from a few districts there. It turned out that these were our paratroopers that were supposed to be deployed in Poland but had accidentally landed in Kalinkavichy. Someone began firing and they mistook our Belarusian for Polish. It was only later, when someone started shouting “For Stalin!” . They followed the railroad tracks until they came across a switch operator’s work station and saw a portrait of Stalin. Only then did they realize that they had been deployed in the wrong place. Later they were all gathered together and they even dried their parachutes at the same school where we were based. My parents were evacuated five days later on one of the passing trains, but I stayed behind. I stayed in my home town, but when the Germans got close, it was decided that we should be put onto trains and sent deeper into Soviet territory. They had to take us through Gomel, but could not do so because the Germans were already on the approaches to the city, so instead we were taken through Kiev [Kyiv]. Before that, I had to figure out what to do with our cow and the chickens that we had just gotten that year. I came home and broke open the door to the henhouse, poured all the grain onto the ground, let the cow out, and left. We were sent to Voroshilovgrad [now Luhansk] Oblast. We traveled through Kiev. The Germans were approaching there. We saw dragon’s teeth [a type of anti-tank fortification] . When we arrived in 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 2/15 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Arkadiy Minevich. Full, unedited interview, 2007 ID OH008.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47688 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN Voroshilovgrad Oblast, all the young people were sent to assist with the harvest. I worked on a hay baler. When the Germans began approaching the oblast, we were again loaded onto trains and taken to Kazan. This was in September or October. When we got to Kazan, we were loaded onto steamships and sent to dig anti-tank trenches in the countryside. We dug trenches until January, when the temperature began to dip down to -50 degrees Celsius. We had no shoes. If our boots ripped, we were issued bast shoes that we could then replace for seven rubles a pair . we were issued a new pair every month. It was very cold, so the guys and I ripped up a blanket in order to make footwraps to wear to work. Aside from that . we were not rationed any bread. After about a month and a half or two, representatives from the Vakhitov Factory came to us in order to recruit workers. Their workers had been drafted and they needed someone to press soap. Each chunk of soap weighed 45 kilograms, too heavy for the women, so they were recruiting new workers. I had a friend named Zhenka Osipov. We decided to walk to Kazan. It was 200 kilometers, in the winter, -50 degrees Celsius and there was no forest for cover. They told us to follow the telegraph poles and spend the night in villages that were on our way. Zhenka Osipov and I set out. His cheek or his nose would start freezing. We figured out that we had to take our towels and wrap them around our faces, leaving holes only for our eyes. We walked, knowing that we had to walk 20 kilometers through the snow and cold to reach the next village. We would arrive and ask the locals to shelter us in exchange for work like chopping firewood . All the men were gone. We would do our work and then the locals would give us something to eat and drink, as well as a place to sleep. We arrived in Kazan after four days of this, chilled to our bones and hungry. We came to the factory and were given jobs as soap pressers, which was demanding work. We worked for eight hours, then rested for eight hours, then worked for eight hours again, and so on. We were very hungry because our rations were not enough to keep us full. We were issued ration cards for porridge or oatmeal, but this was not enough and there was no bread. There were large cisterns with sunflower oil at the factory left there from before the war. They used sunflower oil to make the soap. We were young guys and we were starving. We poured it into our porridge and ate it like soup. Then we got terrible heartburn. There was a lot of water there and if you slipped you would likely be soaked from the neck down. Our target was to press seven units every shift, but we managed to produce nine. The work was very difficult, with each soap slab weighing 45 kilograms, made up of 75 smaller blocks. I remember it to this day. They would be loaded onto carts and then taken to be cut up. We really did not like working there and wanted to go to the front. There was an announcement that the Lankaran Coastal Defense Academy was recruiting cadets. Zhenka Osipov and I applied because we had both finished high school. We applied and waited. In late February we received notices to leave our jobs, collect everything that was owed to us, and prepare for departure to Lankaran. We arrived at the recruitment office only to learn that we had to go back to work since the Germans were approaching Lankaran and the academy was in the process of relocating to Baku. However, 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 3/15 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Arkadiy Minevich. Full, unedited interview, 2007 ID OH008.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b47688 ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN we no longer wanted to return back to work. We saw an announcement in the recruitment office that the armored forces school in Kazan was enrolling cadets. We decided to give it a shot, so we went to the school and applied. We were interviewed. Zhenka was accepted, while I was rejected because I was born in 1924 and was not old enough for the draft yet. He had the documents and I did not. I went outside and did not know what to do. We'd been together all this time and now I didn't know what to do with myself. Plus, I'd been separated from my mother. I was probably sitting there and crying when a captain walked by and asked me why I was in tears. I told him that my friend had been accepted to the academy and that I had not. There were already 200 or 300 civilians waiting in quarantine to begin training and I said that the only reason I was rejected was because I was born in 1924. and didn't have the right papers. He asked me if I had any other documents with me and I said I did not because of the evacuation. He said, "So just write 1923 then." I immediately did what he said. I think he put in a word for me because my application was immediately accepted and I was sent to quarantine with the others. Following that there was an interview, which only seven out of 200 passed. I was among those that passed. Our company was composed mainly of sergeants and sergeant majors that were separated from their units during the retreat.