Александр Кузьмич Яропольский / Alexandr Kusmitsch Jaropolskij 1899 - 1945

Born 9.6.1899 in Moskwa
Died 1.3.1945 in Gusen

Biography

My grandfather Alexandr Kuzmich Yaropolsky was born on 9 June (by the old Russian calendar) / 22 June (by the new Russian calendar) 1899. The family lived in Moscow near to Krasnaya Presnya Street in their own house. My grandfather’s father was a manager in a weaving mill and my grandfather’s mother, Maria Sergeevna (née Drosdova) was a housewife and took care of raising their five children.

Alexandr was the first son born to the Yaropolsky family. In 1911 he graduated with honours from the diocesan school named for F.A. Kopeikin-Serebryakov in Moscow and went on to attend a commercial college. In 1922 my grandfather completed a course for regimental leaders at the Higher Tactical Artillery School and fought in the civil war in the Red Army’s ‘Polish’ campaign. While active as an officer he studied and later taught at the Frunze Military Academy. In 1923 he graduated from the Moscow Institute for Soviet Law in the field of commercial law.

Circumstances dictated that my grandpa ended his military career in the 1930s and worked until the outbreak of war as a lawyer in the People’s Commissariat for Industry.

On 22 June 1941 my grandfather, Alexandr Kuzmich Yaropolsky went voluntarily to the district military commissariat and had himself enlisted. My grandmother, Irina Alexandrovna Yaropolskaya, received no news from her husband during the entire war. She did not marry again and raised her daughter Larisa (my mother), born in 1924, on her own.

After the war my grandmother was informed that her husband was missing in action. Some years later a man came to us and told us that grandfather had saved his life. He and my grandfather had been in a concentration camp together in Reich territory. Prisoners had planned an escape. At the last moment their plans were betrayed and my grandfather gave the others the chance to escape, which meant remaining in the camp himself.

For many years we knew nothing of my grandfather’s fate although we regularly sent enquiries to the Defence Ministry. Only in 1998 did I receive an answer from the Central Archive of the Ministry of Defence of the Russian Federation that Major Alexandr Kuzmich Yaropolsky had been taken prisoner on 21 September 1941 near Pyryatin, was transferred from Stalag XIII A to Stalag XIII D (Nuremberg) on 1 March 1943, and was handed over to the Gestapo on 8 September 1941.

In 2011 a letter arrived from the Red Cross with the information that Alexandr Yaropolsky (prisoner number 633) had been transferred on 2 or 3 October 1944 by the Nuremberg state police to Mauthausen concentration camp (prisoner number 106506) and died there on 1 March 1945.

I am Olga Khuskivadze, Alexandr Yaropolsky’s granddaughter, a lawyer in Moscow. Thanks to the help of the International Red Cross and the association of former prisoners of Mauthausen, I found out where my father died. Now there is a plaque bearing his name on the memorial wall in Gusen.

 

Olga Khuskivadze

 

Translation into English: Joanna White

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