To Tell Our Stories: Holocaust Survivors of Southern Arizona (Volume II)

By Jewish Family and Children's Services of Southern Arizona

During World War II's Nazi onslaught, six million Jews were systematically and brutally killed. Yet millions survived, their lives altered permanently by the terrors they faced. After the war, many left long-established homes to settle in Israel and the United States, hoping for renewal. These are the stories of survivors who have made Southern Arizona their home. Each is an intimate slice of the Holocaust as it occurred throughout Europe and the Soviet Union. And each story is a dedication to loved ones and friends lost and brutalized during a portion of history that has since defined 20th century history and modern-day genocide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jewish Family and Children's Services of Southern Arizona
• Release date: Apr 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215280904

Book preview

Table of Contents

also by jewish family and children's services of southern arizona

Copyright

dedication

introduction

preface

Rudolf Ayzenshtok

Iosif Beskin

Moisey Blitshteyn

Mike Bodnar

Sofa Bograd

Ida Bresler

Paulina Lilly Brull

Mina Dimont

Sidney Finkel

Edith Fox

Blima Friedman

Chava Gasch

Vladimir Ginter

Judy Goldman

Minna Gorelik

Yuriy Gorelik

Lisa Grabell

Anna Iolina

Simon Katz

Mikhail Kogan

William Kugelman

Lev Kunyavskiy

Tsylya Levitskaya

Bertie Levkowitz

Vitya Medovaya

Victoria Messina

Luiza Perchik

Zorya Rappoport

Valentina Rubinstein

Mariya Rytslina

Andrew Schot

Alfred Schreier

Yelizaveta Slabodetskaya

Deena Sortland

Tayba Steklova

Sofia Sudakova

Severin Szperling

Chris Tanz

Grigoriy Tselnik

Nekhoma Tselnik

Marie Turim

Sara Turkin

Robert Varady

Mark Veksler

Klara Yaroshevskaya

acknowledgments

jewish family and children's services

also by jewish family and children's services of southern arizona

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To Tell Our Stories

Holocaust Survivors of Southern Arizona (Volume I)

История людей переживших Холокост,

проживающих в южной Аризоне

to tell our stories

Holocaust Survivors of Southern Arizona

Volume II

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© 2023 Jewish Family and Children's Services (JFCS)

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other mechanical or electronic methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except for use as brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses as permitted by copyright law.

Translations from Russian to English by Richard Fenwick and Raisa Moroz

E-book developed by Richard Fenwick

Cover designed by Aimee Carbone, The RBDI Group, LLC

Cover photograph courtesy of Dylan Martin © Dylan Martin Photography

dedication

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This book is dedicated to the Holocaust Survivors

who made Southern Arizona their home,

and to the six million Jews

and the millions of other innocents

unable to tell us their stories.

introduction

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Jewish Family & Children’s Services of Southern Arizona is proud to present the second edition of To Tell Our Stories: Holocaust Survivors of Southern Arizona, a collection of brief memoirs from some of the participants of our Holocaust Survivors Program.

Our mission at JFCS, guided by Jewish values, is to provide quality social and behavioral health services to people of any religion or ethnic origin throughout Greater Tucson. It has been our privilege to support the survivor community as part of this mission, and our program is the only comprehensive program in Arizona.

This book, a compilation of heartbreaking yet uplifting memories, would not be have been possible without the dedication of our staff, and particularly Raisa Moroz, our devoted Program Manager, who recognized the need for documenting these stories – and made it happen!

We must additionally acknowledge our Holocaust Program volunteer, Richard Fenwick, a retired United States Air Force Russian linguist. Everyone involved with our survivors program is grateful that he found us and willingly shares his many talents.

Our admiration for the survivors who have made their home among us is boundless. Their courage, strength, and resilience are examples to us all. They have been so generous to share the most difficult and personal moments of their lives so that we may remember and learn and share with future generations.

The loss of six million people in a few years’ time is unfathomable. We are so grateful to know our fellow Tucsonans who are living witnesses to the horrors of the Nazi regime and who stand as reminders of our own responsibility to remember.

We at JFCS are truly honored to be able to maintain our Holocaust Survivors Program, and we appreciate the support we receive from the community. However, there is nothing any of us can do to erase the long-lasting affect of these survivors’ memories. What we can do is treat each other with kindness, tolerance and respect so that history will be unable to repeat itself.

Barbara Befferman Danes

Chair, Board of Directors

JFCS of Southern Arizona

Carlos A. Hernández MA, LCSW, CPHQ

President and CEO

JFCS of Southern Arizona

preface

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We are pleased to present volume II of our series of stories written by survivors who have made Southern Arizona their home.

As we stated in volume I, while we believe that Holocaust statistics are vitally important – that up to six million European Jews were killed representing two-thirds of the entire European Jewish population – we also know from first-hand experience that personal accounts of the Holocaust provide the most immediate and instant impact. We’re certain that reading accounts or listening to first-hand accounts of the Holocaust will lead one to consider the statistics in a more personal way.

To date, 268 people known to have survived the Holocaust have made Southern Arizona their home at various points in their lives. Many of them are now of blessed memory. While most of the stories in this volume, 45 in all, were gathered specifically for this book, we are blessed by the fact that organizations like the University of Southern California’s Shoah Foundation have been collecting survivor stories for many years. A few of the stories in this volume come straight from USC’s collection.

After publishing the first volume of 36 personal Holocaust accounts in 2015, we immediately set about holding public readings with survivors reading small excerpts of their own stories to local audiences. These readings have clearly touched the hearts of Southern Arizonans, many of whom tell us they had no idea there were survivors living in the community.

There is as well a small amount of confusion among the audiences with regard to the timeframes of the Holocaust. There is no uniform start date to the Holocaust; various levels of the persecution, roundup, and deportation of Jews occurred at different times, usually dependent upon when the Nazis took control of a country.

For example, Jews in Germany began to feel the stirrings of what was about to happen as early as 1933, when the German government passed laws to exclude Jews from society. In Poland, the initial stages of what became the Holocaust began after Germany’s invasion of that country in September 1939, with the creation of a large-scale ghetto system in all the major and minor cities along with large concentration camps, labor camps and, ultimately, all six of the established killing centers. Holland, France, and other more western European countries fell in 1940, which is when the Holocaust began in those nations.

To the east, in the Soviet Union, the war didn’t begin until June 1941. Jews there felt no effects of the Holocaust until then, much later than most of Europe.

Despite the fact that anti-Semitism was rampant in Hungary well before World War II, it wasn’t until 1944 that Germany decided to take control of that country from its waffling ally. In the last 12 months of the war, Hungarian Jews were ghettoized, tortured, and deported. In May and June 1944 alone, 440,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau killing center.

As you can see, there is no single start date. The terror began once the Nazis arrived.

As we also stated in volume I, we are not Holocaust historians. However, we have gained a large understanding of the Holocaust as a body of history through the survivors we support. If you are interested in the history of the Holocaust, we encourage you to visit Tucson’s Jewish History Museum, which opened a Holocaust History Center in 2013. Their mission includes the study of ongoing human rights abuses in the world, and the issues of genocide that continue to be an unfortunate part of the historical human experience.

Raisa Moroz

Holocaust Program Manager

JFCS of Southern Arizona

Richard Fenwick

Holocaust Program Volunteer

JFCS of Southern Arizona

One note related to this ebook: Footnotes will direct you to a separate section of the book. To return to the stories, please touch the footnote's highlighted number.

Rudolf   Ayzenshtok

Ukraine

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Iwas born in Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine. My mother Zinaida was a house wife and my father Israel was the Chief Engineer at a military factory in Dnepropetrovsk.

The war started June 22, 1941, and Dnepropetrovsk was bombed right away.¹ Every time the air raid alert sounded (the sirens were so loud) we would run to a bomb shelter. My parents invited another family to live with us after their house was destroyed in the bombings. Soon, our family decided we had to leave Dnepropetrovsk as soon as we could. There were six of us in all: my grandmother, mother, my oldest sisters Lidiya and Olga, my twin brother Mikhail and me. We left Dnepropetrovsk on a cart pulled by two horses.

There were many other people (refugees) leaving the city along with us. We walked on the streets and often heard the military yell, Clear the road! Clear the road! Everyone would run from the road to let them get through.

At one point, as we were walking, we saw saw military officers riding on horses and realized my father was among them. He had to remain behind even as we continued, since high rank engineers could not leave the factory at that time. My father was wearing white shoes, white pants and a white shirt. As we departed Dnepropetrovsk, my mother asked my father what she should take for us to wear. I was very young then, but still remember what my father said very well: Pack something, maybe light coats, you will be back soon, and leave my suitcase here in the apartment. My father did not get a chance to go back for his suitcase and uniform because the Germans were already entering Dnepropetrovsk. We were very excited to reconnect with my father when we saw him on that horse. We started shouting, Papa! Papa! We were reunited.

We arrived to Slovyansk, Ukraine, where my mother’s brother lived. We stayed with him for a little while, but had to continue our travels, though my grandmother decided to remain in Slovyansk. When we were leaving she said that she was too old to travel and wanted to stay. They all died there in Slovyansk, killed by Germans.

When we got to the railroad station the train we were supposed to be on had already left. That train also transported equipment from evacuating factories.² My father found out later that that train was bombed by the Germans. We survived purely by luck.

As Chief Engineer at his factory, my father’s assignment was to relocate the operation at another factory located in Central Asia. I don’t remember the exact name of the town, but it was near Tashkent, Uzbekistan. My father worked there as Chief Engineer for a short period before he was reassigned to a different factory, this one in Tashino, which is in Russia’s Gorky region. It was later renamed Pervomaysk. My mother, brother, two sisters and I followed him there. This particular town was never published on maps because if was one of the nuclear center’s of Russia. My father eventually worked as the Chief Engineer at one of the nuclear facilities. In addition to Soviet prisoners of war, only German and Japanese workers worked there.

I was eight years old and was going to school. We didn’t have notebooks so we created our own by cutting out pages of newspaper and writing between the lines of typed text. As Chief Engineer, my father received a food ration, but only for one person. We would often come to the factory to take his ration and that was the only family meal we had. We were always hungry. Ours was one of eight families living in a house made from logs. Finally, my father was able to get an apartment for us. Our family lived in one half of the apartment and the factory director lived in the other half.

In 1947, my father had a stroke and became very ill. He couldn’t hold the position of Chief Engineer anymore, so we quickly ran out of money and had no other sources of income. We moved to a town called Kremenchug, Ukraine, where he was able to get a job as head mechanic at a local factory; however, he couldn’t work long, so he retired.

After I completed the seventh grade I attended Vocational School, and when I was 18 I graduated from Mechanical-Engineering College. I became a specialist in developing tanks. I was assigned to work in a tank factory in Bryansk, and then I was drafted into the navy. I served in the navy four years. Following naval service, I was accepted to go to the Kharkov Polytechnic Institute. After I graduated, I became Chief of the Design Bureau for a car factory. I met my future wife Lidiya there, and in 1958 we were married in Kremenchug. My wife was twenty years old and I was twenty-four. She worked as a Nurse Practitioner. Lidiya and I have two sons: Stanislav and Valeriy. We moved to United States at the end of 1999.

Iosif   Beskin

Russia

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Iwas born on September 14, 1927, in Rostov-on-Don, a city in the former Soviet Union. My father, Moisey Beskin, was a building engineer and specialized in bridge design. He worked at different design firms, then taught at Novocherkassk Polytechnic Institute. My mother, Maria Beskin, was a piano teacher. I don’t have any siblings. My mother’s oldest sister Polina and her sons, Igor and Evgeniy, lived with us (my grandparents were already deceased by then).

My aunt Polina was a dentist and worked at various resorts. In the summer of 1941, she was working as a dentist in a resort in Kabardinka, Russia, in the Krasnodarsk region right on the Black Sea. My cousins and I went there on vacation at the beginning of June, 1941. We swam in the Black Sea and had a great time.

On June 22, which was a Sunday, I went swimming by myself. On my way back, I saw people running to the clubhouse looking very concerned. I started to run as well. I saw worried men discussing something, but I couldn’t understand what was going on and went home. When I arrived, my aunt told me that the war had started.

Back in Rostov, my parents found a man – he was a doctor – who was going to pick up his children from a summer camp close to the place I was staying. He promised my parents he would bring me home too. Early in the morning, my aunt put me on a horse-drawn wagon and sent me to Gelendzhik, where I’d never been before. I arrived at Gelendzhik and found the man who was going to take me back home. He helped me and six other boys get some breakfast, and then put us on the bus to Novorossiysk. We arrived at the train station in Novorossiysk and waited for the train. As we waited, we laid on our bags resting and staring at the sky, and we suddenly spotted a German airplane. We could also hear anti-aircraft artillery shooting at the German . . . this was June 26 or 27, and was the first time I’d ever seen a German airplane. It circled the area, but our artillery scared it away.

We arrived safely in Rostov. It was summer break from school, and when my parents left for work we would go to the Don River to take a swim. We weren’t supposed to swim in the river in 1941 because it was an open area and German airplanes could easily spot us and kill us. Luckily, everything was fine and nobody saw us. There were two airplanes flying around our town, but these were Soviet fighters.

My father was not drafted in the army because he was over 50 and was nearsighted. One day in October or November 1941, he was called to the military recruiting center and ordered to go to the Don River to check transport activities on the bridges crossing it. My father used to design those bridges. He left, but he didn’t come back for a long time. The atmosphere in our town was very unstable and worrisome. My father finally returned, and a few days later the fighting had reached the outskirts of the city.

We could see that Russian forces were getting routed, but we delayed our evacuation in hope that the Germans wouldn’t get into the city. However, German forces entered Rostov-on-Don on November 21, 1941. At first, people were on the streets of the city, but after a few days there was no one to be seen.

Several brutal massacres took place there. For example, when someone ran out into a courtyard of a three-story apartment building, the Germans ordered all the residents of the building to go outside. Once they did, the Germans lined them up and killed them, then burned the building down. After that incident, nobody went outside. Everyone kept their doors and windows locked, and people were scared. Luckily, nobody entered the apartment building where my family lived, and no one got killed. In Rostov, the massacres happened in several places.

The men would gather in groups each morning and go to the Don River to fetch water. My father joined them on November 27, when the battle was very close to the river. That day our neighbor got injured at the river and my father carried him all the way back from the river to our house.

The Germans began shelling the city with artillery, but our building was never hit. The rounds flew overhead and were loud and intense. On November 29, I decided to go outside to see what was going on. At first, I saw one of our soldiers running, and then I saw two or three others. They were carrying rifles and jumped into an armored car that started moving toward the center of the city. I went back to the house and told everyone what I’d seen. People started coming out of their apartments onto the streets. The Germans had established a machine gun on the roof of the cathedral, which was right on our street, and started shooting at the crowd. We saw the bullets flying, hitting the ground, but luckily nobody got killed.

The first time the Russian Army repelled the Germans from Rostov, we started thinking about evacuating. The Germans were not far away, about 40 kilometers, and could return any time. When they were still in the city, the Germans issued an order to gather all of the city’s Jewish people and send them off to be killed. There is a place in Rostov called Zmievskaya Balka where, as I learned later, 27,000 Jews and Soviet civilians were killed by the Nazis on August 11 and 12, 1942. The Jewish men of Rostov were marched to Zmiyovskaya Balka, a ravine outside the city, and shot.

My father worked in the agency which was in charge of all railroads of Northern Kavkaz and knew all the railroads in the area very well. When the evacuation started, many people from our town moved to Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk. When my father and I discussed where to evacuate, he said that we absolutely should not move to these cities. When I questioned why, my father explained that it was a dead end; if Germans moved in that direction there would be no way to escape. He thought it was best to move to Vladikavkaz. There is a Georgian Military Road, which starts right in Vladikavkaz.¹ If we weren’t able to escape by railroad, we could flee by autobahn (the Georgian Military Road). We evacuated to Vladikavkaz. My family, along with my aunt and her son Igor, lived there until the end of July, 1942. My cousin Evgeniy joined the army. I attended school and my father taught at a local technical college. The Germans had closed on Vladikavkaz by July 1942, so toward the beginning of August we made our way to the railroad station and left by train.

We were traveling through Makhachkala with just our necessities in small packs. We hadn’t had time to pack. There were five of us: my mother and father, my aunt, cousin Igor, and me. Makhachkala was in pure chaos. It was filled with people who were storming ships to get in. All of the ships’ decks, every surface, were covered with people. We sailed on a ship for almost two days with so little space that I spent half a night standing on one foot; there was no space at all to put my other foot down. People and their belongings were everywhere.

We arrived to Krasnovodsk, Russia, where the heat was unbearable. My father met some people that he knew from Cherkassy Polytechnic Institute, where he used to teach. They told us that their institute was traveling on the same train we are supposed to take, but in a different train car. They invited us to join them, so we moved to their car. It was a boxcar with just 30 people, all students. There were no benches to sit on, so we all sat on the floor. There was a toilet as well, and because of that and the fact that there was more room, travel became a little easier.

We passed through various cities, such as Ashkhabad and Samarkand, but nobody knew where we were going. The conductor finally said that we had arrived at our final destination, and we learned that we were in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. We went straight to the station square. There were a lot of people there, and out of nowhere we saw a good friend from Rostov who suggested we go to a shoe factory where we could spend the night. We took her advice and went to the shoe factory. There were a lot of people there like us who were looking for a place to spend the night. We slept on the floor in the hall of the shoe factory, then started looking for an apartment the following day. On the second day, I went to explore the city. While walking and looking around, I came across the Tashkent Institute of Railway Transport Engineers. Later that day I returned and told my father that I found him a job. At that time, finding a job was not a problem since most of the men went to war.

My cousin Igor and I also started working. We found jobs as lathe operators at the local factory and had three ration cards for the family in order to get food.

I was accepted into the Tashkent Institute of Transportation. Later, my father got a job there as a professor. We