ONE IN EVERY TEN SOVIET JEWS FOUGHT AT THE FRONT

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MOSCOW. (RIA Novosti political commentator Marianna Belenkaya). On May 9, 1945, the world will mark the 60th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism.

To quote from one of the most famous Russian songs about the war, "We need victory, victory for all, whatever the cost." No one has ever worked out which of the ethnic groups of the Soviet Union made the biggest contribution to the defeat of Germany. Everyone suffered, and everyone shared the victory. But regrettably, the situation in the country after the war was such that the heroism of many soldiers and officers and many facts about the war went unmentioned. This is why generations that did not experience the war often have a distorted view of it.

Many of the myths about the war relate to the Jews. One of these myths is that the Jews were cowards, the Jews didn't fight. Although historians and the men who fought at the front knew the truth, the myths persisted.

Ilya Altman, historian and co-chairman of the Holocaust Foundation, says that about 450,000 of the soldiers and officers who fought in the Red Army during the war were Jewish. This was about a tenth of the entire Jewish population of the Soviet Union at that time. This percentage is particularly striking given that most of the country's Jews lived in Nazi-occupied territories and so could not be called up to the army.

My grandfather, Senior Lieutenant Semyon Bravy (born 1920), was one of the Jews who fought. He was in the aviation corps commanded by Nikolai Kamanin, Hero of the Soviet Union. (Kamanin went on to become an instructor for the first team of Soviet cosmonauts.) They flew together in the same plane for about two years during the war. Kamanin was a pilot and my grandfather was a radio operator gunner. On May 11, 1945, near Lake Balaton, not far from the Austro-Hungarian border, my grandfather's aircraft was shot down for the second time during the war. He miraculously escaped death, but from 160,000 to 200,000 Jews in the Red Army did not make it home.

Only Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians were awarded more Soviet military decorations than Jews. And in terms of the number of Heroes of the Soviet Union (the USSR's highest award for exceptional courage and self-sacrifice) they come fifth, after the Tatars. In total, about 150 Jews who fought during World War II were awarded this title.

Colonel (later Colonel General) David Dragunsky was one of the men to be awarded this title twice. When the war broke out on June 22, 1941, he faced the German forces on the USSR's western border. In 1943, as he was lying seriously wounded in hospital, he was told that the Nazis had shot his father, mother and two sisters. His two brothers perished in battles at the front. On April 30, 1945, Dragunsky's tank brigade joined together with Semyon Krivoshein's tank corps (Krivoshein was also a Jew). Berlin was encircled. Dragunsky received his second Star of Hero of the Soviet Union for these battles, and Krivoshein received his first. Dragunsky participated in the Victory parade on June 24, 1945.

Professor Fyodor Sverdlov first published information about Jews who fought during World War II in the early 1990s, following the collapse of the USSR. Fyodor Sverdlov was born in Kharkov in 1921. After finishing school, he attended a special artillery school, and then the Leningrad Artillery School. During the war, he commanded an artillery battery and then a battalion. He was wounded three times. After the war, he graduated from Frunze Military Academy and then worked there as a lecturer. Most of his books are devoted to the military achievements of the Jews in World War II. The titles include: In the Ranks of the Brave (about Jews - Heroes of the Soviet Union), Jewish Generals, and Military Achievements of Jewish Soldiers.

Altman believes that the statistics debunk the myths that during the war commanders tried to avoid decorating Jews, and that "Jewish generals only decorated Jews." Of course, all kinds of things happened during the war and it would be wrong to say that ethnic background was never taken into account when deciding whom to decorate as a hero. But some political commentators and war veterans claim that in 1943 secret orders (most often verbal) were given to remove Jews from senior military positions and cut the number of Jews on the lists of soldiers and officers identified for awards.

David Ortenberg, editor in chief from 1941-1943 of the main military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda (still exists), recalls that in spring 1943, Alexander Scherbakov, head of the Red Army's Central Political Department, told him, "You have too many Jews on the editorial board. Some must be dismissed." Ortenberg replied that he had already "dismissed" some special correspondents, including Lapin, Khatsrevin, Rozenfeld, Suer, Vilkomir, Slutsky, Ish, and Bernshtein. They had been killed at the front. "There's only one person left to dismiss - that's me," he added. He was sacked that same month.

However, at the front, where death was ever present, people generally paid little attention to the ethnicity of their comrades. Yakov Bershitsky, a Jew, served throughout the war as a doctor. It was at the front that he met his future wife, Raisa, a Muslim Tatar. Together they would drag the wounded from the battlefields and worked throughout the night in the operating theater. It did not matter to them that they were from different backgrounds. They were given the chance to be transferred to the home front on the condition that they worked in different places. But Yakov and Raisa chose to stay together and so remained at the front.

Altman says that from what he hears from the war veterans who visit the Holocaust Center, anti-Semitism was not widespread in the Red Army during the war. The situation changed to a certain extent after 1944 when people from formerly occupied territories were called up. They were mostly young people who had been turned against Jews by Nazi propaganda during the years of the occupation. But for the most part, people treated each other as equals. Altman said that, "Even in the POW camps, where betraying a Jew could make your life easier, people protected their comrades. If a traitor were discovered, he would not make it through the night: other prisoners would kill him. On quite a few occasions Jews managed to survive in camps because they lied about their surnames and were not betrayed by their fellow prisoners." Jews all over the world continue to express their gratitude to the people who protected them.

On May 5, the annual ceremony to award four Russians the title of Righteous among the Nations was held in Moscow. The Israeli Yad Vashem Institute awards this title to people who saved Jews during the war. Several thousand people from the former Soviet Union have been awarded this title. The ceremony was to coincide with Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Remembrance Day.

"Another myth is that the Jews went to their deaths like sheep to the slaughterhouse," Altman says. "This is not true. Everyone knows about the Warsaw ghetto uprising, the first major armed revolt in Nazi-occupied Europe. At the same time, in at least 20 towns and settlements in the USSR, armed and sometimes even unarmed Jews set fire to their homes, attacked the local police that supported the occupying forces and escaped from the ghettos."

There were underground organizations in more than 70% of the ghettos in Western Byelorussia, and in 40% of the ghettos the prisoners concealed weapons. "However, they were not always able to use them. Many of the young people who could have started an uprising and then run away to join the partisans realized that to do so would be to condemn everyone left in the ghetto to death. So, it was no easy decision to become a resistance fighter," Altman noted.

Nevertheless, there were about ten Jewish partisan units in the Soviet Union. Some 25,000 Jews, many of whom had escaped from ghettos, fought in partisan units in Byelorussia, Lithuania, Ukraine and Russia. Many Jews headed major partisan formations. Isai Kazinets, for instance, was the leader of an underground organization in Minsk. He oversaw over 100 subversive operations. On January 7, 1942, Kazinets was hanged in a Minsk park. In 1965 he was posthumously awarded the title Hero of the Soviet Union.

Jews from the former USSR see Masha Bruskina as a symbol of Jewish resistance. At the age of 17, she was the first underground resistance fighter to be publicly executed by the Nazis in occupied Soviet territory. Masha worked at an infirmary for Soviet POWs, where she helped the convalescing soldiers to escape. One of these soldiers was captured and betrayed the girl and her comrades. On October 26, Masha and the other condemned were executed in the center of Minsk. A Nazi photograph of the execution can be found in many World War II history books. However no one even knew the executed girl's name until the late 1960s. Masha's story was uncovered by journalists but was then hushed up until just recently. A month after Masha's execution, her mother died in the Minsk ghetto.

Altman estimates that out of the 3 million or so Jews living in Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, about 2,825,000 were killed.

"In response to your inquiry, we inform you that no living persons have been found." My grandmother's sister kept this reply from the administration of the Byelorussian town of Osipovichi until her dying day. My family seldom mentioned those people who were living in Byelorussia and Ukraine on the eve of the war (in the former tsarist Jewish Pale of Settlement, which later became a Nazi occupation zone). It was too painful to think about them as none survived.

"My dear friend Moisei Markovich, My dear sister, today is the anniversary of my dear mother's death. She was killed by Nazi criminals on November 14, 1941. On that day, at five o'clock in the morning, they began massacring the Jews in our town. By nightfall, 9,000 people had been killed - men, women, children... My dear mother's image is engraved in my mind. She thought of her children till the bitter end. A family friend, who was taken to the pit with our mother, later escaped and told us that our mother had talked about us all the way. Her last words were, 'Thank God, my children are alive. They are not here.'" This was written by Vladimir Shteinberg on November 14, 1944. Shteinberg managed to escape from one of the numerous ghettos in Byelorussia. In 1942, he joined a partisan unit together with a group of young Jews. He was a junior sergeant, and commander of a reconnaissance unit, and he fought in battles to liberate the Baltic countries. He was killed in 1945, at the age of 20.

A collection containing these and other letters written by Jews during the war is to be published by the Russian Holocaust Center. Over the past ten years, war veterans and their relatives have given the Center about 400 letters. Some of them were sent from the front, while others were sent from besieged Leningrad, the ghettos and partisan units. The collection is unique: it contains letters dated June 22, which was the day when Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union, and May 9, 1945, which is Victory Day. Many of the authors of these letters were killed or disappeared. Some of the letters are written in Yiddish, the native language of the eastern European Jews.

Altman explained that although many collections of letters from the front, written by people of various nationalities, were published in Soviet times, letters written by Jews have never been published in a separate collection. "Every nation has the right to its collective memory, to be proud of its heroes," Altman said in conclusion.

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