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why he was particularly compliant in his dealings with the Soviet leaders, especially the security chiefs.⁴⁹

      In Efim Ginsburg’s case, whatever his path during these turbulent years, by the end of 1939 (when he received the first letter from his family), he was living legally in Moscow, the capital of the Soviet Union, which indicates that all previous charges against him had been formally dropped by that time. And yet, it seems obvious that he spent those years in constant fear, as did his family. This would account for the fact that, when the correspondence began, Efim Ginsburg was living separately from the rest of the family and probably had not communicated with them for many years. It may be the reason why the first letter in the correspondence (not analyzed in this book) was sent in late December 1939,⁵⁰ the year when the wave of terror after the Great Purges subsided.⁵¹ Possibly, the Ginsburgs had decided that conducting a correspondence would no longer jeopardize the Rostov branch of the family, especially Volodya Meerovich, the highest-ranking member of the clan.

      The fact that Efim (and, in a wider sense, the entire Ginsburg family) belonged to the circle of those oppressed by the Stalin regime certainly sheds a special light on the correspondence. By all accounts, the family members were predisposed to be particularly cautious in putting their “deviationist” (that is, different from the officially approved) thoughts down on paper, to a greater extent than ordinary Soviet people. It is a big question, whether and to what extent their experience was so unique, given the vast number of people who suffered from Stalinist repression.⁵² But in any case, it adds an additional and extremely important layer to the considerations of the Ginsburg family members as to whether they should flee or not, and what to include or avoid mentioning in their letters.

      We do not have any information about Efims’s profession. The letters only allude to his important position and his being appreciated by his superiors (at least, in the eyes of his sisters). As the correspondence never mentions his wife or children, it seems most likely that he was not married and had no children at the time of the Soviet-German War. It indeed looks plausible, given his apparently turbulent prewar years. In July 1941, he was evacuated from Moscow to Omsk.⁵³ Then he was evacuated for a second time, from Omsk to Alma-Ata (now Almaty in Kazakhstan).⁵⁴ The sad irony is that, since he did not die in the Holocaust, there was no one who could submit any information about him, apart from several small biographical details released by his widow, Ida, in the file submitted to Yad Vashem in 1989.

      Towards the end of the Soviet-German War, Efim Ginsburg returned to Moscow. He married Ida Markovna Dektor sometime after 1943. Ida was a philologist, speech therapist, and translator. She taught at the Institute of Literature. The only thing we know about Efim’s postwar pursuits is that in the 1960s “he wrote books on technical issues.”⁵⁵ In 1973, only ten days after the end of the Yom Kippur War, the couple left the Soviet Union and immigrated to Israel. According to a handwritten note added by Ida Ginsburg-Dektor to one of the Ginsburg letters, he was granted special permission to take the entire correspondence with him abroad,⁵⁶ which was an unusually big concession for the Soviet authorities to make. The couple made their home in the city of Ramat Gan, where Efim died in 1973, only two months after arriving in Israel. His widow donated the vast correspondence that he had conducted with those members of the Ginsburg family who were murdered during the Holocaust to the Yad Vashem Archives in Jerusalem, in 1989. All my attempts to find Ida or any children they might have had, or any other member of his family have proved futile.

      At the start of the Soviet-German War, the Rostov branch of the family numbered ten people, was made up of three generations. Among the adults, there were five women and three men, one of whom died a natural death in the fall of 1941. There were also two children in the family. The older generation was represented by three sisters. (The information about their husbands is also presented in this study.)⁵⁷ As can be seen from their correspondence, the three sisters thought of themselves as elderly, although by modern standards they were only middle-aged. This was because life expectancy in Soviet Russia was much lower than what is customary today in the developed world. In 1939, it was 49.7 years for women and 44.0 for men.⁵⁸

      1) Manya (Monya) (née Ginsburg) was born in Odessa in 1890 to Gedalia and Hanna-Rachel; she was married to Pinchas (Pinya). She was Tamara Meerovich’s mother. She was murdered by the Germans in the Rostov District in August 1942.

      Monya was the oldest family member. (We do not know her married name, so for the purposes of our book we will also refer to her as a Ginsburg, which was certainly her maiden name). She was not employed in 1941–1942, and mainly kept herself busy looking after her grandson, Grisha. She didn’t take part in the correspondence with Efim.

      2) Anna (Anya) Greener (née Ginsburg) was born in Odessa in 1893 to Gedalia and Hanna-Rachel; she married Avraham Greener (1890–1942),⁵⁹ also from Odessa. They had one daughter, Tsylya, who married David Pinchos, and one granddaughter, Anya.

      Anya Greener. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Hall of Names.

      Anya, the second sister, was sluzhashchaia (“functionaire” or “employee,” in Soviet parlance). During 1941–1942, she did not work and was mainly in charge of the house and of buying food for the family. Anya almost never signed the letters sent to Efim, but her sister Liza, who appears as the principal correspondent from this part of the family, repeatedly emphasized that the letters were written by both sisters. She was murdered in the Rostov District in August 1942.

      3) Elizaveta (Liza) Chazkewitz (née Ginsburg) was born in Odessa in 1895 to Gedalia and Hanna-Rachel; she married Boris Chazkewitz, and worked as a pharmacist.

      Elizaveta (Liza) Chazkewitz. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Hall of Names.

      Liza, the third sister, had no children. She had a profession, pharmacist, with which she could earn her living and even support her sister Anya, and sometimes even other members of the family. Liza was very actively involved in the correspondence. From the letters, it is clear that she always acted together with her older sister Anya, which gave them a high standing in the interfamilial relationship. She was murdered in the Rostov District in August 1942.

      4) Boris Chazkewitz, born in 1893, was married to Liza Ginsburg; he died in Rostov-on-Don in September 1941.

      Boris Chazkewitz. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Hall of Names.

      Although he signed one letter, together with his wife, we know nothing about him, except for the fact that his health deteriorated dramatically in late summer 1941. He had to go on working, despite his illness. He died of natural causes on September 18, 1941, that is, two months before the first German occupation of Rostov-on-Don.

      Anya and Liza were not evacuated from Rostov-on-Don in 1941; they survived the first German occupation of the city (November 21–28, 1941). They remained in Rostov-on-Don until July 1942, when the entire family moved to the village of Rogovskoe in the Rostov District, situated more than a hundred kilometers from the city. They were murdered there, after the Germans occupied the area in August 1942.

      The younger generation was represented by the Meerovich and Pinchos families.

      5) Tamara Meerovich was born 1913 in Rostov-on-Don to Pinya and Monya. She was married to Vladimir (Volodya) Meerovich and was the mother of Grisha. Tamara worked as a book-keeper.

      Tamara Meerovich. Courtesy of Yad Vashem Hall of Names.

      Tamara was actively involved in the correspondence, after she was evacuated from Rostov-on-Don in October 1941 together with her mother and son and the Pinchos family, first to the town of Budennovsk in the neighboring Krasnodar territory, and then, in late December 1941, to the slightly more remote city of Ordzhonikidze (now called Vladikavkaz), the capital of the Autonomous Republic of North Ossetia. Prior to her

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