A family of Bessarabian Jews deported twice by Stalin to Siberia

 On the night of July 5-6, 1949, a second wave of deportations of those considered "class enemies" took place throughout the Soviet Union. Among those deported from Soviet Moldova was the Goligorsky Jewish family from Chisinau. It was actually the second time they were deported, after the first wave, from June 12-13, 1941. Yuri, the second son, born during the deportation to Siberia, shares his family's story in an interview with RFI Romania.

Yuri Goligorsky's father was deported to Siberia for the second time in 1949. His second son, Yuri, was born there © Yuri Gologorsky

Yuri Goligorsky: My family, both on my father's and mother's sides, were Bessarabians since they knew each other, their parents, grandparents, great-grandparents were born in Bessarabia. My father's family came from Tighina, which is now called Bender, and my mother's family also came from Tighina, so they are all Bessarabians through and through.

Reporter: Were they rich?

Yuri: My mother's family was not wealthy, quite the opposite. My father's family was indeed wealthy.

My paternal grandfather was a timber merchant, a respected timber merchant, who supplied a lot of wood for the Bessarabians, well-known, generous, very respected.

Reporter: What was their life like during the 22 years (1918 – 1940) that Bessarabia was part of the Kingdom of Romania?

Yuri: Because my grandfather was a wealthy man, and my father was his only child, my grandfather sent his son to study in Bucharest, at the Academy of Fine Arts, because my father was a truly talented artist and was also an aspiring cinematographer.

Yuri's paternal grandparents, Volf and Adele (here in 1937), were originally from Tighina (Bender) © Yuri Goligorsky

When he went to Bucharest, he also produced an animated film, 30-35 meters of film about a walking duck. He sent this experiment to Hollywood and received a response: “Mr. Goligorsky, you can come here, you have a reserved seat, we need cartoonists like you.”

This happened right on the eve of the outbreak of World War II, and my father returned to Tighina in Bessarabia, where he told his father, my grandfather, that it would be the right time to go somewhere else, to America or to Palestine. And not only to practice film production, but also because rumors were circulating insistently in Bucharest that either Germany or the USSR would occupy Bessarabia.

Reporter: And in addition, in the late 1930s and in 1940, the authorities adopted openly anti-Semitic legislative measures, such as the Goga-Cuza decrees, which led to the withdrawal of Romanian citizenship from over 200,000 Jews in Romania.

Yuri: That's right. They all knew about the violence of the Iron Guard and AC Cuza, and that was always on their minds, so they knew that the end result, whoever took over Bessarabia, would be that the Jews would suffer. But my grandfather was firmly convinced that whatever happened, he would prefer to stay in Bessarabia than to go anywhere in the world. Also through the languages they spoke – a beautiful Romanian, a beautiful Russian, a beautiful Yiddish language, my father learned French, they were multicultural, they felt at home in any circumstance.

The Goligorsky family in Bessarabia, circa 1938 © Yuri Goligorsky

Reporter: Where was your father at the end of June 1940 before the occupation of Bessarabia by the Soviets?

Yuri: On June 28, 1940, my father, my mother, were together with their families in Bessarabia, in Tighina. My father had married my mother a year earlier, in 1939 in Tighina, neither of them had gone anywhere else, only my mother's younger sister had emigrated to the United States on the last ship that had left the port of Odessa, together with her son, my cousin, with whom I am not only a relative, but also a great friend, but with a completely different fate.

He became an American from birth, while my parents remained and became prisoners in the Soviet Union.

Reporter: Were your grandfather and father attracted to communist ideology?

Yuri: I wouldn't say they were attracted to communist ideology, they were attracted to the ideology of social justice.

Also, because my grandfather was a rich and generous man and because enough Jews, especially among the young ones, were attracted to the communist ideology, they were often sent to Doftana prison, and my grandfather considered it his duty to bribe the guards to get these Jews out of prison.

As a thank you, when the Soviets came to Bessarabia, my grandfather was arrested, along with these communist Jews, and all sent to the same camp.

Reporter: What happened immediately after June-July 1940 when the Soviets occupied Bessarabia?

Yuri: Initially nothing happened. They came and started the process of confiscating the properties.

So for a few months they used my grandfather as a manager in his own company, which was immediately nationalized, they arrived in June 1940 and the nationalization took place by September.

Reporter: Was this a shock for your grandfather?

Yuri: It was more than a shock, he realized the danger he was in. But at that point it was too late to leave for anything.

Reporter: What was your father's attitude?

Yuri: He felt like a hostage and realized what an opportunity he had missed.

Reporter: What happened in June 1941?

Yuri: At that time my grandfather had already been arrested and deported to the camp, and my father, my mother and my grandmother were exiled to Siberia.

Reporter: Statistics show that on the night of June 12/13, 1941, about 32,000 people were deported on class grounds, to eliminate the "bourgeoisie". Do you have any idea how many of them were Jews?

Yuri: In Tighina, the majority were Jews. However, we must not overlook the fact that wealthy Bessarabian Romanians were also deported to Siberia.

Anyone who had any kind of business, who was rich or well-off was considered a “class enemy”. There was a large concentration of Jews in Tighina, so they were the first to suffer there, but the Moldovans also suffered alongside them.

Reporter: And then what about the accusation of “Judeo-Bolshevism”, according to which the Jews profited from the occupation of Bessarabia by the Soviets?

Yuri: They profited in the sense that they were the first to take a bullet in the head...

Reporter: By what means of transport were they deported?

Yuri: They were taken in cattle cars, for two weeks until they reached their destination.

On the way they were fed mackerel and potatoes, nothing else and very little water. As a result, when they arrived and were allowed to get off the cattle cars, men, women, children, they jumped out and started to relieve themselves without any embarrassment and asked for water.

Reporter: I suspect some died on the way.

Yuri: Many of them died on the way.

Reporter: How many members of your family were in these cars?

Yuri: My father, my mother and my grandmother. My grandfather was taken separately to the camp and was never seen again. He was sent to the Ivdel camp in the Ural mountains, which, by the way, is still in use today.

Reporter: What kind of camp was it?

Yuri: I learned that it was a very harsh camp from the survivors, then young communists that he had rescued from Romanian prisons, who told us that they were given very little to eat.

Suffice it to say that a friend of his named Levitt, whom I never met, but whose story I learned, went crazy and ate his own excrement saying “Now I’m not hungry anymore” and died of poisoning.

Reporter: Can we say that this was an extermination camp?

Yuri: It was simply an extermination camp. Before my grandfather was deported he was a strong and healthy man, like an athlete, although he never practiced any sports, and only three months after being sent to the camp he was a group II invalid, according to the document I received from the archives, which I obtained with difficulty.

So he was a destroyed man. He could no longer be used for productive work anywhere, but these people had to be fed, even if the rations were minuscule.

In the end, the decision was probably made to “help” him die as quickly as possible, to ensure that they were not a burden on the state budget. He died on October 25, 1941.

Reporter: So he died of starvation?

Yuri: Yes. That's what the official document that I obtained from the authorities of the Russian Federation in the mid-1990s says.

Reporter: Tell me what happened to your parents?

Yuri: My parents were in deportation from 1941 to 1947. It wasn't a camp, it was a guarded settlement in the Khanty-Mansi region of the Urals.

In 1947 they were released, allowed to return to Bessarabia, they settled in Chisinau, not Tighina, my brother was born there in 1948, and in 1949 my father was arrested again, only he.

Reporter: This was the second wave of deportations, from July 5/6, 1949, when another 20,000 people were deported from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic on Stalin's orders.

Yuri: It's interesting that I recently spoke with an elderly gentleman from Moscow and discovered that our parents were neighbors in Chisinau, on Cahul Street, were arrested at the same time and sent to Siberia to different settlements in the same year.

He told me an interesting thing, though, being older than me: "Yuri, I frequently go to Chisinau to that place, and the children of those who occupied our houses after we were deported still live there."

Reporter: Why was your father re-arrested and deported again?

Yuri: No reason, it was the second wave. Essentially, it was an order that came from Moscow that said: 5,000 people must be arrested by tomorrow morning, people who had been arrested previously, and he was part of those 5,000.

It was basically like a production process and they couldn’t arrest more than 5,000 people in one night.

Reporter: But it was also the period of Stalin’s anti-Semitic paranoia.

Yuri: Yes, right after the war. Stalin began to suspect the Jews of having hidden intentions and first there was the trial of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, which had helped raise funds in the United States to support the USSR during the war against Nazi Germany, a group led by Shlomo Mihoels, and then the trial of the doctors accused of attempting to poison Soviet leaders, but by then, in the early 1950s, my parents had already been deported.

Reporter: Your mother and brother joined your father, otherwise they couldn’t survive alone in Chisinau.

Yuri: “Voluntarily”, my mother said she didn’t want to be separated from her husband so she said if they wanted they could arrest her too.

They complied immediately, so she was arrested and deported. My father was definitely taken away in cattle cars again, like in 1941, but I have no idea how my mother and brother were taken. They probably had to pay for their own deportation!!!

Reporter: Where exactly were they taken?

Yuri: They were taken to Tyukalinsk, in the Omsk region, in southwestern Siberia, 125 km west of the city of Omsk.

Reporter: Was it an isolated settlement again?

Yuri: They were practically impossible to escape from there. They didn't need guards there.

Reporter: How did they survive there?

Yuri: They grew potatoes, cucumbers and shared a cow with another family. They had milk, they had potatoes and mackerel, caught from a nearby river and brought by fishermen and that was their staple food.

Reporter: What were the winters like there?

Yuri: The temperature sometimes dropped to -35C in the winter. I know that on the day I was born in November 1954 the mercury had dropped below -35C.

Reporter: Why wasn’t your family released after Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953?

Yuri: Why weren’t they released? It’s interesting, first of all it was a trial, people weren’t released right away, it took a while for all the cases to be reviewed.

And secondly the people who worked in the local NKVD (the predecessor of the KGB), I don’t know if they were decent, but somehow they behaved nicely and advised my father: “What’s the point of going back to Moldova? Just to be deported a third time? Better stay here, we know you, you know us, you are very respected here.”

I won’t say that he was offered to join the Communist Party, to which he replied: “I am honored, but I do not feel worthy of this honor”...

Reporter: You were born in 1954, and your family received permission to return to Moldova in 1957. Were they rehabilitated immediately?

Yuri: No way! They made a lot of appeals and it took a long time. They were rehabilitated only in 1963.

Between 1957 and 1963 we lived in little more than a pigsty, because we had no rights. We have no right to claim confiscated property. So we lived in a shed.

By chance I met a man in Chicago who was my first friend, with whom I shared this shed.

He is my age and we met by chance, he works as an engineer at a large company in Chicago and we talk once every two weeks, reminiscing about our five-year-old years.

Reporter: How did your life change in 1963?

Yuri: Things changed dramatically in 1963. When we were rehabilitated, we had the right to request a state-owned apartment, so we were assigned a room and a half in a very good area, in the center of Chisinau, but very small, without a kitchen and without a bathroom.

Reporter: You went to school, you made friends, but you felt that being a Jew in Chisinau you could not enjoy full rights.

Yuri: Of course, and it was something deliberately initiated by the authorities. First of all, Jews were restricted in their right to go to college to study the subject they wanted.

Some of those who graduated from high school at the same time as me had to go to Sverdlovsk or the Urals, to Tomsk, because in Chisinau it would have been impossible for them to be admitted to the faculties they wanted.

Reporter: It was actually a deportation by other means.

Yuri: Yes, it was an exclusion from public life, in a way it was a deportation.

Reporter: Did you personally feel anti-Semitism, from your colleagues, from your neighbors?

Yuri: I studied at a very good school, almost all my friends were either Jews, Moldovans or Russians from families of intellectuals, who were not anti-Semitic.

So if you compartmentalized your life you didn't feel anti-Semitism, but we knew that it was constantly present in the background.

Reporter: What convinced you that you had to leave Soviet Moldova and the USSR?

Yuri: The fate of my parents. I'm not bragging, but from the age of seven I knew I would leave this country, legally or illegally.

I even wanted to flee to the West through Romania, I even went to Ungheni to examine the possibility of crossing the border.

It was an idiocy, because that was probably the most difficult border to cross between the USSR and Romania.

If you remember, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Soviet troops in 1968, Ceaușescu withdrew almost all the border guards from the Romanian bank of the Prut, and when he did that the Soviets immediately doubled their presence on the eastern bank.

A little later, around 1970, I went there on reconnaissance to see if I could cross and to my luck I realized that this would have been an impossible mission.

Reporter: And how did you manage to emigrate to Israel?

Yuri: I became an irritation for the Soviet authorities. I participated in demonstrations, I insulted them, which I would not dare to do now knowing what animals they are.

Reporter: How come they didn't arrest you?

Yuri: I have no idea, maybe they felt sorry for me. The KGB detained me a couple of times for "parental conversations". "You idiot", they told me, "you realize what you're doing, you're playing with fire. In the end we'll arrest you and deport you and your parents for the third time".

Reporter: In what year did you emigrate with your father and mother?

Yuri: June 18, 1973.

Reporter: How come they finally gave in?

Yuri: It was a result of the SALT 1 agreement (Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty) signed by the leaders of the USSR and the United States, Leonid Brezhnev and Richard Nixon.

On my mother's side, except for a brother who fought in the Red Army, the whole family, the whole family was destroyed, we don't know how and where, because my mother had been deported by Stalin, but they were killed either by the Nazis or by the Romanian authorities. My family was "saved" to be killed later. It was only because of Stalin's death in 1953 that the Jews survived, he was preparing a massacre for them. I don't see much difference between Stalin and Hitler, between communism and Nazism.

Yuri Goligorsky

Nixon convinced Brezhnev to allow 100 families to emigrate as a gesture of goodwill.

My brother, however, was kept hostage and I was told that if I made too much noise in the West, they would take revenge.

But I continued to make noise and the KGB did not intimidate me, on the contrary, when I arrived in the West I made a huge scandal and then they realized that they would not be able to get along with me and they let him leave in September 1973 and he arrived in October.

Reporter: I do not want to dwell on the period after 1978 when you came to London and have been living here ever since. I would like to ask you about a subject that we have not discussed: the Holocaust. The Jews of Bessarabia were the hardest hit after the return of the Romanian authorities in the summer of 1941. Only a year after that Bessarabia had been practically cleansed of Jews, who were either killed or deported to Transnistria. Did you have relatives who perished in the Holocaust?

Yuri: On my mother's side, except for a brother who fought in the Red Army, the whole family, the whole family was destroyed, we don't know how and where, because my mother had been deported by Stalin, but they were killed either by the Nazis or by the Romanian authorities.

Reporter: Isn't it ironic that at least some Jews deported by Stalin were "saved" by deportation from the Holocaust?

Yuri: Yes, they were saved to be killed later. Only thanks to Stalin's death in 1953 did the Jews survive, he was preparing a massacre for them.

I don't see a big difference between Stalin and Hitler, between communism and Nazism.

Reporter: When you lived in Moldova, did they talk about the Holocaust?

Yuri: No, it was never discussed, it was a taboo subject, because it was a subject that brought unwanted parallels with the Soviet regime.

Reporter: You were part of a minority, but a significant one, of the Jewish population of Bessarabia that had suffered at the hands of the Soviets, unlike the majority of Jews who had suffered at the hands of the fascists, Romanians or Germans. Did you feel a difference between families like yours and their families?

Yuri: People who were not exiled, deported to Siberia, could not understand the enormity of the deprivations suffered there, it was humanly impossible to understand for those who were not there.

Source of interview: rfi.fr

For more pictures: click here.