100 years ago, on March 1, 1923, Volodymyr Natanovych Gelfand was born – an extraordinary personality, a participant in World War II, a memoirist. He is the author of diary entries from the period of the German-Soviet war.
Volodymyr Gelfand was born in the village of Novoarkhangelsk, Kirovohrad region, in a Jewish family. Nadia Volodymyrivna Horodynska – Volodymyr's mother – came from a poor family with many children. Father, Natan Solomonovych, worked at a cement factory in the city of Dniprodzerzhinsk (Kamyanske). In 1933, at the age of 10, Volodymyr Natanovych and his family moved to the city of Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro). After high school, Volodymyr entered the Dnipropetrovsk Industrial Work Faculty (National Metallurgical Academy of Ukraine), and he managed to study there for three years before the start of the war.
The German attack on the Soviet Union interrupted Volodymyr's education, he moves to Yesentuky to live with his aunt, his father's sister. There he worked as an electrician and had armor from being drafted into the army. However, in April 1942, he turned to the military commissariat and already on May 6, 1942, he became a serviceman of the Red Army. Volodymyr Natanovych entered the front as a 19-year-old private, rose to the rank of lieutenant and commanded a mortar platoon. He fought near Kharkiv, took part in the defense of Stalingrad and the liberation of Ukraine and Poland. He reached Berlin and ended the war in Germany, where he remained with the occupation corps until September 1946. On September 10, 1946, Volodymyr Gelfand left Germany with suitcases of gifts and returned to Dnipropetrovsk to his mother.
In September 1947, he began studying at the historical and philological faculty of Dnipropetrovsk State University (Oles Honchar DNU). In February 1949, Volodymyr married a girl he had known since school and corresponded with during the war. Berta Davydivna Koifman graduated from the Molotov (Perm) Medical Institute. In the summer of 1949, Volodymyr Gelfand transferred to the Molotov (Perm) State University. In 1950, the couple had a son, Oleksandr.
Since August 1952, Volodymyr has been working as a teacher of history and Russian language and literature at Railwaymen's Technical College No. 2 in Molotov (Perm). Unfortunately, the marriage with Berta did not work out. In 1954, Volodymyr returned to Dnipropetrovsk, leaving his family behind. He started working as a teacher at the city technical school.
In 1957, Volodymyr Gelfand met Bella Yukhimivna Shulman. A year later, they got married. They had two sons: Hennadiy in 1959, Vitaly in 1963. Bella worked in a kindergarten, and Volodymyr remained a social science, history, and political economy teacher in vocational schools, first in the 12th, and from 1977 in the 21st in Dnipropetrovsk.
Gelfand read a lot and wrote continuously. Volodymyr Natanovych offered the local press not only reports about school days and work results, but also memories of his time at the front. The 1970s were the most productive for him. The collection of newspaper publications includes 7 articles from 1968, 20 from 1976, 30 from 1978. They appeared in Ukrainian and Russian in local party and Komsomol newspapers, as well as in construction workers' newspapers.
Volodymyr Natanovich's health was not the best, he died on November 25, 1983.
Volodymyr Gelfand recorded everything he saw and experienced during the war in his diary, which he kept from April 1941 to December 1946. Volodymyr Natanovych describes in detail and without idealizing the realities of a soldier's life in the Red Army, the attitude of commanders to subordinates, looting, anti-Semitism, the attitude of the Soviets soldiers to the civilian population of Poland and Germany. It was forbidden to keep diaries in the Red Army, but Gelfand boldly violated this ban.
After the death of Volodymyr Gelfand, his son Vitalii systematized, deciphered and digitized his father's archives. Vitalii said that his father did not tell anyone about the diaries. Sorting through the documents of Volodymyr Natanovych, the son found diaries among the papers – both wartime and peacetime. Part of the military diary was first published in Germany and Sweden in the 2000s, the full version was published in Moscow in 2015.
In 2019, Museum “Jewish Memory and Holocaust in Ukraine” had the honor of welcoming to Dnipro the daughter-in-law of Volodymyr Gelfand, Mrs. Olga – the wife of his son Vitaly, who donated his father's personal belongings to our Museum. Among them, in particular, are unique albums with photos of Germany in 1945–1946 and postwar Dnipropetrovsk, family photos, marriage certificates of Volodymyr and his relatives, diplomas and work books, original diaries and letters from 1947–1983, binoculars, radio, a cigar case and a collection of other personal belongings of Volodymyr Gelfand. Some of them are prepared for placement in a museum exhibition.
Liudmyla Sandul, Darya Yesina