Lev Kolodenker is the brother of Pesia and Aleksandr Kolodenker and husband of Yente Kolodenko, nee Tolkovitz. He was born in Tulchyn in 1925. His father was a coachman and he worked in the Tulchyn shoe factory at the age of fifteen. In 1941, at the age of sixteen, he was drafted into a military training institute, and joined the Red Army in 1944, where he rose to the rank of sergeant. After the war, he worked as truck driver and then again as shoemaker for thirty-five years.
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From Tulchyn to PecheraArmy Training
Tulchyn, Ukraine
Most able-bodied men were drafted in the first days of the war. Lev Kolodenker was sixteen at the time, too young to be sent to the front but not too young to be sent for training. He was drafted from Tulchyn in the first days of the war and was sent to an artillery school, where he learned to be a soldier. Eventually he was put in charge of seven soldiers, with whom he helped liberate “all of Western Ukraine” as well as Poland. “I took Berlin. The Reichstag was right next to me,” he proudly declared. The military, which largely privileged skill over social status, provided unprecedented opportunities for the advancement of poor Jews from the shtetl. Those who had served in the military before the war were drafted immediately without additional training and were sent to the front, if not as fighters, then at least as auxiliary staff. The role they played in defending the Soviet Union and defeating Nazism in Europe remains a source of great pride. In this clip, Lev Kolodenker briefly describes his experience fighting in the Red Army, and relates that his father perished defending Rostov on the Don. Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)