Mr. Fishman and I talked on the phone a few times, but I felt that an in-person conversation would be better for both of us. Also, I wanted to record my interview with him, but at the time, phone recording tech was not where it is today – you could not simply record a phone call from a landline without some additional equipment.
I took a few days off work, bought a ticket for a Southwest flight from Pittsburgh to Ft. Lauderdale, and flew to Florida to interview Mr. Fishman. I did not have much experience interviewing people, so I packed for every eventuality. I brought a giant Lenovo laptop with an external microphone, a tape recorder, and a digital recorder. I packed a Ziplock full of batteries, an extra battery for my laptop, a spare laptop charger, and at least a dozen mini cassette tapes. I brought several flash drives to backup any interview or transcript files, and just to be on the safe side, an external hard drive.
I arrived at Ft. Lauderdale on a humid day in May of 2003. A nice lady at the Enterprise counter handed me a set of keys for a white Hyundai Accent and I drove to a non-descript complex of government-subsidized apartments for low-income senior citizens.
When I walked through the door of Mr. Fishman’s apartment, a familiar smell hit me – the smell of boiling chicken necks. Every kid and adult who grew up in the Soviet Union is intimately familiar with this particular smell. In the USSR one could not simply go to a grocery store and expect to find anything one needed. That’s why every person who lived in the USSR between the 1960s and the 1990s never went anywhere without a special string bag called “avoska”. An avoska is a bag loosely woven from heavy-duty nylon strings and kind of resembles a basketball net with handles. An avoska could be balled up and stuffed in a purse, a backpack, or a pocket, just in case. The word “avos”, on which “avoska” is based, literally means “just in case”. We always carried an avoska on the off chance that, while walking by a grocery store, you might see oranges, or cucumbers, or tomatoes, or chicken, or any other item that may or may not grace the store’s shelves on any given day. If you could not find the groceries that you needed at a grocery store, you went to a bazaar. Every Soviet city had at least one bazaar, an open-air market where people sold anything from second-hand clothes to car parts to potatoes. You could always find almost anything at Soviet bazaars, even when stores everywhere else had nothing on their shelves.
Buying chicken has always been a bit of an adventure. Most chickens found in stores and in bazaars were so malnourished and anemic that their skins had a pronounced blue tinge. In Russian fairy tales, the blue bird is a symbol of hope and happiness. A famous Soviet-era rock band, Mashina Vremeny (The Time Machine), had a hit song dedicated to the mythical blue bird.
We have walked to faraway places that are impossible to find
We spent years in waiting, ignoring snow and rain
We don’t drown in icy water and in fire we don’t burn
We hunt for our luck, we hunt for the blue bird
Whenever my grandparents did manage to hunt down an anemic blue bird, nothing ever went to waste. Bone marrow was used to make kholodets, a jellied meat dish that still haunts my dreams; meat was boiled to make broth, and then cooked separately for additional dishes; the necks were used to make chicken neck soup.
Mr. Fishman invited me to the table and asked if I wanted to have lunch with them. I politely declined, telling him that I ate at the airport.
I set up my laptop with a microphone on Mr. Fishman’s dinner table, placed two tape recorders in front of him, turned everything on, and started my first interview. We talked for almost two hours. Mr. Fishman frequently paused, trying to remember names, places, and details of events. His wife, Galina, would step in once in a while to fill in the blanks. A few times during the interview Mr. Fishman looked like he was about to cry, and I waited for him to gather himself. At the end of conversation, right as I was about to leave, he handed me a manuscript – a sheaf of 50+ loose typewriter-typed pages of Russian text. “These are my memoirs,” – said Mr. Fishman. “I don’t know if anyone will care about this, but can you please translate this manuscript into English for me?”
In 1942, Mikhail Fishman and his brother were stranded in the forests of Western Belarus after the 130th special artillery division was destroyed and scattered by persistent German air raids. Without any means of communication and very little personal ammunition, their group tried to break through enemy lines to join the main troops, but there was only so much that they could do riffles against tanks and machine guns. Most of their group was annihilated. The ones that were able to move on their own decided to spread out and run – every man for himself.
After a couple of hours of walking and running Mikhail made it to a large road surrounded by wheat fields. A German airplane made a pass right above his head. He quickly checked my riffle and realized that he only has three bullets left. Mikhail aimed at the airplane and fired twice, missing both times. The airplane made another pass and let out a burst of machine gun fire. Mikhail fell on the ground and pretended to be dead. The plane circled a couple of times and left.
After some time has passed and the sounds of artillery and small arms fire died down, Mikhail got up and started walking away from the front lines. After a few hours of making his way through a forest, he ran into a fairly large group of Soviet soldiers. Judging by their uniforms and insignia, they all belonged to different units. They asked him if he saw the German troops. When Mikhail said no, they quickly lost interest and started to discuss a plan of how to rejoin the main Soviet forces. They sent a couple of scouts who returned pretty quickly and reported that the road was clear.
However, as soon as the group made it to the first clearing, they were met by machine gun fire. Everyone turned around and started to run. A piece of shrapnel hit Mikhail in the head, knocking him unconscious.
Mikhail came around in the back of a wagon, surrounded by wounded Soviet soldiers. All around the wagon unarmed soldiers in ragged, filthy uniforms dragged their feet on a dusty road. A dozen of Germans soldiers escorted the group to an abandoned Soviet military base in Volkovysk, a town in southwestern Belarus, where they joined another larger group of Soviet POW.
Because of the food shortage, the Germans began killing wounded horses and feeding POWs horsemeat. They asked for volunteers to butcher the horses and to cook the meat. Several people, including Mikhail, agreed to do the job. The sentry led us to a shed and gave us meat cleavers. The job wasn’t pleasant, but the prisoners always managed to hide a couple of extra slices of meat and smuggle them into the camp.
Every day the Germans asked for volunteers to work outside the camp; the ones that went got extra rations of bread. Mikhail volunteered to go with one of the road restorations brigades and was to Bialystok in Poland. After a couple of weeks of cleaning rubble from roads and repairing bridges, Mikhail’s brigade was loaded onto a cargo train and sent to a POW camp near Lublin, Poland. Many years later, Mikhail found out that he was a stone’s throw away from Majdanek, a Nazi concentration camp responsible for exterminating close to 60,000 Jews.
The makeshift POW camp was an enormous piece of land was surrounded by a barbwire fence; every ten meters or so there were small towers with machine guns on top of them. Smaller barbed wire fences divided the camp into even squares. Each square was patrolled by police made up from POW’s that wanted to get on the Nazi’s good side. They wore uniforms, bands on their forearms and were armed with short, heavy sticks. Each camp square also had a supervisor – they were called capo. There were no barracks and the prisoners had to sleep on the ground, under a heavy canvas roof propped up on four poles. The ones that managed to keep their army coats were the lucky ones.
Mikhail managed to hide the fact that he was Jewish and used a name of his old friend from Leningrad.
Escape attempts happened quite often, but most of them were unsuccessful. The ones that were caught were beaten or killed. Near the camp entrance there was a tall pole called by the Nazis “The Pole of Shame”. Prisoners that were caught attempting to escape or stealing were tied to that pole and left there naked for days without food or water, regardless of the weather.
When the camp was hit by typhoid epidemic, most people in my “block” died. Those who survived were transported to another camp, one with actual barracks. One morning a German soldier brought a bucket of yellow paint and ordered the prisoners to paint letters “SU” – Sowjetunion[1] on their coats, shirts, pants and hats. Since the camp had French, British and Italian POW, they needed some way of telling nationalities apart. Mikhail’s was assigned a number – prisoner #6200, Stalag 312. He also got a small metal tag on a string. Each tag consisted of two halves with the prisoner number engraved on each half. When someone died, the guards would break the tag and keep the bottom half of it for the records.
Soon after the new POWs settled in, the camp command ordered them to “volunteer” 20 people for a burial team, a team the prisoners called the “kaput-command”. Despite the terrible work, many people volunteered; whoever worked in the “kaput-command” got extra food at the end of the day. The dead were piled onto a cart drawn by the prisoners. No graves were dug; the bodies were just thrown into old anti-tank trenches. One man, a Moscow architect Nikolai Khatuntzev was almost buried alive. He regained consciousness only seconds before he was about to be thrown into the grave. When he made it back to the camp, he told the Germans that he used to be an architect and they gave him extra bread for drawing portraits of the guards. Several months later he managed to escape…
In the fall the camp was hit by typhoid epidemic. The man in charge of the infirmary was doctor Klepnikov. He was completely useless – it turned out that before the war Klepnikov drove a truck for a military hospital in his hometown. When he was captured, he told the Germans that he was a doctor to get all the perks and privileges that went with that title. When the epidemic broke out, the Germans left the camp. They brought food to the gates and whoever could walk would unload it from the trucks and distribute it among the prisoners. When someone got better, they would be immediately transferred to a different camp.
An enormous camp, wooden barracks, two-tiered bunks with straw-filled mattresses. Huge square in the middle. A long cement building with showers in one half and disinfection units in the other. Next to it, there was a laundry house and a shoe and cloths repair shops where prisoners worked on producing and fixing German uniforms and boots. On the other side of the camp there were several warehouses filled with old Polish, French and British uniforms.
The infirmary was behind the warehouses, right next to the barbed-wire fence. The doctors – Jews from Yugoslavia – did not have to wear the yellow star of David.
Within the next couple of weeks, the camp received a large “shipment” of Italians that refused to fight in Africa. They were separated from the Soviet and Polish POWs by a very high fence with barbed wire on top extending at an angle. The Germans were sure that nothing and no one could get through that fence, so they didn’t post any guards. The prisoners managed to pass notes and food across the fence when no one was looking.
All prisoners were separated into work teams that were sent to the city to load/unload trains. One time, Mikhail’s brigade was ordered to load a shipment of uniforms and boots that was going to the front. They managed to steal some gloves and damage most of the uniforms.
A lot of people who worked in the camp were Polish civilian employees; the Germans did not bother to check them, and we could trade with them for food.
In 1943 the Germans started to feel that things weren’t exactly going the way they originally expected. The prisoners heard rumors that the Nazi troops were planning to leave the territory occupied by the camp. One day, a new group of POWs told us that the Soviet troops are advancing and freeing occupied territories along the way. Towards the end of 1943 the guards became so preoccupied with what was going on the front lines that they paid little to no attention to what was going on in the camp. Many prisoners took full advantage of such opportunity; several times large groups of POWs managed to escape.
Mikhail thought about the possibility of escape all the time. He managed to convince his capo to assign Mikhail to a 15-person brigade that was being sent to work in the fields of a local farmer.
There was a little shed surrounded by barbed wire behind the farmer’s house. The prisoners were guarded by a German soldier who was discharged from the regular army due to a wound. The prisoners called him “Kosoy[2]”. He seemed to be a nice enough guy, always smiled, never carried a weapon. Officially, his job was to make sure that the farmer did not stash grain for himself. He constantly talked about national socialism, kept saying how after the war all farms would belong to pureblooded Germans.
Every night German soldiers would take away our work cloths, though they allowed us to keep our shoes and bags. They never even bothered to search us.
Working in the fields was very hard. Mikhail wasn’t used to such work and was always the last one to finish the daily quota. The prisoners worked from six in the morning to six in the evening. The farmer would allow them a short lunch break; food was brought and consumed right there in the field. On rainy days, the prisoners stayed in the shed and cooked a very thick soup from leftover potato peels. The farmer was a very religious man, and every Sunday gave the prisoners extra meat, especially if they did a good job during the week.
After about three months of working on that farm, Mikhail’s brigade started to plan an escape. One of the men used to be a blacksmith before the war; he made a pick that would allow them to open the shed door.
Some of the people who helped around the farm were Polish workers, men and women who “volunteered” to work for the Germans. One of them told Mikhail that the Soviet troops were getting closer. Mikhail asked him to get a map of the area.
Not everyone wanted to escape. The rule of thumb in the Soviet Army was that if you allowed yourself to be captured by the enemy, you were by definition a traitor and would be punished as such. The prisoners managed to steal and hide enough warm clothes and food for seven people.
Mikhail and six other prisoners left the barrack around 8 pm, right after the sunset, hoping that by the time it gets light they could get far enough and hide out in the crop fields.
They opened the barrack’s door, grabbed our bundles, climbed over the fence, and walked away as fast as we could. During that first night they managed to cover a lot of distance without running into anyone. During the day they stayed hidden in a cornfield. When it got dark, they split into two groups.
On the morning of the second day Mikhail’s group was awakened by barking of dogs and loud shouting. Barking and shouting were getting closer and closer. All of a sudden, the escapees heard a familiar voice shouting in German, “Don’t shoot!” They recognized the German guard from the farm.
Within minutes they were surrounded by a large group of armed men. For the most part they weren’t too cruel, though a couple of people were smacked with rifle butts. The guard from the farm stopped them from hitting us and started to scream, “Why did you run away? Did you have it so bad at the farm? You wanted to go back to Stalin?”
They tied their hands and led them to a low cement-block building. In the morning two armed soldiers loaded them onto a platform truck and escorted us back to Stalag #312. Mikhail ended up in a barrack with 40 Soviet POWs captured while trying to escape from various labor camps and 5 French soldiers along with their general. The French told them to keep their spirits up because the allied troops were pretty close to victory.
At the end of 1944 those who could still walk were marched West, somewhere towards the border of Poland and Germany. Mikhail was part of a prisoner brigade tasked erecting a one-story building – a dorm for young German girls who were working as trolley conductors.
The man in charge of construction was a Polish communist and he kept the prisoners up to date with the news of the advances of the Soviet Army.
In January of 1945 the prisoners saw more and more British air raids. In the middle of January, the prisoners were lined up in front of their barracks and told that the Russian troops were close by and ordered camp’s evacuation.
On the first night of the march Mikhail and two of his friends decided to run. They climbed out of the barn and went East in the direction they came from. They walked all night and all day, finally stopping in a small town. They knocked on the door of one of the houses. The people who lived there – an old man and two women – saw the letters “SU” on the prisoners’ clothes and let them in. They gave them hot tea and asked about what will happen to them when the Russians come. They told them that according to rumors the Russians treated Poles no better than the Nazis. Mikhail assured them that they shouldn’t worry, that the punishment for pillaging in the Soviet Army was execution without trial. The old man showed Mikhail and his friends a secret way out of the house in case the Germans showed up and let them sleep in the living room.
The next day Mikhail and his friends had to hide in the basement because a small German regiment came through town. While they were waiting for the Germans to leave, the old man told them that his neighbor was hiding two British POWs. A day later he told them that he saw Soviet troops advancing down the road.
After an hour the prisoners asked the old man to check on the Soviet troops again. He left and came back with a Soviet corporal. The corporal was very drunk and very obnoxious. He took the old man’s watch, and it took Mikhail a long time to convince him to give it back.
The prisoners put the corporal on his horse and followed him to a house full of soldiers who were eating, drinking, and cleaning their weapons. They surrounded Mikhail and his friends, and one of them asked, “Where did you come from, you fascist dogs?”
Mikhail told them about being a POW, about their time behind the barbed wire, the oppression, and the torture. The soldiers didn’t want to listen and demanded immediate execution.
When they dragged Mikhail out of the house, he saw a dead body in German uniform lying on the ground. Luckily, a sergeant decided to stop the lynching that was about to take place. He ran out in the middle of the road and stopped a carriage with a Soviet colonel. The colonel ordered the soldiers to escort Mikhail and his companions to a POW registration center.
The POW registration center was in a hospital in the middle of the town. The hospital was filled with freed POWs. Hundreds and hundreds of people, Englishmen, Frenchmen, a group of Jewish women from Lithuania – all dirty, skinny, hungry and sick.
At the registration office some official-looking people took down everyone’s names and told them that they might be going to the front.
Mikhail and several others were ordered to scout the area and gather unattended cattle. One day, as he was walking through a field looking for runaway horses, he ran into one of the men who escaped from Stalag #312. The man was escorted by two armed soldiers and an officer. The man recognized Mikhail and yelled: “I know him – we were in a POW camp together. He can vouch for me!”
“Do you know him?” – the officer asked Mikhail. – “Can you vouch that he is a true Soviet citizen and not a Nazi sympathizer?”
“Of course, he is a true Soviet citizen! I have never seen him do anything to help the Nazis” – replied Mikhail.
“In that case you should come with us.”
The officer led Mikhail and the arrested man to a small house.
“Now tell me about yourself.” – the officer asked. – “Tell me how you were captured, what did you do in Poland and Germany and why are you covering for a traitor.”
He nodded to two soldiers who grabbed Mikhail by his shoulders and led him into an adjacent room. Mikhail was pushed in front of a large wooden desk, a remnant of some grand pre-revolutionary mansion. Behind the desk sat an officer in NKVD uniform, chest covered in medals. The medal-encrusted NKVD officer did not ever bother raising his gaze at Mikhail – he pulled out a sheet of paper and began an official interrogation. “Date of birth! Place of birth! Nationality! Where did you serve in the Soviet Army! Where were you captured! What camps were you held at! When did you agree to collaborate with the Nazis? Why are you covering for a traitor?”
Every word came out as a bark. The officer barely waited for a response before yelling out the next question. “How many people were you your unit? Who recruited you into Gestapo? How did you pass information to the Nazis?” The officer was getting more and more worked up. He finally looked up from his sheet of paper and stared at Mikhail for a moment. “How did you survive in the camps being a Jew?”
“The Germans did not know that I am Jewish,” replied Mikhail. “I am not circumcised, and I guess I don’t look like a Jew.” The officer laughed and said, “That’s funny, because all Jews look like you.”
For over a week Mikhail went through a cycle of being locked in a cellar, interrogated, and beaten. Every day two guards would escort him to the room with a giant desk. Sometimes he would sit for hours and wait, sometimes the NKVD officer with medals on his chest would already be there. The officer would scream the same questions and demand that Mikhail sign a confession. When Mikhail would refuse, the NKVD officer or the guards would beat him.
After a week, Mikhail started to black out. He would wake up with new bruises and cuts and not remember how he got them; sometimes he could not remember that he was already interrogated the day before, or what questions the officer asked him.
One day, the guards woke Mikhail up and dragged him out of the cellar. Instead of taking him to the interrogation room, they led him to a platform truck already loaded with a group of about 30 beaten people, many in torn Soviet army uniforms. They were loaded onto a train and taken to Kursk.
The train frequently stopped; sometimes they sat unmoving for hours and waited for other trains to pass, trains that carried supplies and equipment to the front. Other times, they were allowed brief stops to throw out the bodies of those who died in transit. Mikhail completely lost track of time. When they got to Kursk, their railcar was connected to a different train headed to Moscow.
After a couple of days at a station near Moscow, the train was redirected to Vologda. Prisoners were pulled off the train and sorted into groups based on some unknown set of rules. Each group was then escorted to Vologda prison.
Mikhail ended up with a cement cell with a group of criminals. This was a common practice of intimidation, where political prisoners were placed with murderers and robbers. In case of Mikhail, the proven intimidation technique did not work. Mikhail was very well read and could spend hours entertaining his cellmates with stories about Robin Hood, Count of Monte Cristo, and Ivanhoe.
Mikhail was in the Vologda prison for about 90 days. On May 18th of 1944 he was transferred to Vorkuta RechLag.
Michael met my grandfather in August of 1953, shortly after the Vorkuta RechLag uprising. The uprising started in the middle of July when prisoners from mine #29 walked out of the mine and refused to continue to work. After Stalin’s death in 1953, the Soviet government issues a general amnesty. However, that amnesty applied only to prisoners with criminal sentences and disregarded political inmates. As the majority of people in Vorkuta Gulag were arrested and sentenced for various “political” crimes, the amnesty did not apply to them.
Prisoners did not stage a violent uprising – they simply walked out of the mines and stood within their designated areas. Over the following week, more and more political inmates walked out of the mines and administrative jobs and joined the ranks of the protesters. This was the first (and the largest) uprising of this kind in USSR. Top Soviet brass visited the camp, including the State attorney of the USSR and several generals. They walked around the camp and spoke to inmates. Eventually, the camp administration ordered mass arrests of “provocateurs” – inmates responsible for inciting the uprising. The prisoners started building barricades to stop the arrests. In the course of one day, a peaceful standoff turned violent. A group of prisoners forced their way into the part of the camp where inmates were kept in extended isolation and freed more than 70 people. The prison administration responded by ordering the guards to fire into the crowd. The uprising was cut down in less than a minute – once the machine guns from the guard towers started firing, the prisoners ran. Close to a hundred people were killed – some died on the spot, others died later when the camp administration denied them medical care.
Shortly after the uprising, the camp administration began shuffling prisoners around, transferring them between mines, administrative posts, and barracks. My grandfather, along with a man by the name of Yakov Feldbein, were transferred from mine #7 to mine #29 and moved into Mikhail Fishman’s barracks. They did not get an opportunity to become close friends in RechLag – a few months after being moved to mine #29, my grandfather was released from Gulag. After being in the Gulag system for over 10 years, he had no money, no civilian clothes, and no family or friends in Vorkuta. One major caveat of his release was five years of exile – a limitation imposed on many former political prisoners that prevented them from living in certain large cities. When Mikhail Fishman found out about my grandfather’s impending release, he talked to everyone he knew and managed to raise 1000 rubles from other inmates and find a civilian winter coat for my grandfather.
When Mikhail was eventually released from Gulag, my grandfather was already married to my grandmother, and they were expecting a child. They took Mikhail in and helped him find a job. Mikhail and my grandfather stayed friends for 46 years. Mikhail visited our family in Gomel on multiple occasions, and constantly wrote letters to my grandfather after he immigrated to the United States. Even after my grandfather’s death in May of 1999, Mikhail kept in touch with my grandmother, writing letters and calling on her birthdays.
I left Mikhail’s apartment late in the evening. I would have loved to stay longer and ask more questions, but I had to catch a flight back to Pittsburgh. As I was driving back to the airport, a wave of anxiety and sadness came over me. I pulled over on the side of the road and sat in the car, crying. At the time, I could not quite frame or organize my thoughts, I just knew that I had to find a way to tell Mr. Fishman’s story, as well as stories of everyone who helped my grandfather get through 11 years of GULAG. A year later, after reading Anne Applebaum’s amazing book called “Gulag: A History”, I came across a passage that echoed the importance of why I wanted to tell these stories. “[In] the terror of the 1930s Stalin killed more Ukrainians than Hitler murdered Jews. Yet how many in the West still remember it?” Depending on the source, scholars estimate that the total number of deaths in the GULAG system ranged from 1.2 to 1.7 million. And how many people still remember these atrocities? Not just people in the West, but younger generations of people who grew up in the former Soviet Union? It hit me that this was no longer a story of me searching for my grandfather or even a story about my grandfather. I wanted to create an artifact, a memory, something that would help preserve even one story out of millions, one life from millions of “statistics” of Stalin’s purges.
[1] Soviet Union
[2] Cross-eyed (Russian)
Dmitriy B. 