Memories of NKVD Order #00447

Evgeniia Fizdel on Her Father's Arrest

Evgeniia Fizdel was born in 1923 in Odessa, then Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (today Odesa, Ukraine). She lived with her parents in Odessa when in August 1937 her father, Adol’f Fizdel, was arrested as a “German spy” and sent to a Soviet concentration camp. In 1940, he was released from the camp. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Evgeniia evacuated to Ufa, a city in the Urals, where she continued her medical training. In 1944, she was drafted into the Soviet army and as a military doctor and participated in the liberation of Poland and Germany. After Victory Day in May 1945, she was sent to Terezin, Czechoslovakia, to help with the typhus epidemic in the recently liberated Theresienstadt ghetto. After the war, Evgeniia worked as a doctor.

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  • Elena Zavadskaia on Order #00447

    Language: English

    Elena Zavadskaiia was born in 1925 in Mogilev-Podol’skii, then USSR (today Mohyliv-Podil’skii, Ukraine). Her parents, Evgenii and Konstantsiia Zavadskiii, were ethnic Poles, and because of their nationality in 1937 they became potential targets of order #00447. On November 1, 1937, her father was arrested. Soon after, her mother, Konstantsiia, was told that Evgenii had been sentenced to “ten years of corrective labor camps without the right of correspondence”—a Soviet euphemism for a sentence of execution by shooting. In July 1941, the Germans occupied Mogilev-Podol’skii, and Elena’s mother and grandmother, Anna Dembitskaia, offered their help to the family of Elena’s friend Sara Perel’man and their neighbors, the Lerner family. They hid them in their house while the Nazis stayed in the city. Later, when thousands of Jewish deportees from Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Romania came to Mogilev-Podol’skii, Elena’s family gave shelter to a Jewish family. After the war, Elena graduated from medical school and worked as a doctor. In 1996, Yad Vashem recognized Elena and her mother as Righteous Among the nations.

  • Evgeniia Fizdel on Her Father's Arrest

    Language: English

    Evgeniia Fizdel was born in 1923 in Odessa, then Ukrainian Socialist Soviet Republic (today Odesa, Ukraine). She lived with her parents in Odessa when in August 1937 her father, Adol’f Fizdel, was arrested as a “German spy” and sent to a Soviet concentration camp. In 1940, he was released from the camp. When the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Evgeniia evacuated to Ufa, a city in the Urals, where she continued her medical training. In 1944, she was drafted into the Soviet army and as a military doctor and participated in the liberation of Poland and Germany. After Victory Day in May 1945, she was sent to Terezin, Czechoslovakia, to help with the typhus epidemic in the recently liberated Theresienstadt ghetto. After the war, Evgeniia worked as a doctor.