Maya Kunichenko (née Beigelman)
Please tell us a little about your profession.
I am a metallurgical engineer by profession. After graduating from the Mariupol Metallurgical Institute, I worked in Kazan at the Kazan Aviation Plant. It so happened that my mother fell ill, and I was forced to move to Ukraine. Unfortunately, shortly after my arrival, my mother died.
Please tell us about your family.
My mother was born in 1921 in Ukraine in the small town of Sofiyivka. These were difficult years – there was hunger, the Makhnovshchina [an attempt to form a stateless anarchist society in parts of Ukraine during the Russian Revolution – ed.], and poverty. May parents, Rozalia Semyonovna and Semyon Yakovlevich, accepted the new order and became typical Soviet Jews.
My father's parents, on the other hand, remained religious people who fully observed the laws of Jewish life until the end of their days. Their home was kosher, and Jewish holidays were celebrated behind closed windows. My cousin and I were strictly forbidden to speak in public and at school about what was happening at home. My father was named Tova at birth, but in ordinary life he was known as Anatoly. My grandmother Ethel and grandfather Boruch lived long lives. My grandmother sewed traditional white burial shrouds used in Jewish burials, which is considered a great mitzvah.
My grandparents on both sides lived in Nikopol and were neighbors. Their children - my mother and father - graduated from a Jewish school in Nikopol, where they studied in Yiddish. The last graduating class was in 1939 - my father's younger sister, Bronislava, just managed to graduate from school that year, after which the school was closed.
Even before the war, my father graduated from the Leningrad Higher Anti-Aircraft Missile Command School in 1939. He came to Nikopol for a week to visit his parents. My mother graduated from medical school and, in connection with the battles at Khalkhin Gol, which were a harbinger of war with Japan, voluntarily left with her friends for the Far East to work in a hospital. After her return to Nikopol, her parents and my father's parents hurriedly married their children, as they were afraid that their children - my future father and mother - would otherwise assimilate. Immediately after that, my father was sent to Ufa, Bashkiria, where he went together with my mother. In May 1941, my father, understanding the pre-war situation, sent my pregnant mother to Ukraine to her parents. On August 4, the Germans approached Nikopol, but the families of my grandparents on both sides managed to leave on carts two days before. There were two pregnant women in their large group - my mother and her older sister. During these travels, my four-year-old cousin, the son of my mother's sister, died due to lack of medicine and food. And after a while she lost her newborn child as well. I believe that already in these days the personal Holocaust of my family began. After a long and tumultuous journey, my relatives ended up in evacuation in Kazakhstan in the abandoned village of Kyzyl Kunchuguz. According to my mother's recollections, the locals received them very warmly. Soon my grandfather, my mother's father, was conscripted into the army, and he went through the whole war. Once, on one terrible October day, my grandmother - my mother's mother - received three funerals at once. Two of them for two sons, one of whom, at the age of 18, volunteered for the front and died near Novorossiysk. The third funeral was for her son-in-law - my father. It said that he was missing. I never saw my father, because I was born two months after this news, on January 1, 1942. In 1944 we returned to Nikopol.
After graduating from the Metallurgical Institute, I worked at a military aircraft factory in Kazan. I married Leonid Kunichenko. On October 16, 1941, my husband, who was then four years old, together with his mother, two-year-old brother, grandmother, grandfather and mother's sister, Bronislava Tartakovskaya, witnessed the mass execution of Jews in Dnepropetrovsk. The shooting continued for several days. By a lucky chance, a German officer took my husband's mother and two sons out of that terrible place, and they survived. They walked for a long time and reached the city of Sumy, where his father’s parents lived. Sumy was occupied at that time, and the mother and children had to hide so that the neighbors would not recognize them. This case is described in the book “People, Years, Life” by Ilya Ehrenburg.
In 1991, we emigrated to Israel, where we lived for thirty years. My husband's mother also left with us, and she passed away at the age of 90. I felt that Israel is my home, although starting from scratch was not easy. I had to take on any job, but these difficulties did not overshadow my feeling that I was in my native land and Jewish life was close to me. I organized a home for lonely elderly people, which I called "Warm House.” I worked there for eighteen years. My daughter lived on a kibbutz with two small children, and my grandchildren served in the Israeli army. Living in Israel was the happiest time for me.
