Valery Myzgaev

* 1939

Belarus
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    NKVD, KGB, and the Gestapo merged into one

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    “My opinion, and I do not hide it, is that the current Belarusian government has taken the lessons learned by the NKVD, the KGB, and the Gesto and merged them into one. Their actions, decrees, trials, fines have nothing to do with human norms and are disproportionate to the peaceful protests, where there are no weapons, no breaking of windows. For what reason are people brought to court? It is not clear to me. I was always against it. Not every former ghetto prisoner supports me. People are afraid they will get into trouble, that their German income will be blocked. To that, I give a different example. I tell them: ‘You are peculiar people. When you were being destroyed by German fascism, Belarusian peasants, and not just the peasants – the Belarusian nation sheltered you, even though they knew that by sheltering a Jew, they were putting their whole family at risk of being executed. But they weren’t afraid.’ They generally admit I’m right. That’s my stance on the matter, and I stand by it. I look forward to changes to the better, although I don’t know when they will come, seeing that the ‘older brother’ has got our back.”

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    Mum’s courage and intelligence in resisting violence

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    “It was in 1942, my mother realised that the ghetto would not last much longer. She made use of the fact that I had a Slavic surname, a patronymic, and a first name, and so she sent me with the help of a stranger to a children’s home in Minsk. Because she no longer had a child to care for, she fled to the partisans. For a person to make such a decision, they have to have courage and intelligence. She stayed in the partisan unit until the end of the war. Mum and her sister found me in a children’s home in Slutsk after the liberation of Belarus. After that, we were always together until her death in 2010.”

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    Jewish pogrom in the ghetto

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    “Minsk was occupied by the Germans on 26 June. The Jews were ordered to move to the ghetto, and so everyone abandoned their flats and moved there. A strange situation. The Jews had appeared to be getting freedom: settlement zones were being cancelled, mixed marriages were allowed. My mother’s older sister had married a Belarusian, my mother married a Russian, my mother’s older brother married a Jew, the younger brother married a Ukrainian. Then the ghetto came. The older sister and her two children hid in a village with relatives of her husband. Mum, Granny, and I were in the ghetto. My mothers two brothers, [her] sister’s husband and my father were fighting on the front. All the men were in the army, the women remained in the occupied territory. You could say I was born again on 2 March 1942. The Germans conducted pogroms on Jewish or Soviet feast days. On 2 March, on the Jewish feast of Purim, they launched a big pogrom. Before that, a work team had been formed to clear the snow and clean the streets. Mum would go from the ghetto to work in Gorki Park, where she loaded up peat and coal. That day, my mother decided to take me with her. Granny had said: ‘Look what the weather’s like, it’s sleeting, he’ll catch a cold!’ But Mum wanted to feed me the soup that the workers were given, and she took me with her. The pogrom raged through the ghetto at that time. We never saw Granny again, we didn’t find here.”

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    08.06.2021

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One must have courage and intelligence to resist violence

Valery Vasiliyevich Myzgaev was born in Minsk in the former Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1939. His mother’s father, Chaim Schmidt, was a Polish Jews from the suburbs of Warsaw who had studied in Paris and worked as a tailor. In 1919, after Poland achieved independence, his grandfather moved to Belarus with his family. He found a job at KIM, a factory that made stockings and knitwear. In 1937 he was arrested and accused of espionage – he was executed in December 1937. The witness’s mother, Lyubov Schmidt, studied in Leningrad and took part in the building of Komsomolsk-on-Amur, where she married Vasiliy Fyodorovich Myzgaev. In June 1941, Lyubov Myzgaeva took her two-year-old Valery on a holiday from Khabarovsk to Minsk. After the German occupation of Minsk, Lyubov was detained in the Jewish ghetto along with her mother Anna and her son Valery. Anna died on 2 March 1942 during a pogrom on the Jews. The witness’s mother left her son in a children’s home and fled from the ghetto. She remained with the No. 106 partisan unit until the liberation of Belarus. After the liberation, she picked up her son from the children’s home in Slutsk. The witness’s father had died on the front in 1942. Valery attended the Minsk Institute of Agricultural Mechanisation, completed a post-graduate degree, and began working at the Research Institute for Agricultural Mechanisation in Minsk; he held patents for his inventions. His wife, Svetlana Abramovna, is a doctor of physical and mathematical sciences. In the 1990s the witness also conducted business in connection with his work at the institute, and he continued these business activities after retiring in 2001. He became active in the Belarusian Public Association of Jews – former prisoners of ghettos and Nazi concentration camps (BOOUGL), which he currently heads. He was severely critical of the authorities and the methods they used to suppress the 2020 protests in Belarus, he wrote an appeal to the public prosecutor’s office and the Investigative Committee of Belarus. His granddaughter Miriam is currently serving in the Israel Defence Forces and plans to continue the family’s scientific tradition.

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