DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Lev Manevich. Full, unedited interview, 2009 ID BEL036.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4dt1c ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TABLE OF CONTENTS ITEM TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION 2 CITATION & RIGHTS 13 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 1/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Lev Manevich. Full, unedited interview, 2009 ID BEL036.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4dt1c ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN TRANSCRIPT ENGLISH TRANSLATION —Today is November 3, 2009. We are in Vitebsk, Belarus. We are meeting with a veteran of the Great Patriotic War. Please tell us your name, where and when you were born. Please, go ahead. It's the beginning of November. A few days from now we will celebrate the great October Revolution, which I congratulate you with. —Please introduce yourself. I am Lev Genrikhovich Manevich. This has been my last name to date, but for two years when I had a different name—Pyotr Vasilyevich Shvedov. I also had a number, "vier und achtzig, vier, ein und achtzig” [84481]. —Where and when were you born? I was born in the Viktorovka khutor, near the Mozhzhevoe village of the Kaslyukovichsky District, Mogilev Oblast, to a family of Jewish peasants. —What do you remember of your life before the war, of your family? Even though we were very poor—we were "kolkhozniki" [collective farmers]—the time until I turned fourteen was the happiest time of my life. When I turned fourteen, I left my home to go study, and I spent the rest of my life half starving. —Was this a Jewish kolkhoz? Yes, it was a Jewish settlement. Only Jews lived there, on the territory of a country estate. I only remember the landowner's wife and her son, Viktor, whom the farm was named after. I remember [officials] arriving from the district center and taking him away. This happened before I started school. —What year was this? 1927. —And he never returned? No, he never returned. [L.M. reads a poem in Belarusian about his homeland]. I want to have another 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 2/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Lev Manevich. Full, unedited interview, 2009 ID BEL036.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4dt1c ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN chance to visit my homeland. —And then what happened to you? What school did you attend? Was it a Jewish school? No, it was a Belorussian school. I finished seven grades. I wasn't a wunderkind: all subjects were difficult for me. Nevertheless, I graduated seven grades, earned a merit certificate, and applied to the Orsha Teachers College. My documents were sent back to me, as I was missing one year of schooling. But I had an uncle who worked in Orsha. At first he was in the police force and was then promoted to the first party secretary of the district party committee. Thanks to his request, I was allowed to take the entrance exams and I was admitted to the Orsha Teachers College, where I studied for two years. It’s interesting to note that during this period my uncle's career progressed: he was nominated to the Supreme Soviet. Five days before the election his candidacy was removed and he ended up in an NKVD basement, in the very building where he worked. He was tortured for nine months. By chance he was able to get a pair of his shoes to his wife, and inside he hid a note. It said that when his son grows up, to tell him that his father was always, until his last day, devoted to Stalin. The shoes ended up with his nephew and were sent to Moscow, to Stalin. As a result, he was freed. He was jailed during Beria's tenure, and released under Beria's tenure, and he continued to work as a party secretary of the district committee until the war broke out. He took part in the war. He was a commissar at a hospital throughout the war. He returned after the war and went back to work. My parents were executed. When I got back from the war, I wrote a letter to the kolkhoz asking what had happened to my parents. I received a half-page response: "Your father and your entire family were shot by German-fascist occupiers." I went home the first opportunity I had. My neighbors, peasant women, told me how it happened. Blood froze in my veins, I felt chills, and I couldn't hold back tears. Our house stood on the bank of a river. This river still flows and weaves through the willow bushes. I stood on the bank for a long time with my son. I called out "aooo," hoping someone might respond. But no one did. My daughter and I visited the mass grave there; good people setup a monument there. A weeping willow now grows there, and happy people live nearby. Goats graze in the summer and happy people live nearby. That's a fragment from my biography. —Besides you, were there other children? Did you have brothers or sisters? That's just the thing, I had two younger brothers and a sister, you see. A polizei arrived from the city and ordered the [town] overseer to prepare a horse cart, and everyone was loaded on. The oldest of my younger brothers was about to run, but the polizei pulled out a gun, ready to shoot. My mother screamed, and my little brother was caught and placed back on the cart. A day later they were all shot in Mstislavl 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 3/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Lev Manevich. Full, unedited interview, 2009 ID BEL036.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4dt1c ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN [Mstsislaw]. —The polizei—was he Belorussian? I don't know whether he was Ukrainian or Belorussian. That's the story. In the morning when I wake up and in the evening when I get ready for bed, I cannot help but remember these things. This and everything that happened then. There are seven boulders sitting in my garden, under my window. I imagine that my loved ones, [the following lines quote a famous Soviet song, "Cranes" —Ed.] like those soldiers who never returned from bloody fields, weren't buried in the ground but turned into white cranes. And when at the close of day I see them in their weary V, I can see a gap in their formation—a little space that, perhaps, is meant for me. I will rise up with them, and dissolve in the heaven mist [end of quote], and I will wish upon you, my friends, that you live long on our wonderful and unhappy God-created land. What else would you like to know? —When were you drafted to the army? That is a good question. I joined two days after the war began, straight out of university. I was a first-year university student. I had one more exam to take and came to school with the intention to take the exam. It was the second day of the war. I discovered that the war had begun while [studying] in the Lenin Library—there was a pillar with a radio attached, and Molotov came on the radio at 11 o'clock in the morning. I came to the university asking for instructions. [We were ordered to] gather in the basement of the university. And in the meantime, there already lay an unexploded bomb the size of a person by the university. We were given small-caliber rifles and organized into . —This was in Orsha? This was in Minsk. The university was a state university. A student fighter detachment [was organized], which included all of the university heads of staff. We took part in it for a few days, but there wasn't much we could do, and we were told to go home. It took me several days to get home. By the time I got back Stalin had already made the announcement over the radio. Everything was quiet and peaceful at home, you see. My father received an army summons, but since he worked at the mill, he stayed so that he would keep working. Our home phone rang asking if anyone born in 1923 resided in the household, at which point I was ordered to appear before the military enlistment committee. When I arrived, my documents were taken and they announced, "You're moving out tomorrow." They gathered about twenty of us, and we started walking. It took us a long time to get to the end station, the Rada Station, near Tambov. There we underwent training. We sharpened sticks and with these sticks we were supposed [to practice] bayonet attacks against the Germans. Later we were sorted and those who graduated school were sent to the East. It took us a long time to get out there; we went all the way to Kazakhstan. There we were trained for a 2021 © BLAVATNIK ARCHIVE FOUNDATION PG 4/13 BLAVATNIKARCHIVE.ORG DIGITAL COLLECTIONS ITEM TRANSCRIPT Lev Manevich. Full, unedited interview, 2009 ID BEL036.interview PERMALINK http://n2t.net/ark:/86084/b4dt1c ITEM TYPE VIDEO ORIGINAL LANGUAGE RUSSIAN month and then sent to the Southwestern Front. It was already the winter of 1941. I spent a year at the front and two and a half as a POW. Yes, yours truly, a Belorussian Jew, went through five German-Nazi concentration camps. Went through—but survived a thousand days in the German-Nazi captivity.