In May 1941 my future parents, Larisa Striliver and Grigory
Finkelstein, got married.
On the first day of Hitler's war with Russia, June 22 1941, Grigory
was arrested by the government for allegedly telling an anti-government joke.
Hope it was a good one, because it cost him 10 years of Gulag.
It looked like the government did not know that Grigory
Finkelstein was married. The normal practice was to arrest both spouses and
send them to Gulag. But my mother was lucky and the arresting hoodlums left her
alone.
Meanwhile, my mother’s parents were in the Western Ukraine,
where her father worked at the time. She did not know anything about their fate
first hand. Only that Shaya lost Fanya somewhere in the crowd where she
probably perished in the bombing. A broken man, he came back to Vinnitsa, to
meet his bitter end with his extended family and the rest of Vinnitsa Jews. Right before the Germans occupied the city there were possibilities of evacuation but one of the influential family
members, who was a
Berlin-trained doctor, persuaded everybody that all these fears of the Germans
are Soviet propaganda. “Germans are civilized people and are incapable of such
atrocities”. Plausible as his arguments were, he was wrong. 38 people related
to Larisa perished in the Vinnitsa holocaust.
In June 1941 my mother, 22 and all alone, knew nothing of
all this and was hoping that her parents would come back to Kiev any day. One of
these days of interminable waiting she went to the railway station to see off some
relatives who were evacuating East. The railway station was surrounded by the Russian troops and nobody
was let out into the city. With a few roubles in her purse and on high heels my
mom got onto one of the trains. It was August 1941. The Babiy Yar massacres
started in September. They claimed the life of my mother’s younger sister,
Nyusya, then 17. As mom would say later with a sigh, "I was lucky".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar
This eastward progress became part of my mother’s lore.
“ We moved by night and stopped by day. The German planes
were flying overhead, spitting bombs. It was safer to get off the train than to
stay there. But the tracks were strewn with corpses of infants.” This might be where my mother’s ambivalence
about procreation came from.
“I was walking along the track and saw a German plane flying
low, so low that we were easy targets. I could see the pilot’s face. It was a
friendly face with a mop of blond hair. But the ground around me was covered
with bodies of people he had shot. I smiled at him nervously, more a grimace
than a smile. He smiled back at me, saluted and flew on. I was spared”.
Eventually mom reunited with her aunt, Bronya, the
only other person from the Striliver family who survived the war being married
to a Russian Army officer stationed in the East. Bronya Striliver was 32 and
had a 2-year-old daughter, also Lara. And this these three people were destined
to go through the war together, survive it and remain close for the rest of
their lives.
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| 2 Larisas during the war |
After endless progress by train they were settled in
Danilovka, Kazachstan. The town was
centered around a gold (or diamond) mine, so, as my mother used to say, “again
we were lucky, we had potatoes and did not go hungry”.
The war started as my mother finished her 4th
year of university course and was going into the 5th and final year.
So she did not have a university diploma. However, her education was deemed
sufficient by the authorities to have her teach Russian language and literature
in the local high school. Larisa took to
her duties seriously, and being a naturally gifted teacher, she soon became proficient
and gained the love of her students.
However, she felt she needed to complete her studies. With great difficulty she travelled to Tashkent where the Kiev University was evacuated to. After being enrolled in the university she saw that students were mostly used as slave labor and no studying was going on. At the University she met a few Americans, stranded in Russia with no hope of ever seeing their country of origin. They came to the new Republic idealistically, to help, got quickly disillusioned with the reality of the place but would never be let out. It was a cautionary tale of Russia's perfidy that I heard from the earliest childhood.
Seeing the futility of her attempt to graduate, Larisa decided to go home. For her, at the time, home was Danilovka, where the only family she had was located. University studies still incomplete, she went back to Danilovka.
On May 9th 1945 the war was over and hopes of
reunions blossomed. But they were to be dashed. The entire Striliver family, except for Larisa and Bronya, perished in the Holocaust.
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