Efim Skobilitskii was born in 1919 in Berdichev. His father was born in Poland, near Warsaw, and worked as a metalworker. His mother raised five sons. He studied in both a Yiddish school and in a cheder. During World War II, he served in the Red Army as the commander of a battalion of tanks. After he was demobilized in 1949, he returned to Berdychiv and was trained as an agronomist. He worked at a warehouse transfer station for kolkhozi and zovkhozi for thirty-five years.
Other Interviews:
"stuffing ourselves"Career in the Red Army
The Zogerin (the Synagogue Prompter)
“when I encountered the Germans”
Berdychiv, Ukraine
Approximately 500,000 Jews served in the Red Army during the Second World War. Only 300,000 of those who served survived to bear witness.
Jewish soldiers knew that they were fighting for much more than just territory or ideology; those who were drafted after the occupation had witnessed first-hand the atrocities the Germans committed against innocent Jews. They recognized that defeat at the hands of the Germans would mean certain death for themselves and any surviving family members. They had seen their loved ones murdered and had been forced to endure the horrors of the ghettos and camps. Even those who had not been under occupation, but joined the military in the first weeks of the war or from points of evacuation, still heard of the fate of those left behind. Jewish soldiers knew what their fate would be if the Red Army lost the war.
As the war turned in the Soviets’ favor and the Red Army became more confident of eventual victory, Jews also started to demand vengeance. Chaim Skoblitsky of Berdichev put it best to us when he told us: “The Germans killed my mother, my father and [my little brother] Motele. But I reckoned with them. I killed more of them than they killed of mine. I cut them to pieces.”
A diary collected by the Blavatnik Archive Foundation records a Jewish soldier whom the diarist encountered; the soldier, too, spoke of revenge: “We drank their blood. I got plenty of revenge for my family,” he tells the diarist after explaining how the Germans murdered thirty-five members of his family. Many Jews were motivated not only by patriotism, but also by revenge.
This theme was echoed and reinforced by Yiddish-language newspapers and political speeches, which urged Jews to fight for vengeance. The famed war correspondent, Ilya Ehrenburg, who came to identify more and more with his Jewish roots throughout the war, famously wrote articles screaming for vengeance to motivate the troops: “We will die, but we will destroy the hated butchers,” he vowed in one article. Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)