Tatiana Tilipman’s brother Iosif Krupnik

This is my brother Iosif Krupnik. This photo was taken in Odessa in 1932.

My brother Haim-Iosl, born in 1912. In his passport he was Iosif. At home he was called Munia. Iosif finished a primary school in Dzygovka and moved to study in other town. I don't remember where Iosif studied. Iosif married my classmate Polina and moved to Chernovtsy, Yampol district. Iosif worked at the state insurance department. He provided insurance to agricultural companies.

On 22 June 1941 the Great Patriotic War began. Iosif also received a letter from the military office, but he was proved to be unfit for combatant service and stayed to serve in the recruitment commission. In early July institutions began to leave the town. Chairman of the kolkhoz gave Iosif a wagon and horses and said; 'take your family out of the town. The Germans are approaching'. My parents and I and my brother with his wife Polina left the town. We went as far as the Dnieper on the wagon. We left the horses on the bank and crossed the river. My brother was to go back to take the horses, but there were Germans already on that bank. So we had lost our horses. Some drivers going in that direction gave us rides to Poltava. From there we went to Kharkov and then to Rostov. After Rostov we came to Stalingrad. So we got to Turkestan station in Northern Kazakhstan.

In 1942, my brother Iosif was recruited to the army from Turkestan. He was sent to study in an artillery school in Tambov. His wife Polina moved to her relatives. When I wrote my brother that she left he confessed that he had thought about divorcing her for quite some time, but he didn't want to upset our parents. After finishing the artillery school Iosif was sent to serve in an air force unit in Semipalatinsk.

After the Great Patriotic War my brother Iosif served near Leningrad. When military staff was reduced in the early 1960s he moved to Moscow. He remarried there. His wife Sopha is a dentist. They had a daughter named Ludmila and a son named Boria. Iosif died in 2002.