World War II in the USSR

Chana Bezbrozh

Top: Sossie and Tzudik

Bottom: Tanya and Arkady

Also living in Belaya Tserkov were Chana’s daughter Sossie Gittel Bezbrozh, her husband Tzudik Shmorgun and their children.  Luckily, Sossie, Tzudik, Tanya and Arkady managed to get evacuated to the city of Magnitogorsk in the Ural Mountains. Tanya worked in a furniture factory there during the war and their son Arkady worked in a factory that made military equipment. Tanya stayed in Magnitogorsk after the war and eventually became the director of the furniture factory. Sossie and Tzudik’s daughter Mania and her husband Lev Poltorak also survived the war, but I do not know where they were.  Sadly, Tzudik was hit by a car and killed in 1944.

Magnitogorsk

Sossie Gittel and Tzudik's eldest son Zavel Shmorgun was drafted into the Soviet Army on June 24th, 1941, two days after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. He became missing in action only six months later in January of 1942.  

Zavel’s wife Ida (called Hinda in this document) wrote to the Soviet army to request the whereabouts of her husband.  Click the left icon to the see the government’s response in Russian saying that Zavel was missing in action.  Click the right icon to see the English translation.

Bezbrozh is a very unusual name, and we know that Moisey’s wife was named Anna and that they had a son.  Did Moisey and Anna have two children, Dmitry and Fima, or in the confusion and chaos of the war, did the name Fima somehow get accidentally changed to Dmitry as the story was passed down through the years?  Regardless, I am quite certain that Fima Bezbrozh was the son of the Moisey Bezbrozh pictured above, and that he was evacuated from Dnepropetrovsk to Cherkessk.  We will find out what happened in Cherkessk shortly.

While Moisey’s family was suffering their fate at the hands of the Nazis, Moisey was serving in the Red Army.  Moisey was promoted to the rank of yefreytor, which is the equivalent of a corporal, in a Sapper group.  (A sapper is a combat engineer who clears minefields, does demolition, puts up fortifications, etc., usually at the front and under fire.)

Moisey Bezbrozh

On August 25, the Wehrmacht reached Dnepropetrovsk, which was the home of a great many Bezbrozhs and Lyutrovniks.  Most of them were evacuated before the Nazis arrived, but Moisey Bezbrozh’s wife Anna, his son Dmitry, his mother Ita, and his sister whose name we do not know did not escape in time and were all killed by the Nazis.  Moisey had been drafted into the Soviet Army in June of 1941 and had already left Dnepropetrovsk.  On the website for the Israeli Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, there is a list of Jews who were evacuated from Dnepropetrovsk to the city of Cherkessk.  On this list there is a record for a seven-year-old boy named Fima Bezbrozh who was the son of Moisey and Khanna (this is a variant of Anna) Bezbrozh.  

Click on the left icon to see the record of Fima Bezbrozh’s evacuation from Dnepropetrovsk to Cherkessk.

On April 27th, 1945 (eleven days before the end of the war!), Moisey was part of a landing operation to an island which was under heavy enemy fire.  A shell fragment hit his boat, killing the driver.  He took over control of the boat and delivered his troops.  On his return journey, his damaged boat sank.  He swam to shore and, even though he was wounded, he held his base until reinforcements arrived.  He received a commendation on May 7, 1945.  We don’t know if Moisey knew at this point that his family had been murdered by the Nazis.  Perhaps this knowledge partly explains his courage under fire, but there is no way to be certain. (Click to the left to see Moisey’s medal.)

Click on the left icon to see Moisey Bezbrozh’s commendation in Russian.  Click on the right icon to see the English translation.

Such was the case with Moisey Bezbrozh’s sister Klara and her husband Aron (also known as Arkady Kofman.) As the Nazis approached Dnepropetrovsk, Arkady and his two brothers and their families were all evacuated to the city of Saratov in the Ural mountains.  There these three families worked in an aviation factory producing military aircraft for the defense of the country against the Nazi invasion.

Slava and Esther, along with their children Uzik, 15 years old, and Rita, 12 years old, were to be relocated to the city of Orsk, 1300 miles east of Dnepropetrovsk in the Ural mountains.  During the train ride to Orsk, Esther began to suffer a serious attack of glaucoma.  At the time, the only cure was for Esther to have her eye removed!  So Esther was dropped off at the nearest station and sent to a hospital where she would have the operation.  Here she was in a nightmarish situation of panic and confusion as thousands of people were fleeing from the Nazis, and then to make matters worse, she was dropped off in a strange city where she would be separated from her daughter and sister and then have her eye removed!  But the operation went smoothly and Esther was fitted with a prosthetic eye that was so good that her youngest daughter Janna did not realize that it was fake until she was an adult.  Not too long after the operation, Esther finished the journey to Orsk and was reunited with her daughter Rita, her sister Slava and her nephew Uzik.

Klara Bezbrzoh and Arkady Kofman

Esther, Rita, Uzik and Slava

Slava Lyutrovnik Bezbrozh, the widow of Froim, worked in the management of the Soviet Railway, and was evacuated from Dnepropetrovsk along with her son Uzik.  Esther’s husband Yacov Baider had been drafted into the army, leaving Esther alone in Dnepropetrovsk with her daughter Rita.  Because of Slava’s important position with the railroad, she was able to bring Esther and Rita with her when she was evacuated  In spite of the chaos of the Nazi invasion, the Soviet government arranged massive evacuations from cities in the Ukraine.  It’s a good thing that most of the Bezbrozhs were evacuated, because in February of 1942, Einsatzgruppe D reduced the city's Jewish population from 30,000 to 702 over the course of four days.

In Orsk, Slava and Esther worked as signalers at the telephone station. During the war, this was considered a special service to the war effort and Slava and Esther’s family were well-treated.   There was school for the children and some of the comforts of life such as theater and movies… and discomforts such as minus 45 degrees of frost in the winter.  Slava and Esther worked very hard and long hours.  As Esther’s daughter Janna said, “The war effort in all the parts of the Soviet Union, with very hard and many hours of labor of all - for the front!!!  The rear was considered the same front as the battle. Without the rear, there would have been no victory.”  For their labor, and Slava and Esther were awarded with medals for Valiant Labor.  (Click on their medals to the left.)

Chiam Lyotrovnik

anything about his last words and his thoughts... When, where? Maybe he was killed somewhere in that meat-grinder, or maybe he was captured and moved to a concentration camp." According to the Russian military archive, Chaim Litrovnik disappeared on June 28th, 1942.  Lena and her son Boris were evacuated to Samarkand in Uzbekistan, and were safe there during the war.

Slava and Esther’s brother Chaim Lyotrovnik, his wife Lena and their son Boris were also living in Dnepropetrovsk before the war.  This is the story Boris told about his father: "My dad, Khaim Usherovich Litrovnik, at that time not a young person, 44 years old, decided to go to the army as a soldier. As I learned later, he wasn’t a cruel and careless person. Vice versa, he was sooner a soft-hearted man, who really did care about his family. Moreover he had the privilege not to go into the army because he worked in the food industry, which at that time was important for the army as well. Nevertheless he decided to fight against the Nazis and in 1942 started to serve as a soldier, leaving his two year old son and his wife (my mother).  In a year my mother received a letter saying that Khaim Litrovnik has disappeared, fighting in the Stalingrad battle.   So, I don’t know even anything about his destiny, about his last days, hours, and minutes,  

Click on the left icon to see a summary of Chaim Lyutrovnik’s record from the Russian War Memorial website.  Click on the right icon to see the original record in Russian with English annotations.  (Note that they incorrectly listed Chaim’s birthplace as Dnepropetrovsk.  He was born in Lysianka.)

Elena Shafir (the daughter of Mariasi Bezbrozh and Yechiel Shafir) and her husband Israil Sokolov also lived in Dnepropetrovsk.  Israil was drafted into the army, but was able to arrange for his wife Elena and their two young sons Leonid and Efim to be evacuated to the city of Molotov (now called Perm) which is near the Ural Mountains.  To support her children, Elena worked in a factory cafeteria in Molotov during the war.  Israil was a gun commander and was killed in the Battle of Moscow in January of 1942.  

Israil wrote a poignant letter to his wife shortly before he was killed.  He said that he hoped they would be reunited and continue their life together, but that, “it doesn't always work out as you like.”

Israel and Elena Sokolov

Click on the left icon to see a Israil Sokolov’s final letter to his wife Elena in English.  Click on the right icon to see the letter in Russian.

Elena Shafir’s mother and sister, Mariasi Bezbrozh Shafir and Sonya Shafir, were either living in Zvenigorodka or Dnepropetrovsk when the war broke out.  Luckily, they were able to get evacuated to the city of Khabarovsk (in the Russian Far East, only 19 miles from the Chinese border!)  They remained there until the end of the war.

Mariasi’s son Michael Shafir was drafted into the Soviet army and his wife Betya and son Fima were evacuated from Dnepropetrovsk.  Michael, his wife and son were fortunate enough to make it through the war alive.

Marisa’s father Moshe Bezbrozh (one of the three brothers) and Moshe’s other two daughters Dotsie and Chana also lived in Dnepropetrovsk.

How I unraveled the mystery is an interesting, but poignant, story in itself.  First, I will tell you everything I knew about Dotsie and Chana before May of 2019.  My grandmother passed away in 1985.  As I mentioned earlier, more than ten years later, my cousin Bill, also Fannie’s grandson, found a small box containing some photographs.  These were obviously very special to her, and it is very poignant that she had kept these photos of her sisters in a little box for decades.  None of us, had ever seen these photos before.  Well, thank goodness for my cousin Bill, because in May of 2019, the photos that he found, and that had been locked away in a little box for fifty years, helped solve the mystery.

Moshe, Dotsie and Chana Bezbrozh

My Grandma Fannie did not like to talk a lot about her life in Russia, and, as I young kid, I just didn’t think to ask her lots of detailed questions about what happened to the family who stayed behind.  So, after she passed away, I realized there were a lot of things that I didn’t know.  One of them was what had happened to her father and her two younger sisters Dotsie and Chana.  In fact, on the previous version of this website which was written in 2008, I wrote that we probably would never know what happened to them.  Well, in May of 2019 I did find out what happened to Dotsie and Chana.

In that little box were the three photos that you see to the left: One of Chana and Dotsie sent from Zvenigorodka in 1923, another of Chana sent from Dnepropetrovsk in 1928, and the final photo on the right, where Chana looks like she’s in her late 30s.  This is all I had to go on.  My grandmother had never talked about her sisters, except to tell us their names.  So, from these photos I knew that Dotsie was alive in 1923, and that Chana was alive in the late 1930s, and that Chana probably lived in Dnepropetrovsk.  I didn’t know anything about when my grandmother’s father Moshe had died.

There was one more photo in the box which was the most mysterious of all.  It was a photo of a baby.

“Dear sister Feiga?”  “Brother-in-law Pinya?”  “Anna Goldenberg?”  Did Chana or Dotsie marry a man with the last name of Goldenberg, and this was their baby Anny?  In 2008 I wrote, “It is quite possible, but it is unlikely that we will ever know the answer for certain.”  Well, I was wrong.  In 2019, I found out the answer.

The back of the photo reads as follows: “June 15, 1932. For a long and endless memory to our dear brother-in-law Pinya, to our dear sister Feiga, and to your so darling kids from our daughter Anny Goldenberg."

On Thursday, May 23rd, 2019, I started doing some work on this website to add all of the new information I had gotten.  I had looked at the website dozens of times, and for some reason, on this day, I decided to click on a link that went to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum.  I hadn’t clicked on this link for years, and when I did, it didn’t work.  They must have renamed the page that my link pointed to, so I went to Google and found the Yad Vashem website.  I had searched the Yad Vashem website for “Bezbrozh” several times, and always only two records came up.  One was for Chana Bezbrozh the wife of Meyer, a record that Arkady Shmorgun had added, and the other was a record that I had added for Ita Bezbrozh, the wife of Meyer’s son Abram.  Well, I got to the search page and decided, on a fluke, to search for Bezbrozh even though I had done so many times.  I entered the name “Bezbrozh” and this is what I found:

I was excited and horrified at the same time.  I had found my relatives, but had found them on the Holocaust website.  I was also stunned to see my great-grandfather Moshe there.  It never occurred to me that he had lived until 1941.

I clicked on Chana’s record.  It said that Chana’s father’s name was Moshe.  This was clearly my grandmother’s sister

I clicked on Moishe’s record.  It said his father’s name was Yankel just like my great-grandfather’s.  And he was born in 1861.  (I always heard that Moshe had been born in 1860, but this was clearly him)  And he was living in Dnepropetrovsk, just like Chana was on the from 1928.  The record was from a list of residents who were evacuated from Dnepropetrovsk and sent to Cherkessk, Russia.  They said they didn’t know what his fate was.  I was on an emotional roller coaster ride.  I found my great-grandfather and lost him in the same moment.  (Click on the icon to see his record.)

It said that  Chana was a schetovod, which means a bookkeeper.  Like her father, she was also evacuated to Cherkessk.

Grandma Fannie had visited Russia in about 1965 and went to see her sister Mariassi.  I know that Grandma visited several cousins on that trip, but Mariasi was the only sibling that she had alive in Russia.  Perhaps Chana survived the war, but it seemed unlikely.  (Click on the icon to see her record.)

This Anya Goldenberg was born in 1931, and the postcard was from June of 1932.  This could be the same Anny Goldenberg as in my eighty-seven-year-old postcard.  I clicked on the record and it said that Anya’s parents were Petr and Donya Goldenberg.  Could Donya be Dotsie?  (Click to the left to see Anya’s record.)

I opened Donya Goldenber’s record.  Her father’s name… Moisey, which is Russian for Moshe.  This was my grandmother’s sister Dotsie.  Dotsie must be a diminutive of Donia.  Once again, I had found relatives and lost them in the same moment.  My Great-Aunt Dotsie had gotten married to Petr Goldenberg.  Dotsie was alive in 1941. (Click to the left to see Donya’s record.)

And I had a relative I had never known existed — Anny Goldenberg, my father’s first cousin, who was ten years old and living in Dnepropetrovsk in 1941.

I mentioned my findings to my brilliant friend Tamara, and she quickly found that my Great-Aunt Donya and newly found Great-Uncle Petr had another child, a girl named Fania, who was born in 1936.  So my father had had two first cousins that he didn’t know about, Anny Goldenberg born in 1931, and Fania born in 1936.  Jews don’t normally name their children after people who are living, but I wonder if Donia named her second daughter Fania after her sister Fanny, my grandmother, who was far away in America.  (Click to the left to see Fania’s record.)

And, let’s not forget their cousin Fima Bezbrozh, the son of Moisey and Chana, whom we mentioned above.  He was also evacuated from Dnepropetrovsk to Cherkessk.  (Click to the leftt to see his record.)

All of these records were from a list of Jews who were evacuated from Dnepropetrovsk and sent to Cherkessk, where, it was assumed, they would be safe.  It said their fate was “Not stated.”  Part of me was hopeful.  Maybe they had escaped from the Nazis?  I liked that “Not stated.”  It left a possibility of hope.  But, I had to know for certain.  On the Yad Vashem website I found an article about the Jews of Cherkessk.  It said that Cherkessk fell to the Nazis on August 2, 1942, shortly after Moshe, his daughters and his granddaughters had arrived there.  The Germans used the Jews in the city for slave labor.  Some were imprisoned and tortured, and then, on September 28, 1942, all of the Jews in Cherkessk were put into mobile gas vans and murdered.  The Russian Red Army liberated Cherkessk less than four months later on January 21, 1943.  Moshe, Chana and Donia couldn’t have survived.  If they had, why didn’t my grandmother tell me the story about how her father and sisters had survived the war?  But part of me still has some hope that little Anna and Fania, and maybe their cousin Fima, somehow got away, but, being children, didn’t know how to contact the rest of the family after the war.  It is probably a fantasy, but more fantastic things have happened.

Sima and Shloima’s son Shulem (Sam Bernstein) moved to the United States in 1913, and their daughter Stella had moved to the U.S. in 1926.  Shloima was killed during the Russian Revolution in 1917, but his widow Sima, along with their sons Yankel, Misha and Zhan, and daughters Fania and Mania, along with their spouses and children, all lived in Chernigov in the late 1930s.  In September of 1941, the Nazis began their assault on Chernigov.  Ida Bezbrozh, the daughter of Yankel and Sarah Bezbrozh, was fourteen years old at the time. She remembers that when the Nazis started bombing the city, her father Yankel rented a truck and drove the whole family out of town.  Then they took a train to Rostov-on-Don, a city further east in the Ukraine where Yankel had been working in a hospital.  Chernigov fell to the Nazis on September 9, 1941, but luckily all of the Bezbrozhs had escaped.  Fania’s husband Yosif Mirkin died in 1941 from illness, but I’m not sure whether it was before or after they were evacuated from Chernigov.  Shortly after Fania’s husband Yosif died, Fania’s sister Mania and her husband Tsala named the boy Yosif after his uncle who at passed away.

While the family was living in Rostov, Ida’s father Yankel was drafted into the army.  Misha and Zhan were also drafted during this time.  The women and children all stayed in Rostov until the Nazis began to approach that city in September of 1942.  Then they evacuated to Siberia, and then they finally moved once more to Frunze in Kirghizstan, where they remained for the rest of the war.

Ida’s father Yankel served in the Soviet Army during the war.  She does not know in what battle he was wounded, but he died from a stomach wound received in battle in 1943.  First he saved his family by getting them to Rostov, and then he died defending his country.  Yankel is shown to the left in a photo from the early 1940s.  (Click on the photo to enlarge.)

Shloima and Sima’s son Misha also served in the Soviet Army, but luckily he survived and returned to his family after the war.  (Click to the left to see a photo that he sent to his family from the front.)

Kiev - Capital of the Ukraine

Zhan Bezbrozh during the war

Shloima (also called Solomon) and Sima’s son Zhan Bezbrozh served in an anti-tank unit during the war.  Luckily, he also survived and was decorated with several medals.  He held great pride in fighting the Nazis and being a decorated war veteran.

Zhan and his medals

Zus Bezbrozh

Regardless of whether he was in the army or the Underground, Zus has a highly unusual story.  Zus was captured during the war by the Nazis and put in a detainment camp. He knew that as a Jew he would be murdered. But then one of his fellow inmates, a man named Yakov Pavlenko who was not Jewish, died in the camp. Zus took the man’s documents and became Yakov Pavlenko for the duration of the war. Since the Germans did not think he was Jewish, they spared his life. After the war, Zus, now Yakov, went to the Soviet officials and explained that he was not really Yakov Pavlenko. The officials encouraged him to keep the name Pavlenko since it wasn't Jewish. They thought it would make his life easier in the anti-Semitic environment of the Soviet Union. So Zus Bezbrozh stayed Yakov Pavlenko for the rest of his life.

Zavel Shmorgun, Chiam Lyutrovnik, Israil Sokolov and Yankel Bezbrozh all died fighting the Nazis, but they did not die in vain.  It is precisely because the Soviets had so much manpower that they were able to slow down the German advance until winter came.  Then the Russian soldiers, who were more used to the cold, and more used to fighting in the cold, were finally able to defeat the Nazis.  By being able to continually replenish their lines with men, the Soviets were eventually able to inflict catastrophic losses on the Nazis.  These losses weakened the Third Reich and made it more difficult for them to defend themselves from the assault that was to come on D-Day on June 6th, 1944.  So these Bezbrozh descendants who died fighting the Nazis, and everyone else who was working behind the lines to send weapons and supplies to the front, made a great contribution to wearing the Nazis down which would lead to their eventual defeat.