Russian

Vesti at 20:00

Today a new exhibition opened at the Tolerance Museum in Moscow. It is timed to the seventieth anniversary of the Great Victory and is devoted to the fates of Jews who, together with other peoples, fought the Nazis and brought victory closer. It is the common history of the war told through individual lives.

From pilot Polina Gelman, who became a Hero of the Soviet Union, to Yevgeny Khaldei, author of the famous photograph Raising the Victory Banner over the Reichstag. Polina Yermolayeva reports once again on the war.

“Rzhevskaya” was a pen name chosen in memory of the terrible battles near Rzhev. Yelena Kagan volunteered for the front, leaving behind her two-year-old daughter, and made it all the way to Berlin. She met Victory wearing this very tunic. Twenty years later, her memoirs told the world how Hitler’s remains had been sought.

The only way to establish the identity of Hitler’s charred remains was by his teeth. Imagine the scene: the group had no safe, so Hitler’s teeth were placed in a cheap jewelry box, and Yelena Kagan carried them under her arm.

22 June 1941. Raising the Victory Banner over the Reichstag. Yevgeny Khaldei’s two best-known photographs open and close the exhibition; between them are people, feats and roads. The “Night Witch” Polina Gelman: 800 combat sorties, the only Jewish woman awarded the Gold Star of a Hero. Yevgeniya Katseva, a philology student, worked with German prisoners. Here are memories and documents that have never before been exhibited.

Practically every nationality then living in the Soviet Union fought fascism and defended the freedom and independence of our country at an enormous cost in human lives.

The history of the Great Patriotic War is presented through individual destinies. Alexander Pechersky led the only successful uprising at the Sobibor death camp. Vladimir Gelfand described every day in his diary.

Beginning in 1941, before he had even entered combat, he was already writing that we would win, that the Germans would be defeated and that we would enter Berlin. Lieutenant Gelfand did indeed enter Berlin and managed to preserve his entire archive, never once encountering military censorship and repeatedly escaping German encirclement. For a Jew, captivity was synonymous with death.

Hitler and the Nazis were personal enemies of every Jew, because in addition to seeking to enslave the Soviet Union, Hitler was personally committed to destroying all Jews.

His mother was murdered in the Berdychiv ghetto; his words are carved on Mamayev Kurgan. Vasily Grossman witnessed both the Battle of Stalingrad and the prisoners of Treblinka and Majdanek with his own eyes and kept frontline notes that later formed the basis of his major book.

A truly priceless exhibit is the first page of the novel Life and Fate: Grossman’s tiny handwriting and numerous corrections. This is the very manuscript seized during a search in 1961. Everything was taken then — drafts and even the carbon copies held by the typists who had retyped the novel.

Suslov said the book could not be published in the USSR for another two or three hundred years. He was wrong. Life and Fate was published even before the Soviet Union collapsed. The manuscripts were found in the KGB archives in 2013. The novel became a literary monument to the victory of all the peoples of our country, without exception.