In Constant Fear of Being Discovered I’m a Jew

In 1940, I graduated high school in Fastov, a small town in the Kyiv region and enrolled in the Math and Physics Department at the Lviv University. In June 1941, the German army invaded the Soviet Union, dragging the country into war. I was drafted into the Soviet army when I was 19 and participated in my first battle on July 11, 1941.

We fought hard while retreating, crossed the Dnieper River in Cherskasy area, and were encircled there. When trying to break through, I suffered a leg wound and a concussion. Losing and regaining consciousness, I saw a truck approaching me. I thought they were German soldiers and started shooting. Someone started shouting at me, “Why the hell are you shooting? We are on your side!” I found myself in the back of truck, taken away from the battlefield. My leg was bandaged, the Soviet soldiers gave me crutches and I stayed in a trench.

I couldn’t sleep the whole night because of my pain and the screams and groans of the wounded soldiers in the trenches. I nodded off in the morning when a shrill cry “Hände hoch (Hands up)!” woke me up.

The Nazis broke through our defenses and ordered us to leave. Gravely wounded soldiers were shot right on the spot. My comrades helped me get up, put me on a cart, and we started moving. After roaming around for a long time, they brought us to the city of Kremenchug in the Poltava region, to a prisoners of war camp. All the wounded were put on the floor of a barn. The comrades that were able to walk were bringing us food once or twice a day (a potato peel broth and burned grain bread). I thought that would be the end of me.

Post POW camp release, circa 1943 with a local village girl

At one point, policemen came to take down personal information. They asked for my full name and ethnicity. I said I was Jewish. They took it down and left.

My neighbor, an ethnic Russian, asked, “Why did you tell them you were Jewish? They are going to kill you now.”

I brushed it off by saying, “I’ll die anyway, although it would have been better to die in combat.”

When I was brought in to change wound dressing, I felt faint and sick to my stomach when I saw my wound teeming with worms. Right at that moment, I suddenly got a fervent desire to live. I started shouting, “Water! Water!” They poured water on me, gave me some water to drink, and I felt better. They dressed my wound and brought me back.

Several days later, the Germans and local police officers came in and ordered everyone to get up as we were being transferred to a bigger camp. I could barely move. Our column of wounded soldiers was taken outside the fence and started heading towards the other camp while local Soviet women and children stood on the sides of the road, watching us in terror.

I was straggling. An old woman ran up to me, shoved a piece of bread into my hand and whispered, “Do not fall behind, son! They will kill you if you do.”

In the beginning of the war with a comrade, circa 1941

It was December 1941. I was often left without broth and bread in the larger camp because I could not walk. As we settled in a former army barrack, I ended up on the lower level of a two-story bunk. One day, while changing my bandage in the camp’s medical unit, I learned that our troops had gone on offensive in the Moscow area and drove the Nazis far away from the capital. I was incredibly happy and passed this information along in my barrack. Another patient who was on the upper bunk above me heard me and figured that I was Jewish by my accent. “There is a Jew here!” he screamed, but miraculously no one paid attention.

One time, I went to get lunch and met an acquaintance from my hometown. “Go to the barracks across the street. There are some young POWs there that are being handed over to the locals to recover and work for the Germans. Make up a new ethnicity and a new name for yourself,” the acquaintance said.

I was thinking what ethnicity to choose and decided to become Chuvash, a Turkic ethnic group in Siberia who are mostly Muslim, because there is no “r” in this word. I was afraid that the way I roll my “r” may identify me as being Jewish.

A few days later, they brought me to the camp commandant and I provided the new false information about myself. I changed my last name from Kaganovsky, a very identifiable Jewish name, to “Ukhanov,” a name that sounded Chuvash, and my first name from Iosif to the Muslim version “Yezep.” They issued a new ID card and let me out of the camp the next morning. I refer to that day, December 9, 1941, as “A Day of Life” that I would later celebrate with family.

At that time, POWs were often discharged to be sent to Germany to labor camps or drafted as German army soldiers. When I received the discharge paper, it had a name of a village where I was told to go to and await further instructions. Heading there, I would spend the nights in villages on the way, asking people for food. Often people called me zhid, a pejorative name for a Jew in Russian, to my face. Despite my painful leg wound and difficulty walking, I walked 25 kilometers in the span of seven days, to the village of Maksimovka, in Ukraine’s Poltava region. As I arrived, I was advised to see the district’s commandant and get a referral for work at the collective farm. I received the referral and permission.

To minimize the risk of being exposed as a Jew, I decided not to talk to people and pretended that I didn’t understand them and didn’t speak Russian. I stayed with an old woman who would receive food from the collective farm to give me (flour, potatoes, sunflower oil). The woman washed my clothes and ironed my lice-ridden overcoat.

One day, I looked at myself in the mirror and fainted. Bare bones, pale face, dry yellowish skin, glassy eyes. Despite all that, I knew one thing – I had to live to take revenge on the enemy.

When I was a child, I could draw well and my work was displayed in exhibitions. I decided to start drawing people’s faces from photographs. People bartered bread, eggs, milk, and sometimes a piece of salo (pork fat in Russian) for these portraits.

Once, a police officer came and asked me to say “kukuruza,” (corn in Russian) a word with the sound “r” in it. I was stunned. He suspected that I am a Jew and I thought this would be the end of me. He kept asking me to say “kukuruza” and started screaming, but I pretended that couldn’t understand what he wanted. He took out his hand pistol, pulled the trigger and the pistol jammed. Another miracle.

Post war soviet ID document, picture page.

Witnessing that scene, the hostess told the policeman plaintively in Ukrainian, “Look at this nice boy. He does not understand anything. I have vodka and salo. Let’s sit down and have a drink.” He left me alone. That night my hostess told me that early morning I was mumbling something in my language all night. I was probably mumbling Yiddish in my sleep.

A few months later, I started feeling a little better and began going to the collective farm myself to get food. A warehouse clerk once told me, “Yezep, come hang out with us. You are so interesting. We’ll have fun.” I agreed and we hung out a few times with food, jokes, and songs while I played on the mandolin.

A few weeks later, the clerk’s daughter told me, “Yezep, come live with us.” Her father arranged it with my hostess and I moved in with them. The girl took interest in my Chuvash language since she thought I was Chuvash. She showed me her hand asking, “How do you say it in your language?” I had to quickly make up a word. “Chala” was my answer.

A few days later she showed me her hand again and asked, “Tell me again how to say this in your language.” I forgot what I told her the first time and blurted out another word I made up another word on the spot: “balda.”

“No,” she said. “That’s not what you said last time.”

I started writing down the words I made up in a notebook and memorizing them. Every day she asked me for new words trying to learn my language. Half a year later, we communicated in this so-called Chuvash language almost fluently. I had to make up whole songs and poems in “my” language.

I accepted a job as a night watchman. Throughout the two years that I lived in Maksimovka, I had a daily fear of being discovered that I was a Jew and shot. Neighbors were often visiting us telling stories about Jews getting caught by the Germans. Once they told us that comrade Pavlov, someone I knew since the beginning of the war, a POW living in the village, was arrested. It turned out he was a Jew.

I once entered the room of the house where I was staying and heard the hostess, Martha, talking to a neighbor. The neighbor said, “Martha, he hears everything.”

“That’s alright,” Martha answered, looking toward me, “this alien doesn’t understand a word.”

Martha’s daughter’s name was Raya. I never called her by name to avoid mispronouncing the “r” sound. Once her whole family gathered, called me and asked, “Why don’t you call Raya by her name?” I was stunned. What should I do? Again, they asked me to call her by name. I told Raya in our made-up language: “Our law, holy God Allah says say the name of the girl you love, no wedding.”

“What’s he saying?” Raya’s mom asked her daughter.

“Yezep says that, according to their law, the bride cannot be called by name before wedding,” she answered bashfully. The parents were satisfied with the answer and left. Another miracle.

The villagers received the district commandant’s directive to have all prisoners of war appear for a medical exam so that they could be sent to work in Germany. I thought that this would finally be my end since they would easily detect that I am Jewish during the medical exam.

I came there and was shaking like a leaf. I decided to go last. I came to the door and screamed, “Come in?” in broken Russian.

“Come on in!” someone answered with a Georgian accent. I came in and saw a few Russian doctors along with German ones. The doctor who called me was Georgian. I was standing there shivering. My heart was racing. They removed the bandage from my leg. The Russian doctor examined the wound and told me to take off my shirt. I lied down. He checked my heart, then came up to the German doctor and told him something. I stopped breathing. Will he ask me to take off my pants?

Iosif Ukhanov with his granddaughter Yelena, 2008

The German came up, examined the wound, listened to my heart, and said “Weg (away in German).” I was let go. Based on my heart rate and the condition of the wound, I was deemed not healthy enough for further examination. Another miracle.

A few months later, the Soviet Airforce started bombing Kremenchug, a city in central Ukraine where Germans had a large presence. We understood that our Soviet forces would be coming soon. Indeed, we were liberated at the end of August 1943. I was drafted again and sent to the front. I fought until the victory, finished the war in Prague, and was discharged from the armed forces. I was awarded two Orders of Patriotic War and ten medals – one of them is the medal for courage.

After the war, I worked as a geologist all my life and participated in numerous expeditions. What attracted me to this profession was not only its romantic flair, but also a chance to avoid excessive questions about my made-up name, origins of which I didn’t feel ready to disclose.

Right after the liberation, I was standing in a registration line next to a person who gave me shelter during the war, and I could not reveal my story to him. This probably also saved me from the clutches of the Soviet security services, who would have used brutal force to get testimony on how a Jew could survive under the Nazi occupation of Ukraine.

With tefillin in Milwaukee at his local synagogue, in early 2000s

Note from granddaughter: For most of his life my grandfather was not a religious person. Years of communism and religious repression did its job. Towards the end of his life, after their move to Milwaukee, Wisconsin in mid 1990s, he started going to a local synagogue on a regular basis and revisiting Jewish traditions he learned in childhood. And multiple times, after telling us his story of survival, he would note that he felt a presence of an angel performing miracles for him. There was a purpose to his survival. There was a higher reason for him to live.

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