Interview

Tsolik Groysman 's were also born in Tarashche. His father was a watchmaker and his mother was a homemaker. He grew up with two sisters. He went to a Yiddish school for seven years and then transferred to a Ukrainian school to complete ten grades. A month after the war broke out, he was drafted into the Red Army. He was injured twice in battle, once in Rostov and once in Stalingrad. Before the war, he had studied to become a dentist, but was unable to complete his studies after the war because of his injuries. After he was released from hospital in Tarashche, he took courses to become a massage therapist and started working in the hospital. He then moved to Almaty, where his uncle lived, and started working as a watchmaker, along with his uncle and father. He married a childhood friend from Tarashche and moved to Korsun-Shevchenkivskyy in 1952, where he worked again as a watchmaker.

“forward”

Korsun-Shevchenkivskyy  , Ukraine

In the two clips on this page, Tsolik Groysman explains how his belief in God was reinforced by his experiences during the war. He was injured twice, but can only attribute his survival to the intervention of God. In particular, he focuses on one tank battle that he survived for reasons he cannot explain without resorting to the miraculous.

Source: Jeffrey Veidlinger, In the Shadow of the Shtetl: Small-Town Jewish Life in Soviet Ukraine (Indiana University Press, 2013)