“Adversity” is the theme for Week 38 of the 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks Challenge. Like many Jews in Eastern Europe, my husband’s great-grandmother, Sima, faced a tremendous amount of adversity and difficult times in her life. Any one of the things she endured would have been enough to destroy most people, but she never gave up, even when facing the very worst circumstances. She was brave and tenacious, and above all else, kind.
Sima Bolotinskaya was born in 1898 in the little town of Gadyach in the Poltava region of Ukraine to Nekhemia Moise Bolotinsky and his wife Raya. I imagine her town was much like the fictional village of Anatevka in Fiddler on the Roof. Like the book of short stories Fiddler was based on, Tevye and His Daughters, she grew up in a family of seven sisters and no brothers. Sima lost both parents when she was young. Her mother died at the age of 45, and by 1923, her father was also gone. Gadyach was affected by pogroms in both 1905 and 1919. It’s unknown whether she lost her parents during one of those brutal campaigns against the Jews, or if her family was left relatively unscathed.
She married Leyba (aka Lev) Braslavsky between 1919-1921. The Povolzhye famine hit Ukraine and Russia in 1921-1922, while Sima was pregnant with her first daughter, Rahil. The famine was caused by a combination of severe drought and years of war. Farmers planned against these cyclical droughts which occurred every 5-7 years, by storing at least a year’s worth of grain. However, after years of military forces requisitioning crops, first during World War I (1914-1918) and then during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), farmers were left with almost no reserves when the famine hit in the autumn of 1921. Sima’s father-in-law was a butcher, so perhaps the Braslavsky and Bolotinsky families fared a little better than others, if the livestock wasn’t requisitioned as well. The lack of grains and vegetables may have impacted her pregnancy. Rahil was a sickly child – extremely thin, and often complained of stomach pains.
Sima was surrounded by family, and they all stuck together through the good times and the bad. She lived at 17 Grizayevji St., Unit 2, with her brother-in-law and sister-in-law and their children. Her husband’s parents lived in the same house in Unit 1 with some of their younger children and extended family. Most of Sima’s younger sisters lived next door at #19, with her eldest sister, Haivyla “Berta” Zlatopolsky. I imagine their homes were busy and chaotic in the very best way, with children running in and out. Until 1929 when religion was effectively banned in the USSR, they practiced their faith. Gadyach had a large, thriving Jewish community with religious schools and a synagogue.
By 1925, the family’s situation was slightly improved. Food was never abundant, but it was more widely available. That year, Sima and Leyba welcomed a second daughter into the family. Unlike Rahil, Berta was healthy and strong. The family had a few years of relative stability, until 1928 when Stalin introduced the First Five-Year Plan.
Stalin wasn’t a fan of Ukraine or the Ukrainian people and wanted possession of their rich farmland. Ukraine was briefly an independent nation between 1917 and 1921, when it succumbed to the Red Army and was incorporated into the Soviet Union. Stalin viewed the Ukrainian people as a threat to his totalitarian authority. To break the people and prevent them from revolting and regaining their independence, Stalin chipped away at their autonomy beginning in the early 1920s when he began imprisoning, banishing, and executing thousands of Ukraine’s intellectuals, church leaders, and party members who supported and encouraged Ukraine’s unique cultural identity. The First Five-Year Plan was intended to transform the Soviet Union from an agricultural state to a modern, industrialized nation. Stalin wanted to create “kolkhoz” or collective farms by taking farms away from land-owning peasants in Ukraine, dubbed “kulaks.” The former kulaks were forced to farm the very land stolen from them. The Ukrainians, justifiably angry, revolted by destroying crops and killing livestock. This was the beginning of Holodomor – “death by hunger” in Ukrainian. In retaliation, the Soviets implemented unrealistically high grain quotas in Ukrainian villages. When these quotas couldn’t be met, the Soviets confiscated every morsel of grain – sometimes even the seed grain needed to plant the following year’s crops. The punishment for stealing even a few stalks of grain was execution. During Stalin’s Famine of 1932-1933, roughly 3.9 million Ukrainians died of hunger.
Sima, Leyba, and their daughters left Gadyach for Leningrad in 1929, shortly after Stalin began requisitioning farms. Several family members who had already settled in Leningrad promised there were better opportunities to be had in the city. They moved into an apartment with Leyba’s sister, Pasha, and her family. The majority of their extended family on both sides settled in Leningrad before the start of WWII.
WWII was brutal on Soviet citizens, particularly on those who were Jews. In the first wave of the Holocaust known as the “Holocaust by Bullets,” Jews were rounded up and mass executed. Children were often poisoned, men and women shot. This happened throughout Ukraine in 1941. Though most of Sima’s sisters had left Gadyach, her younger sisters Liza and Tatiana remained there and were murdered. Sima and her other sisters tried to convince them to leave, but Liza’s husband foolishly believed the Germans would let them live if they invaded. Tatiana did flee Gadyach for other parts of Ukraine, but it wasn’t far enough to escape the Nazis.
On September 8, 1941, Germany surrounded Leningrad in a siege that lasted 900 days. The family again faced starvation. With supply lines cut, strict rationing was put in place. Most people received one piece of bread about the size of the palm of a hand each day. As the war dragged on and supplies dwindled, sawdust was mixed in with the flour. The most essential workers were given extra rations, so they had energy to carry out their tasks, but things were bleak. Electricity was cut. There was no heat in the brutal, Russian winters. People burned books, furniture, and family pictures to stay alive. Sima and her daughter Berta received extra rations by working in a factory, but because public transportation was cut, they walked 3-hours one-way through the cold, dark streets of Leningrad. The factory allotted garden space to some of their workers, and Sima and Berta were eventually able to grow vegetables to supplement their meager rations. It wasn’t enough to keep them healthy or full, but it was enough to keep them alive, and stave off the scurvy that affected Sima that first year of the blockade. Malnutrition caused her to lose most of her teeth.
In the few letters Leyba wrote home to Sima during the war, he expressed concern over their daughter Rahil’s declining health. Whether it was due to the starvation Sima may have suffered during her pregnancy that caused Rahil’s health problems or if she suffered from an undiagnosed condition (Celiacs disease fits her symptoms) Rahil was never healthy, and often complained of stomach pains. Her delicate health declined rapidly during the siege. She could barely choke down her small square of bread and complained of excruciating abdominal pain. She literally wasted away in front of her mother’s eyes, while Sima watched, powerless to help her. Rahil died from starvation in July of 1942. She was one of 630,000 Leningrad citizens to starve to death during the war.
Sima didn’t have a chance to absorb Rahil’s death when she received news that Leyba was missing in action, presumed dead. In under a year, she went from being a beloved wife and mother of two, to a widow with one child. Half of her immediate family was gone.
People wrestled with the impossible decision to remain in Leningrad or evacuate. If they stayed, they could freeze or starve to death if they were able to keep the Nazis from breaching the city. If they evacuated, they risked capture and likely death. Without a crystal ball, it was impossible to know which decision was right. Sima and her two sisters in Leningrad, Riva and Manya, decided when the time was right, they would evacuate together. Leyba encouraged her to leave if she needed to in one of his last letters to her. For whatever reason, Manya left without her sisters. She didn’t tell them she was leaving and was just gone one day. She and her family were likely killed as they were never heard from again.
On March 27, 1942, most of Sima’s in-laws evacuated on a train headed to Krasnodar in southern Russia. Sima and Berta accompanied 11 family members to the train station that day, hugging and kissing nieces, nephews, sisters-in-law or aunts good-bye, thankfully accepting their ration cards which gave them several additional days of food. She received one or two letters from the family while they were enroute to Krasnodar – gut-wrenching letters telling Sima that some of her nieces and nephews died, their bodies unceremoniously thrown out of the train or trucks they were travelling in because there was no time to stop and bury anyone.
And then the letters stopped. None of the 11 family members who set out for Krasnodar were heard from again. They were presumably intercepted by Nazis and murdered before they arrived, though records show that 4 family members survived the journey: Sima's sisters-in-law Pasha Uzel and Musya (Maria) Braslavskaya, and her nephews David Uzel and Yakov Shvartzman. German forces overtook Krasnodar in August of 1942 and remained there until February of 1943. During their occupation, they murdered over 15,660 Jews. The carefully kept arrival and housing assignments of the evacuated Jews made it easy to find them.
Sima waited on Riva to decide when to evacuate, but for whatever reason – perhaps the loss of so many people they knew who tried to evacuate and were killed – Riva never chose a date to leave Leningrad. That decision may have saved their lives.
By the time the war was over, most of Sima’s family was gone. Adversity, loss, and starvation fundamentally changes a person sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. Had Sima turned into an angry, selfish, bitter woman, no one could have blamed her. She lived through some of the worst imaginable horrors. She didn’t change for the worse though. Instead, her hardships reinforced her love and appreciation for her remaining family. She built her life back around them, always putting their needs ahead of her own. When her grandchildren were born a few years after the war, she threw herself into the role of a doting babushka. She shared a special bond with her granddaughter, Elena, and when she grew up, married, and had a child of her own, Sima lived with her and took care of the baby. All those who knew her remember her as a kind, thoughtful lady, a gentle soul with a generous spirit. She worried over those she loved, making sure their bellies were full and they were warm. Sima never thought about herself; even on her deathbed her only concern was for her great-grandson’s future. Her last words were about him. She passed away from complications of a broken hip in August of 1985. That Sima’s character and heart remained intact after all she endured is a testimony to her inner strength in the face of adversity and hardship. She was a kind and beautiful person.
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It is heartbreaking to read how cruel humans can be to one another. But, it is heartwarming to know that Sima could remain a kind and loving person despite the adversity she lived through for so many years. Thank you for sharing Sima's story.