The Kushner Family

Like one drop of water reflects the whole ocean, the history of the Kushner family is very typical of many people who lived in Imperial Russia and later in the Soviet Union.

My grandfather Abram Kushner (1879-1942) was born into a family of Moscow Jews. His father Samuel Kushner was a traffic policeman who had fought as a soldier in the Crimean war. A family legend has it that in one of the battles he saved his officer’s life. For this exploit he was awarded St. George Cross and given permission to live outside the Pale of Settlement. He chose Moscow as his residence. Many years passed since the war. One day Samuel Kushner was standing on the street regulating the traffic when he suddenly heard someone calling him by name. It was the officer whom Samuel had saved from death during the war. The officer got off the coach, embraced my great-grandfather and wanted to give him a ruble (a lot of money at that time). “No, barin (sir)”, said Samuel, “I can’t accept this.” They spoke for a while, and the officer departed in tears.

Samuel’s son Abram met his future wife in the Polish town of Lukow where he served as a conscript. His barracks were not too far away from the Rosenbaums’ farm and every day the young soldier watched a young girl Perla play in the courtyard of her house. The girl studied in a gymnasium in Warsaw and would visit her parents only in summer holidays. She was becoming more and more beautiful every year so it was only natural that Abram fell in love with her. When she turned seventeen, he proposed to her but Perla's parents didn’t give their consent to that marriage saying they didn’t want their daughter to marry a “Moskal” – a humiliating word for the natives of Russia. So Abram and his bride fled to Moscow where they got married, their first child was born in 1905. A few years later Perla, obviously feeling guilt for getting married against her parents’ will, went back to Lukow to see her family but the parents even didn’t let her in. No one could imagine at that time that had my grandmother not met Abram and stayed in Lukow, she would have shared the fate of millions of Jews who were killed in the Holocaust.

At the oubreak of the First World War, Abram was called up for the army but one or two years later he was wounded in the head and demobilized. His wife Praskovia finished nursing courses and left for Tambov, a city 580 kilimeters south of Moscow, to nurse the wounded military in the local hospital. Like the rest of their fellow-citizens, the Kushner family survived the war, two revolutions and the famine and poverty that accompanied them. In the critical moments of the family’s life an unexpected aid came from the United States. Praskovia’s brother Louis Rosenbaum, whom she didn’t know personally as he had emigrated from Poland before she was born, started sending money and food parcels to his sister from New York. This aid lasted until the second half of the 1930s when it became dangerous to communicate with foreigners.

When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union June 22, 1941, my grandmother refused to evacuate saying she had known well the Germans in Poland, whom she regarded as a cultural nation. She didn’t know about the Nazi terror against the Jews as Soviet newspapers wrote very little or almost nothing about it before the war, especially when Stalin and Hitler were allies. But even if this information had been extensively publicized in the Soviet media, my family would have considered it propaganda. During the war the Kushner family struggled to survive starvation and poverty by knitting clothes which they exchanged for bread at the market. My grandfather Abram died of hunger in 1942.

Praskovia died in 1952, a few months before the birth of her grandson Sergei.

Abram and Praskovia Kushners had four children: Niura (1905-1993), Samuel (1907-1942), Olga (1913-1986) and my mother Vera (1926-2009). Of all the children, Samuel had the most tragical fate. A photographer for the military newspaper Krasnaya Zvezda, he was arrested by the NKVD in the mid-1930s on framed charges of “anti-Soviet activities.” He served his sentence in a labor camp in the faraway Republic of Bashkiria and was called up for the army in March 1942. He was killed during a German air raid a few months later, in May 1942, while building a floating bridge acr

oss the river.Niura worked in a tailor’s workshop while Olga was a worker in a printing house in Moscow, her daughter Tanya Levant, 69, and her family now live in the United States.

The most intelligent and educated of all the sisters was my mother Vera Belanovskaya. During the war she, like many of her peers, attended an evening school and worked at a military enterprise that manufactured mittens for artillerists. Upon finishing school she passed exams and was admitted to the biological department of Moscow State University which she graduated from in 1951. My parents Vera Kushner and Alexander Belanovsky, physicist, got married in 1950 but divorced in the mid-1960s. Left alone, Vera brought up her children – my elder brother Sergei and myself, Dmitry Belanovsky, – relying only on herself. At a certain period of time she had to work in two hospitals to feed the family. All her life she suffered from insomnia – the result of a nervous breakdown caused by the divorce - and took many pills to get some sleep at least for a few hours. The last thirty three years before retirement in 2000 she worked in the Filatov Children’s Hospital as a laboratory doctor. Her qualification and knowledge helped to save the lives of many children.

Louis Rosenbaum | Likever Independent Young Men's Association | The Rosenbaum family

The Kushner family | Lukow today | Old Lukow | Jewish Lukow | Disaster of the Lukow Jews | About myself