My name is Ida Shchupak. I was born in the town of Bobruisk, which is in Belarus.

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I lived there for some time before the war, and then, when I was fifteen, we moved to Ukraine, and I spent all my conscious life in Ukraine, in the city of Zaporizhzhia. In 2002 we moved to Canada, to Toronto, where I still live today. But today I want to tell the story of my father’s life, because his fate shaped my childhood and youth.

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My father was born in 1911 in the town of Rogachev, also in Belarus. But his mother died in childbirth, and he was raised by his mother’s sister, who later married his father. The family was large, so they could not give the children much education; they all learned practical, everyday trades.

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My father was a great patriot of his homeland. He even joined the active army a year earlier than required. In 1934, when there was a Komsomol construction project in Arkhangelsk, he went there. He always had to be at the front, even though he had just gotten married. When there were demonstrations with banners, my father walked at the head of the column. He was a “Voroshilov sharpshooter.” At that time being a “Voroshilov sharpshooter” was regarded almost like an order.

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When the war began, my father worked at a sewing factory. He happened to be on the night shift; he ran home and told my mother: “Get ready. The radio says dozens of German planes are heading for the city. We must leave the city, and I’m going to the military enlistment office.” She pulled photographs out of an album — all she could find — and took them with her. Those photographs accompanied us throughout the war. Soon after, he returned and told my mother: “The enlistment office is closed. It says: ‘Everyone has gone to the front.’ Get ready, we’re leaving the city.”

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So we left the city... It was the town of Bobruisk, Belarus. We had to cross the Berezina River; there was a bridge, and Soviet soldiers were already on the bridge urging everyone across. They said: “Quick, quick, cross the bridge. We’ll blow it up so the Germans can’t pass.” How far can a five-year-old walk on their own little legs? At one rest stop we accidentally met my grandfather — my mother’s father. He was a blacksmith, and a blacksmith usually had a horse and a cart. That’s how we moved on. They were glad, though I didn’t feel it then — my mother and father were especially happy to have found relatives. They could leave us in their care. And my father said: “I will go and fight.” Many refugees were on that road, and soldiers often passed us. One of the units was the 1086th Red Banner Rifle Regiment, the 323rd detachment of the Bryansk Division... My father joined them and went to fight. He went to the front.

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For a long time we did not know where he was or what had happened to him. We traveled by cart and on open flatbeds; we were bombed, we were left stranded in water — there were many hardships. I don’t remember exactly how, but we ended up in Voronezh. There they were recruiting young people to go either near Leningrad or into the taiga for logging. Because my mother had me, and some of her sisters had children, they were not subject to registration. My mother’s sister Zhenya, who had no children, was offered to go somewhere. She decided to go to Siberia. My mother didn’t want to let her go alone, so we, my mother and Aunt Zhenya, ended up in Siberia together.

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Siberia — the remote Siberian taiga. A God-forsaken village with the exotic name Kozyulino. That’s where we lived. My mother and aunt went out to the logging camp every day. They sawed large logs and then floated them down the river — the Ob River... There was one interesting incident during the war that I, as a six-year-old, managed to profit from using my wits. How? Father once brought my mother a shawl from Poland. She put that shawl over her shoulders when we left home, and the shawl stayed with us in Siberia. The locals saw it and asked, “Did you knit that?” She said, “Yes.” They gave her yarn so she could knit similar shawls for them. My mother knitted and earned a little that way. We had to take one of her finished pieces to an old woman. For some reason that old woman took a liking to me and told my mother: “You have such hard conditions; I live alone — let Ida live with me. I’ll give you a bucket of potatoes, a bucket of rutabagas, a bucket of beets.” My mother said, “No, I can’t.” As we walked home I said to my mother, “Mom, you should have left me there. She would have brought you those vegetables, and I would have run back to you later.” My mother told that old woman what I had said. Tears came to the old woman’s eyes, and she brought us all those vegetables on a sled. She said, “Ida earned it.” That’s how I earned that food.

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What did we eat? We had an aluminum pail; water was poured in and a thin porridge was made — a little flour was sprinkled in and cooked — that’s what we ate. Once my mother left me one potato. I sliced that potato; the old woman stayed with me while everyone else went to work. She stoked the stove, and I baked the potato on it — I’ve never in my life tasted anything better. I remember a lot, even though I was small. I remember when we left — it was summer. I was in a tracksuit. No coat, no shoes — nothing. I could not go outside the whole winter in the cold. There was nothing to wear.

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For a long time we knew nothing about my father’s fate. But credit where it’s due (I was struck by this even later, when I was capable of understanding) — during the war information about refugees was very well organized. Through the Red Cross you could find many people. My father found us in Siberia through the Red Cross. He sent us his little triangular letters from the front. But it so happened that at the beginning of January we received his last letter. It wasn’t even a letter, just a postcard. I have a copy of the postcard; the original is with my eldest son, Ihor, at the “Holocaust Museum” in Dnipro, Ukraine. With your permission, I will read what my father wrote to me, a six-year-old girl.

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“To the dear little daughter Idachka from Daddy Mikhail Grigorievich Naftolin. Keep the memory and do not despair, and never forget about Daddy. A front-line greeting. 20 December 1942. I am at war. I defend my beloved country. We are destroying the damned fascists for the killings and routs. Soon we will return victorious to our native home. If I die defending my beloved homeland, grow up and take up arms for me quickly. Destroy the enemy without mercy, for the death of your beloved father. Destroy traitors to the motherland without mercy. And never be a slave, an object of the enemy’s mockery. This is a father’s command to you, my beloved daughter. Be braver against the enemy always.”

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He did not know that literally within a few months he himself would be declared an “enemy of the people.”

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It happened like this: at the beginning of the war — as you’ve probably heard — it often happened that people would say, “Our troops are surrounded by the Germans, get out however you can.” That’s how my mother’s brother managed, by chance, to escape the encirclement and spent the rest of the war fighting with the partisans. The same thing happened to my father. When they were trying to get out — it was in the Bryansk forests — there was a German “cuckoo” perched in a tree. Do you know what that is? It’s a German sniper who shoots at passing soldiers and civilians.

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My father was handed a submachine gun because they knew he was a good marksman. But before he could take down the fascist, the sniper managed to wound him. The wound, luckily, was not serious — the bullet passed through his shoulder cleanly. Still, that was only the beginning of unpredictable events. The soldiers escaped from the encirclement in small groups. In the group where my father was, there was a political officer. He came up to my father and said: “Mikhail, you’re a Jew. If we get captured by the Germans, they’ll shoot us all because of you. So go your own way, and we’ll go ours.”

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And so my father walked wherever his eyes led him. Soon he came to the edge of the forest and saw a small village. He was afraid to enter it — he didn’t know whether there were Germans there or not — so he decided to wait until evening. When it got dark, he entered the first house at the edge of the village. The woman who lived there told him that this was a partisan area — there were no Germans in the village or nearby. But at that time people were very vigilant, and she, of course, reported to the local partisan commander that a soldier had come from the forest and asked them to check his loyalty.

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They invited him to the partisan unit, talked to him, and realized he was an honest and decent man. Moreover, they had recently captured a “tongue” — a German prisoner — but no one could translate what he was saying because they didn’t know German. My father did. So he served as their interpreter. The commander of the partisan detachment offered him to stay and fight with them, but my father felt that wasn’t enough — he wanted to return to the regular Soviet army. He asked the commander to help him cross the front line. After some time, the partisans really did help him get across.

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But as soon as he rejoined the Soviet troops, they threw him into a cellar — without food or water. He sat there for several days before being called in for interrogation. And the first question they asked him was this: “How is it that you, a Jew, survived on territory occupied by the Germans (though it actually wasn’t occupied)? You must be a traitor to the Motherland.”

He was sentenced by a “troika” — an extrajudicial tribunal. The charges: Article 58, paragraph 10, part 2 — “counterrevolutionary propaganda and agitation.” Whom could he have possibly agitated — the trees in the forest? Or the old peasant women? The sentence: ten years of corrective labor camps with confiscation of property. What property? He had nothing but his duffel bag. And that’s how he ended up in the camps.

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He spent the first years in the city of Rybinsk. In 1944, when our hometown Bobruisk was liberated, my relatives decided to return. Miraculously, my grandparents’ house had survived. Next to the house stood a wrecked German tank. Inside, there was nothing — only the floor, walls, and ceiling. Everything else had been taken away. Absolutely everything. There were nine of us children — cousins and siblings. We all slept together on the bare floor. There wasn’t even a stool. Nothing.

Somehow my father found out that we had returned to Belarus and sent word about where he was. He begged my mother and me to come see him.

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I will never forget this. I was nine years old. We traveled in a general carriage, of course — we had no money for any other kind of transport. First we had to go to Moscow, then to Rybinsk. When we arrived at the camp, the guards told us that the prisoners were out working and we’d have to wait for their return. And this scene has stayed with me for the rest of my life — I can never forget it.

Imagine this: a dark, black mass of people barely shuffling their feet. All in black — hats, jackets, trousers. Heads lowered. They were guarded by soldiers with rifles and dogs. They were led back to the camp; the gates opened, and above them hung a sign — I don’t remember the exact words, but it was something like “Welcome.” That’s how we finally got a meeting with my father. We saw him.

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My father tried not to talk much about it — it was too painful. To spare us, he always softened things, saying everything was fine, he would endure it, we should hold on — “Study well,” he always told me. But after some time he was transferred to the city of Uglich, where he spent the rest of his sentence. He fell ill with tuberculosis and barely survived. His life was saved by a camp doctor, who took pity on him — my father was a handsome, blue-eyed young man, only 34 years old. There was no penicillin then, but she managed to find some somewhere — and saved his life.

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Of course, the conditions were brutal. Later, my father told us that there were all sorts of people in the camp — military officers, actors, artists. There were many gifted and extraordinary people there. Their accusations were similar — the same or almost the same as my father’s. For nothing. It weighed on me like a stone to know that my father was living in such savage conditions…

When I was accepted into the Young Pioneers, they would ask, “Where is your father?” And I had to lie — for the first time in my life. I said, “He’s missing in action.” I had to hide the truth. When it came time to join the Komsomol, it was the same situation. I said, “He’s missing in action.” My mother hid the truth from me for a while, but when my father insisted that she bring me to see him, she told me — under the strictest secrecy: “Just don’t tell anyone.” That was it. It became taboo. And I never told anyone.

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Here I have a photograph of myself taken before the war — I’m wearing a tracksuit, standing on a chair. That photograph, taken in Bobruisk, was with my father in the camp. There he met an artist and asked him to paint my portrait. It wasn’t possible to paint on canvas, so they used plywood instead. In the photo, I’m standing on a chair, but the artist painted me as if I were standing in a forest. And during the war, we really did live in Siberia…

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When we once came to visit my father, we were allowed to take that painting home. On it, my father had written: “To my dear little daughter Idachka, from your loving daddy. City of Uglich.” and the year. But we couldn’t let anyone know where our father was. So I painted over the words “Uglich” and the year with oil paint, while the rest of the picture I covered with watercolor, so it could later be washed off.

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That painting has traveled across many places and countries — from Uglich to Bobruisk, from Bobruisk to Zaporizhzhia, and from Zaporizhzhia to here, Canada. We keep it as a precious relic. My father, in the harsh conditions of the camp, managed to make such a beautiful gift for his daughter.

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Can you imagine what would have happened to me if the children or the adults had found out that I was the daughter of an “enemy of the people”? At our school, there was a brother and sister — their last name was Nemtsov — and they were bullied mercilessly until their parents changed their surname and transferred them to another school. What would have happened to me if they had found out I was the daughter of an “enemy of the people”?

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That Damoclean sword hanging over me followed me all the way until my father’s release from prison. In 1952, his camp term ended. But there was a regulation in place: former prisoners could not live in large cities. So my father couldn’t return to our city. He felt ashamed — he had been such a patriot, so respected. Everyone in town knew him. And suddenly, he was an “enemy of the people,” a man who had been in prison.

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In the camp, he had a cellmate — a friend, as they said — who was released earlier and lived in Yevpatoria. That man invited my father to come there, and my father was given permission to go. But after ten years in prison, having seen only my mother and me, of course he wanted to see more of his relatives. On his way, passing through the city of Zaporizhzhia, he remembered that he had family there. He stopped, met them, and they persuaded him to stay.

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However, he was not allowed to live within the city limits. Not far from Zaporizhzhia there was a settlement called Verkhnyaya Khortytsia. Nearby, at a repair and utility workshop, there was a sewing shop. My father was an excellent tailor. It was thanks to his golden hands that he had survived in the camp — at that time, it was fashionable among the camp officers to wear leather coats, and he sewed them beautifully. That skill saved his life, because the officers and staff he sewed for sometimes brought him a bit of food. That was the only way he survived.

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At the workshop, he had to sew gloves for the workers. He would layer the fabric up to 15–20 centimeters thick, cut it with a knife — that was his job. But there was no other choice. My mother and I were still in Bobruisk, Belarus. Naturally, he sent for us to come and join him.

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And then — January 1953. I was in the eighth grade at the time. My entire class came to see me off. They all came to the train station. I remember, before we left... There was a movie theater in our town called “Tovarishch” (“Comrade”), and the film “Silva” was showing there. We went to see it together as a class — so I would have something to remember them by. Many, many years later, when I returned to Bobruisk, I went back to that cinema and remembered how my classmates had come to say goodbye to me.

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In short, we arrived in Zaporizhzhia — though for us it was only a name, “Zaporizhzhia.” We lived in Verkhnyaya Khortytsia. To get from the settlement to the city, you had to take a bus. The bus passed by the Transformer Factory, where many workers commuted. To get on the bus, you literally had to fight your way in. I had long braids, and when I climbed aboard, I tucked them under my belt — otherwise, they could have been caught in the door and left behind.

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After some time, my father got a little more stable financially and decided to build a house. They gave him a plot of land — though it was hardly land at all. There had once been a mill there, destroyed during the war, so the “plot” was nothing but rubble and broken stones. When the house was finally built, many people who had served time with my father — “cellmates,” as they called one another — began visiting us often. Some even stayed with us for a while. They always helped one another.

What gave me peace was that no one where we lived knew where my father had been. That heavy stone I had carried in my heart all those years in Belarus seemed to lift at last.

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Then one day, in 1962, I was at my parents’ home when suddenly my father came running in during the day. “I’ve been urgently called to the military enlistment office,” he said. At last, he returned — smiling, holding a paper packet in his hands. I remember it vividly: he emptied it onto the table. These were the belongings that had once been confiscated from him — three rubles, some change, photographs, and small trinkets. Even after all the monetary reforms, that’s what was left — three rubles and a few kopecks.

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But the most important thing: he showed us a document — his full rehabilitation. The date: September 4, 1962. Issued by the Military Tribunal of the Belarusian Military District, case file of the UKGB of the Mogilev Region. The record can be found in the database “Victims of Political Terror in the USSR,” Belarusian Memorial.

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After that, on February 23 and May 9, the children from the military office would always congratulate my father on those dates. Later, when the anniversary of Victory Day came and commemorative medals were issued, he was awarded one of them.

But those years left their mark. His health was ruined. My father fell ill. The doctors found metastases throughout his body; there was no hope of saving him. I came to my parents to help care for him. His condition was terrible. And on October 19, it will be exactly forty-three years since he passed away. He was only sixty-seven.

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There was hardly any light in his life — none for him, none in my childhood or youth. For him, it turned out that life had passed in vain. And yet, he had been such a patriot — you saw what he wrote to his six-year-old daughter, those words... Could a man like that possibly betray his homeland? He didn’t even allow his sisters and their Polish husbands, who wanted to return to Poland in the 1960s, to leave. He said, “No. We must live in the Soviet Union.” And yet, he was rehabilitated only after Stalin’s death.

My father had four brothers who were killed at the front. The youngest was only twenty-three. When Stalin died, we cried crocodile tears. I didn’t know then that this man had crippled not only my father’s life, but also mine — and the lives of thousands upon thousands of others.

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Why look far for examples? Do you know the poet Tanich? He once told a joke — not even a particularly harsh one — about the Soviet regime, and he was given eight years. Eight years in prison — for a joke! His wife later said that the man who had written the denunciation came to apologize after Tanich returned from the camps. But what good are your apologies when a man has spent eight years in those inhuman conditions? Back then, people were afraid to say a single extra word. They whispered in kitchens because they were scared. There were all kinds of people, and denunciations were widespread.

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I had a cousin who fought through the entire war. He was a captain. He decided to go to Moscow — I don’t know which office he went to, but he wanted to find out why such a man had been sentenced to ten years as a “traitor to the Motherland.” He entered the office in his uniform. The official behind the desk, with a thick folder of documents before him, said:
“This is your uncle’s case, Captain. And if you don’t want to lose your rank — forget about your uncle.”

That was my father’s fate — and mine as well.

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P.S. All my life I wanted to do something original. Many women embroidered — I did too. I also carved things out of wood and so on. One day, while cleaning a fish — it was a bighead carp — I noticed that its bones were very beautiful. First, they were pearly, and second, they looked like petals. I decided to make a flower out of those bones.

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I boiled the fish head until the bones separated, poured off the broth (which could be used for soup), then washed and dried the bones thoroughly. When drying, some of them deformed slightly — which actually made them even more interesting. They looked like little flowers or petals. Later I began carving shapes out of the larger bones.

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Here in Canada there is a lot of fish — and it’s excellent — but for my work, only one kind is suitable: carp. The others don’t work. Why? Because their bones are too soft and too transparent. Here, for example, I have one of my works made from fish bones found in Canadian waters. See — this one, and this one. There’s a big difference. That’s why I can only use carp bones.​​​

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