Episode 5: Helpers

SPEAKER_02 0:01

In this chapter of Yasha's story, they put all us in this circuit. One family with this bench and on that bench. We couldn't go outside. My sister said, just take us. This pure girls. I was sleeping on the floor, and it is the floor was made of cement. We'll freeze here to death. I just suffered and suffered. We bought a ticket to go to Kazakhstan.

SPEAKER_00 0:44

Hundreds of thousands of Jewish families were displaced when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union during World War II. Those who evaded Nazi death camps were faced with a perilous journey eastward in order to survive. This is the true tale of one of those families, told by the son who lived through it all. His Russian nickname is Yasha, and this is his story. Inside a dimly lit arena, somewhere in the Soviet Union, a spotlight flickers to life, illuminating a rounded stage. In the surrounding stands, rows of seats ascend steeply toward the rafters, filled with an audience, eager to be entertained. Suddenly, the silence is broken by theatrical music. And the sound of pause patting on the ground. Into the light marches a procession of well-trained dogs, each on their hind legs, dressed in the unmistakable uniforms of Nazi soldiers, mock weapons slung over their shoulders. The bizarre army advances toward the middle of the stage, where a hill stands draped in a map of the Soviet Union. The task before them is clear. Climb to the top and conquer the nation. But as they begin their ascent, the task proves extremely difficult for the clumsy invaders, as any dogs that succeed in scrambling up the hill simply lose their balance and immediately tumble down the other side. They struggle to the top again and again, and down each time they fall in a cycle of comedic failure. The audience erupts, both entertained and assuaged by their foe's literal and symbolic downfall. As surreal as it sounds, this spectacle was real, conjured and performed in one of the Soviet Union's most celebrated arenas, the circus. The skit was called The March of Germany and their vassals to the USSR. And after a while of its canine performers' pitiful antics, it drives home its intended message. The spotlight narrows to the forefront of the battalion and onto the lead dog, dressed unmistakably as Adolf Hitler. The furry Fuhrer makes a notable retreat from the hill, a signal for the other dogs, tired and tattered from their tumbles, to follow. After scanning the arena and finding no other way out, he eventually notices a gallows standing ominously in the ring. He approaches and, on command from offstage, reluctantly sticks his head through a noose. The audience is pleased with the symbolic act of surrender, which is then underscored by the rousing words of the animal trainer, who delivers a monologue weaving themes of hubris, folly, and the eventual downfall of the fascist invaders. Before they started dressing dogs as Nazis, and even well before Stalin came to power, the circus was a prominent feature in Russian culture. During the czarist era, it was world-renowned for its high-quality performances and skilled artists. A place where aristocrats and common folk alike could behold exotic animals, mischievous clowns, and the daring feats of acrobats. When the communists took over, this cultural emblem turned into a platform for propaganda, a tool for shaping and reflecting the values of Soviet society. During the war, this took the form of denigrating the fascists and their collaborators by whatever means and with whatever creatures necessary, in order to dehumanize the enemy and reinvigorate a war-weary Soviet citizenry, some of whom have been enduring the very real-world consequences of Hitler's conquests. After more than a year on the run and fresh off an agonizing three-month train journey, 12-year-old Yasha and his displaced family could surely have used some comedic reprieve, the likes of Hitler's clumsy dogs. But for them and their fellow evacuees, who had been sent north from the threatened territory of the Caucasus to the city of Berezniki in the Ural Mountains to work, the local circus would come to play a far different role in their Soviet experience. Yasha owned an electronics repair shop for many years after immigrating to the US. And surely none of his customers would have added an eye at this one syllable mix up. It was one of a plethora of pronunciation issues during our interview and during Yasha's American life as a whole. When he would pause in the middle of a sentence, searching for the right word or saying finally finding it, but pronouncing it just slightly wrong. Despite the cultural and physical permanence of the Russian circus, the demands of the war and a massive displaced population presented a more dire reality. For a 12-year-old kid in another time and place, the prospect of living within the walls of a circus, of going on mischievous adventures alongside acrobats and clowns, might be the stuff of joyful daydreams. But from this ring, at least, the performers have vanished, probably drafted to the front lines, leaving behind their tightropes and face paint for machine guns to fight the Germans. And where an excited audience once sat, awaiting their acts, now lay rows of makeshift bedding on cascading benches. Music, laughter, and applause, replaced by the hushed conversations and chattering teeth of displaced families, waiting for someone to tell them what their job would be in the cold outside.

SPEAKER_02 9:08

It's already winter coming. We didn't have any clothes, anything. And there is almost almost Siberia. It's very close to Siberia. It is so cold became in the beginning. I remember it is November, in the beginning of November. We couldn't go outside. I remember I have some shoes with holes already.

SPEAKER_00 9:35

After more than a year of living out of suitcases, surely the family's Soviet-era footwear, or whatever was left of them, weren't the only articles that were worn out and ill-equipped for their new environment. As Yasha points out, the city of Berezniki isn't far from the frozen wilderness of Western Siberia, where winter temperatures are preceded by a negative, more often than not. Even if they own the items and clothing necessary to withstand such a climate, we have to remember, since they left home, they've been limited only to what they could carry, or whatever the government allotted them on their various transports. When they were forced to hastily pack and flee Petrakov, there was no way of knowing that the wear and tear, frost and sweat of six consecutive seasons on the move would still leave them displaced, living in an abandoned circus tent in the frozen Urals, and enlisted to aid in the construction of a chemical manufacturing plant.

SPEAKER_02 10:48

And my sister, they need to go to work to build this manufacturer. Manufacturing when they took the passport. Um this pure girls. She was what sixteen, seventeen, very young girls.

SPEAKER_00 11:10

The weather in Berezniki may have been frigid, but when Yasha and his family arrived in November of 1942, its streets would have been ablaze with the radiant light of factories and manufacturing plants, churning around the clock to meet the relentless demands of the war effort. The city was a burgeoning hub of the Soviet chemical industry. And now, evacuees from all over the country were being shipped in to backfill workers who had been drafted to the front and to help produce materials crucial to the military. Without their passports, which the government opportunely seized before they boarded the train north, it appeared the family was stuck in their makeshift circus shelter, and that Yasha's sisters, three teenage girls from rural Belarus, were about to get pulled into the cold, ratcheting gears of the Soviet war engine. But, as we've come to expect, their mother, ever steadfast in her duty to protect her family, wasn't willing to accept that fate.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

It's very cold to get a and and what? We don't have a park, we don't have anything.

SPEAKER_00 12:44

If, like me, you're growing motion sick from all this picking up and leaving, just imagine how Yasha felt. Especially now, after having just spent three straight months on a train. At least this time, for the first time, the impetus for their departure wasn't the existential threat of the advancing Nazis. In fact, in a strange twist of fate, the same forces of nature now spurring Josh's family elsewhere were also crippling the very enemy who had predestined them to the snowy Urals in the first place. By this time, the infamously harsh Russian winter had become quite the frozen thorn in the side of the German military. It had already been a significant factor in Hitler's failure in taking Moscow the previous year. And now, German troops, already stretched thin and struggling with supply issues, had to once again contend with sub-zero temperatures, snow, and ice that hampered mobility and the functioning of equipment. Not to mention troop health and morale. But unlike Yasha's mother, German soldiers did not have the option of retreat. Despite insufficient clothing and crippled supply lines, and at the untenable risk of losing ground in the war, they were ordered further and further into frigid battle. Casualty reports quickly became full of severe frostbite and hypothermia, and dwindling rations spread rampant starvation among the German ranks. All of this, plus the equally freezing but firmly dug-in, Soviet defense, meant that the German advance had significantly stalled by the end of 1942. And so, while Hitler's generals strategized how to boost declining morale and push through the cold, Yasha's mother was trying to figure a way to get her family out of it. But with their documentation in control of the state, they couldn't just pick up and leave. They needed those passports back. And this time it was one of Yasha's sisters who took action.

SPEAKER_02 15:09

And my second sister, Gala, she started to go around and talk to people that give us the passport back. We need to leave, we cannot stay here. No, in the end, to make it shorter, in the end, we got the passports.

SPEAKER_00 15:33

Just like earlier, when Yasha's oldest sister, Tanya, was somehow able to convince the famously firm-handed Soviet authorities to keep her passport, allowing her to depart and seek a better life in Tashkent. We're left wondering here. How on earth was Gala, the next oldest in a line of apparently very clever sisters, able to thwart the state apparatus again and get the family's passports back? It must have taken a lot more than just wandering into an administrative office and saying, Pretty please. Did she steal them? Bribe someone? Make an important friend? This is another part of the interview where I wish I had dug a little deeper for the story within the story. Regardless, prepare to start hearing more about Yasha's clever sisters, who, as the family prepared to once again make their way on their own, would each need to find their own ways to contribute to their collective survival. But first thing was first: secure transport to a more hospitable climate.

SPEAKER_02 16:47

And now it was a question how to buy tickets to go somewhere. And we where to go somewhere that is warm. We brought with us this uh bedding that we sleep on. It's it's made of uh of feathers, it's a big one and feathers, it is very useful in that time. And it was a big market there in the city, and everybody would if you have something you go and sell them, you buy something, sell them. And we sold this bedding, pillows and this stuff, and we collect some money that you get, and in Soviet Union, train tickets is not very expensive.

SPEAKER_00 17:39

With the influx of evacuees to the city, the market in Berezniki was no longer just a place for locals to buy their food and other daily necessities, but gathering grounds for displaced families who desperately sought items fundamental to their new struggle. Warm clothing, boots, firewood, or a simple quintessential loaf of bread. Yasha's family, though, weren't seeking items to make their stay more comfortable, but their exit possible. And although cheap, train tickets weren't free. They had to find something to sell. In that time, and especially that place, something as simple as down betting could be life-saving. But desperate times called for desperate measures, and sacrifices had to be made. Besides, they had their very cold fingers crossed that where they were going, they wouldn't need it.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

But the other side is a very warm. It's a big, big state, Kazakhstan. And we decided to go there. And we went to cities, to the capital of the city of Kazakhstan, and it's called Almatan.

SPEAKER_00 19:40

All it takes is one quick look at a map of the world from the time to appreciate just how staggeringly large the Soviet Union was. If 22 million square kilometers is hard to conceptualize, just consider that it more than doubled the size of the next largest country in the world and spanned 11 different time zones. In fact, the country Yasha called home covered approximately one-sixth of the entire planet's land surface, with about 20% of its fresh water, 11% of its oil supply, and many of the world's richest mineral deposits. Its 15 individual republics unified a vast swath of cultures, geographies, and resources under a single communist banner, forging a geopolitical and economic behemoth on the world stage. No wonder Hitler wanted it so bad. The second largest of the country's republics was the Kazakh-Soviet Socialist Republic, or modern-day Kazakhstan, covering well over two and a half million square kilometers. To the east, it borders the rugged All Thai Mountains, gateway to China and the exotics of the Orient. And in its west, it hugs the Caspian Sea, the crucial waterway that, just a few months prior, transported Yasha and his family out of war-torn Europe. Now, desperate for some warmth, they had their eyes on the bustling capital, Almatar, which lay in the southeastern corner, closer to the milder climates of Central Asia. But getting there meant, you guessed it, another train, heading around 3,000 kilometers back south across the vast interior of the largest country on Earth, and retracing more than half of the distance they had just traveled. Thanks to Gala, they had their passports. But now they were in for yet another long journey. At least, unlike their previous trek, they had tickets for a train that was actually meant to transport people, and not shoddling. Repurposed by the government to cram displaced bodies. And for once, thanks to Yasha's maturing sisters and some good old-fashioned Soviet chivalry, they had some help in making the long haul a little more manageable.

SPEAKER_02 22:20

It was not easy. It was very hard. But my sisters, especially Marshall, you know, she was a good-looking girl. And some men start looking at her, and some of them start to help them.

SPEAKER_00 22:41

Not even war can stop the fervor of youth. During my childhood, I was fortunate enough to know each of the three sisters Yasha wrote alongside on the way to Almatta, all of whom immigrated to Colorado as adults. I have particular memories of the youngest, Masha, who spoke little to no English, but always doled out a smile and customary kiss on the cheek when the extended family got together. Masha, Sonia, and Gala were all mothers and grandmothers with families of their own when I knew them. But I wonder what they remembered from this time in their lives, and of this particular age, when blossoming young women start drawing the gaze of eager young men.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

And this is a lack of help. This couple males helped us because they said that it's just girls in my mom and not me.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

We have to assume Itka was wary of the advances of these men who wanted to help. However heightened her protective instincts, though, help was not something Yasha's mother could really afford to turn down. The inherent challenges of single motherhood aside, she had the monstrous task of keeping her four remaining children warm, fed, and together under impossible circumstances. So if a few eager gentlemen offered to carry their luggage or assist in finding them somewhere to sit on that train toward Kazakhstan, it's fair to assume she was willing to accept the help. Albeit with the classic maternal side eye always on watch. Even Yasha, the brother, and another of the classic sister-suitor skeptics, insists on the sincerity of these men.

SPEAKER_02 24:37

And it was a few guys, very nice guys, that helped us a lot. Especially one guy, even after we apart, he wrote a letter, some very good letters. He's a very nice guy. But now I'm thinking, who is he? Because a man in his age, he's supposed to fight with Germans, he's supposed to be on the front. But he somehow went from together with us.

SPEAKER_00 25:09

How romantic. And like Yasha, it leaves me wondering, what was the story behind this mysterious gentleman? Perhaps he was an enigmatic spy, posing as a civilian on his way to infiltrate German lines. Or maybe a wandering intellectual traveling the rails to inspire his next great book or poem. Or even a daring war deserter, riskily evading Soviet authorities. In the romance novel That Isn't, we'd learn, in an overly drawn out and gratuitous fashion, how his journey fatefully intersected with Yasha's families. How he wasn't searching for love, but found it accidentally in the eyes of a teenage girl from Belarus. Sorry to break it to all you swooners out there, but this isn't fiction. We can't make up his name, the reason he was on that train to Almatta, the content of those letters, or sorry, romance fiends, the extent of his handsomeness. What we do know is that he and his counterparts, whatever their stories, helped Yasha's family. And it's the actions, not necessarily the identities, of these silent supporters that live on in the stories of those they've helped. But in defiance of those faceless helpers on the train, and in contrast to their northern journey, it was the conditions outside, at the famously cold and barren Soviet train stations, where the family had to stop, wait, and sleep on their journey toward Kazakhstan that were equally frozen in Yasha's memory.

SPEAKER_02 27:04

But you know how the trainees go there during the war. We have maybe a few stops. We need to change the trains. We need to spend night in the stations because the next train will come in the morning. And I remember I was sleeping on the floor, and it is the floor was made of cement, and it was so cold that my kidneys, my kidneys became not good from the cold that I couldn't go. It was terrible.

SPEAKER_00 27:46

A veteran of a few dozen Colorado winters myself, I might have thought I had at least a decent idea of what it means to be cold. I've been outside in below freezing temperatures. I've experienced those penetrating shivers, your body's first request to bundle up or go inside. Even had my fingers and toes start to go numb when I didn't listen. But the thing is, I've always had the option to bundle up or go inside. Twelve-year-old Yasha had no such choice. The cold he experienced on the way to Kazakhstan during nights of sleeping on train station floors was something else entirely. With shivers and numbness going continuously unanswered. This variety of cold causes your core temperature to plummet and eventually forces your body to choose which vital organs to keep operational. With your kidneys lower down on the list, they are sacrificed. You suddenly discover you can't urinate no matter how hard you try. This allows toxins to start building up in your bloodstream. Nausea and weakness kick in, and then delirium. Night after night, that freezing concrete floor sucks any remaining warmth from your body. And without a change in your environment, your body slowly becomes poisoned by its own waste.

SPEAKER_02 29:22

We didn't have a doctor, we didn't have anything. I just suffer and suffer and suffer until it's gone away.

SPEAKER_00 29:30

Acute kidney failure is just one example of the various maladies brought on by prolonged exposure to extreme cold. A silent enemy that killed countless people during this time, whether it be on frozen train station floors, in German or Soviet labor camps, or on the battlefield. Without a doctor and with medicine and resources limited as it were, it's either a matter of sheer luck, or perhaps the journey finally, mercifully coming to an end, that Yasha was able to survive.

SPEAKER_02 30:07

And we came to Al-Mata. Because we came to Al-Mata not by the government, but we came by ourselves. We went to a place that we have a special place for people that came. And as we say, what we said, okay, we came, we want to stay here.

SPEAKER_00 30:29

Once more, Yasha's family found themselves in another unfamiliar city, waiting for someone to tell them what came next. But in its relentless game of human chess, where bodies were like ponds on a vast orde, some all-powerful state entity had once again decided that their positioning was not optimal. They were of better use somewhere else.

SPEAKER_02 30:56

They said no. Here in Almatar you cannot stay. You will go to Karahanda. It's again the cold cold park of Kazakhstan. The cities produce coal. A lot of coal. It's a very famous city.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

The family's next move had been decided for them. The state cared not at all that this move would send them to exactly the type of place Yasha's mother was trying to avoid. The very kind from which she had just fled after another long train journey. In addition to its harsh climate, the coal mining city of Karaganda harbored one of the Soviet Union's largest labor camps, an imposing outpost of Stalin's infamous gulags, where notoriously brutal working conditions awaited political prisoners, dissidents, and other undesirables. A class to which we couldn't really blame Yasha's family for feeling they belonged at this point. Though I doubt she had knowledge of this ominous association, the prospect of relocating to another winter wasteland and the risk of laboring in the coal mines was untenable for Yasha's mother. And this time, Ika's response to this latest directive was pretty direct itself.

SPEAKER_02 32:24

My mom said, no, we will not go there. And they said, okay, if you will find by yourself a job, war, if you will find war, then we will stay. But we are we will not give you, we will not help you to find war. And we start looking for war. And in this place, some people will come if if they need some workers, they knew that there is people that you can hire. And one time a worker came from a local train train station and said, We need people to work.

SPEAKER_00 33:03

This family had to be absolutely sick of trains and their stations. But in order to stay out of the cold, they had to stay in Almatah. And in order to stay in Almatah, they had to work. And when it came to work, you took what you could get.

SPEAKER_02 33:21

My sister said, Okay, we're ready to do whatever we need, just take us. And they took us. They give the three sisters they give work on the truck. They give us a small small, I cannot call apartment, it's just a door and go like in the in a closet from the from a very small place. And they start working on these trucks.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Just like at the frigid construction site of the chemical plant in Bereznaki, and in the sweltering field of the collective farm in the Caucasus, the now calloused hands of Yasha's teenage sisters were again recruited for arduous manual labor. And again, just as this episode started, so it shall end, with unsuitable shelter, grueling work, and a slight mispronunciation, followed by the painful misunderstanding that follows.

SPEAKER_02 34:20

What mean tracks? They need to put this uh uh what you put on on on something you put the track. You know what I'm talking about? Drain road? No. Spala.

SPEAKER_01 34:43

Drain?

SPEAKER_02 34:45

Guys, you you don't even have a maj how how is the track was was built?

SPEAKER_01 34:51

It's not a truck.

SPEAKER_02 34:52

Train?

SPEAKER_01 34:53

Train. Train truck. It's a drain a trap. It's about a truck or track? No, it's not a truck, it's not a car. Oh I I thought you were saying truck. No. Or the tracks go on. Yeah, the track, the afterzit, because it builds his train will go. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 35:17

Despite Yasha's frequent but understandable struggle with the nuances of a difficult language, not to mention my apparent inability to use context clues, my grandfather always managed to make it work. He was good at that, making things work. I saw it with my own eyes on many occasions growing up. Whether it was navigating his way around a tricky sentence, in his TV VCR repair shop, where he made a career of making things work for other people, or in the improbable life he built for himself and his family on the other side of a harrowing childhood. It all started with a seed that was planted when Yasha was just a kid, when unimaginable hardship forced him to grow up too early. And perhaps it was Almatar, Kazakhstan, where that seed began to sprout, when in 1942, he and his family arrived to a tiny apartment near the train station and had to figure out how to scrape out a life there. In order to make that work, it would take a lot more than just a little hard work and determination. They would need a special breed of resilience, constant adaptability, some luck, and at times a bout of dangerous creativity. Even as a young teenager, my grandfather's resourcefulness and budding entrepreneurial spirit would begin to shine through and become essential to his family's survival. With the war grinding on in the world they left behind, Yasha must fight new life or death battles of his own in the face of unrelenting hunger and poverty. And when dire circumstances force his family apart, a teenage Yasha becomes their only chance at survival. And we start to see the makings of the man I knew. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others and leave a rating or review wherever you're listening. And don't forget to follow to stay involved in the story. There's more to come. I hope you'll join us again.