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Леба Улянский / Elliokum (Leva) Uljansky 1896 - 1944 Edit

Born 6.12.1896 in Mogilew
Died 2.11.1944 in Melk

Biography

WHAT AN OLD PHOTO REMINDS ME OF

 

I catch myself thinking that for some reason I very rarely reminisce. Yes, sometimes. Is it only in connection with dates, events that excite memory.

Recently, my wife started talking about the fact that the sixth of December is the birthday of my father, Uljansky Lev Girshevich. It is necessary to light candles, gather the family around the table, because, despite the fate of the villain that took my father away at less than 48 years old, he is always with us.

We arrived in Israel in a different way than most repatriates. In October 1991, we left Moscow for Austria to once again visit the former Mauthausen concentration camp, where prisoner No. 86083, my father, was burned on 2 November 1944, and, according to Jewish custom, lay stones on a memorial plaque installed there by our family.

We did not return to Moscow.

Through the Vienna branch of the Sokhnut they left for Israel.

Anyone who has ever dealt with Soviet customs officers knows what it is. There was no question of any things other than personal items. But we took some photos with us to Vienna. One of them shows my father's parents, brothers and sisters.

How did their fate turn out? To a large extent, they were predetermined by the military fate of our hometown of Mogilev, in Belarus. There were heavy battles near Mogilev, about which their participant Konstantin Simonov wrote. The city was surrounded, from which it was difficult to escape both for the military and civilians. It should be noted that many Jews lived in Mogilev before the war, most of whom died. Evidence of this is the fate of our relatives, whose faces are captured in this old photograph.

As expected, in the center are the father's parents, Girsh and Shifra Uljansky. Grandfather Hirsch died before the war. Grandmother Shifra died in the evacuation, hit by a car.

To the left of my grandfather is Basya, my father's sister. Directly above her is her Husband Baynes. During the evacuation, Basya buried two daughters – Olenka, my age, and little Firochka. The fate of Baynes is still unknown.

To the right of Baynes is Riva, another sister of her father. Her husband Solomon is a participant in the war. Next to Riva is my father. Before the war, he worked as a purveyor, in other words, a shoe cutter. He was unfit for military service and was a member of the local air defense unit.

On the morning of 22 June 1941, even before the speech on the radio by People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs V. Molotov and 3-4 days before our hasty flight, my father was summoned, as I now understand, on alarm. Two or three times he ran home with a rifle, a gas mask, alarmed by what was happening.

On the very day when my mother, grabbing my hands and my younger sister Rosa, decided to run away from the city, I, a sixth grader, wrote a note to my father that we decided, they say, to leave the city for some time to some village, and as soon as the Germans are driven out, we will immediately return.

Didn't return.

I would like to believe that this note of mine eased the suffering of my father in the fascist death camp, because it gave him hope that we were alive.

Throughout the war and in the post-war years, Rosa and I wrote to various authorities in order to find out something about the fate of my father. In vain. "Uljansky Lev Girshevich is not on the lists of those killed, wounded and missing," was the standard answer.

Only 34 years after the victorious salute, the sister received a notice from the Red Cross that "... according to the information available to the Polish Red Cross, Uljansky Lyova, who was born on 6 December 1896 in the city of Mogilev, died in the Mauthausen concentration camp (Austria) on 2 November 1944" (I recall that the Mauthausen death camp was liberated on 5 May 1945 by the 11th Panzer Division of the US Third Army, commanded by General Patton).

So, in the difficult history of the search for his father, an end was put. However, it is far from the last one, because we have done a lot so that, if not physically, then spiritually, he is always with us.

Omitting details, I will only say that contrary to the position of the Soviet Red Cross (... there are no separate graves in Mauthausen, we do not know how your father got there, etc.) to me, a Jew, lieutenant colonel of the reserve, in the recent past, deputy political officer of the regiment commander, after considerable effort, they nevertheless allowed a trip to Austria to the place of his father's death.

And here I am walking along the same slabs of Appellplatz, on which the hungry, sick, mentally and physically exhausted prisoner No. 86083, my father, heavily stepped.

I climb the so-called staircase of death, along which, breathing heavily, the exhausted prisoner No. 86083, my father, was dragging hefty stones. Here is the infamous "wall of paratroopers", from which the brutalized Nazis pushed ghost people down. All this was shown with the utmost authenticity by the film director Sergei Bondarchuk in the film "The Fate of a Man".

What happened at that moment in my soul – it is impossible to tell. So, in my soul there was a meeting with my father, which did not take place. That is how I titled a poem dedicated to his memory. It contains these lines:...

“It seemed to me: a little more,

A little more, and finally

Let the emaciated, sick,

But I will find you, father.

 

I repeat, dad, again:

You are alive, you are with us forever.

And we named our grandson Leva.

May you be happy for years.”

In one of the former camp blocks I saw a book in which tourists from different countries wrote down their impressions. Looking for records in Russian. I found only one, which was made on 2.10.87 for former prisoner of Mauthausen Vlasov Nikolai Ivanovich from Kyiv. I also left my note: "October 4, 1987. My father died here. Hundreds of thousands of people died here. People. It's time to come to your senses, stop destroying each other."

But what about "No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten?” Except for the standard monument to the "victims of fascism" from the Soviet government and the monument to General D. Karbyshev, there was not a single sign of attention and memory to an ordinary person, especially a Jew.

It was then that we decided, in the presence of our entire family, to erect a plaque in memory of our father, which was done on the 45th anniversary of his death. So, in the fall of 1989, the first and, perhaps, the only memorial plaque to a specific person from the former USSR, a Jew, my father, appeared in the former Mauthausen concentration camp. The father's questionnaire, number 25868, is also kept in the Hall of Names at the Yad Vashem Museum.

Again, I look at the photo. The one on the far right in the top row is Moshe's father's brother. Maybe Vladimir Vysotsky had people like Moshe in mind when he sang about those who "didn't return from the battle yesterday." Or Mark Bernes sang about him in his famous Cranes.

“And in that formation, there is a small gap.

Maybe this is the place for me...”

The fate of the Moshe family was also tragic. At the prompting of local residents, the fascists buried his wife Raya and two daughters alive. All their "guilt" was that they were Jews. How not to remember Grigory Kanovich who wrote that we will never claim that it hurts only us Jews. But the truth is, we've only been hurt because we're Jews.

To the right of the father's parents are the father's elder sister Khava and her husband Leva. Their eldest son, Julius, also died at the front. The younger, David, was killed by the Nazis in Mogilev.

In the bottom row of the picture is Vera, father's younger sister. If the rest of the Uljansky family suffered directly or indirectly precisely from the Nazis, then Vera and her family – from "their own".

Her husband Zinovy (Zalman) Shulman stormed the Winter Palace, defended the revolution in the civil war, graduated from the military academy and served in the Artillery Directorate of the Red Army. But ... the case of M. Tukhachevsky broke out, and during the discussion of his "guilt" military engineer Z. Shulman dared to express disagreement with the official point of view. This was enough for him to be arrested as an enemy of the people, and Vera as a member of the family of an enemy of the people.

Zinovy lived to be rehabilitated in 1956, while Vera spent about four years in prison, and in the winter of 1941 she was released "due to lack of corpus delicti."

In those terrible years, two young children of Vera and Zinovy were taken in by Basya and Riva.

Of all those presented in the photo, only Vera is now alive.

That's what the old photo reminded me of.

And how many of these photographs are kept in Jewish families with similar fates of the people depicted on them. The similarity of their destinies is not accidental, because all of them are the sons and daughters of my people, who suffered a terrible catastrophe.

So let them be our protectors before the Almighty.

"Lord, cover under the shadow of your wings all those who have departed. Tie their souls into a knot of life. Grant comfort to the mourners and may there be great peace for them and all Israel" (Ps. 23.91.130)

For 52 years now, my father Uljansky Lev has been gone, but there is his grandson – Lev Uljansky. Life goes on.

 

Semyon ULJANSKY, 1996 Kiryat Ata. Israel, transmitted by Ilja Uljansky, grandson

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