Interview with Lev Manevich

Belarusian Jewish teenager Lev Manevich was finishing his first year as a university student in Minsk in June 1941 when German-led forces attacked the Soviet Union. Manevich was drafted into the Soviet army and served at the front for several months. In the summer of 1942, German forces surrounded his unit and Manevich became a prisoner of war (POW).

In the featured interview,¹ Manevich describes how he narrowly escaped execution by German forces while imprisoned in a POW camp. German authorities typically assembled captured POWs and separated out those whom Nazi ideology regarded as racial and political enemies—particularly those suspected of being Jews, Communists, or political officers known as Commissars.² The German Army High Command ordered that individuals identified as members of these groups should be shot immediately.³

German forces sometimes found it difficult to carry out orders to shoot Jewish Red Army soldiers and other so-called “enemies” captured in battle. It was impossible for them to identify Jewish soldiers or Communist Party members by appearance alone. After German troops selected POWs they thought looked Jewish, they relied on other POWs to identify themselves or point out others in the group.⁴ Jewish or Communist Red Army soldiers learned to conceal their identities, but they also depended on the silence of their fellow soldiers in order to avoid recognition and execution. Being targeted as Jewish added to the already horrific conditions facing Soviet POWs in German custody. Manevich observes that “for a Jewish soldier, the most frightening thing on earth was to be captured by the Germans.”

German army personnel in POW camps often tried to discover which POWs were Jewish by conducting medical examinations to determine if men were circumcised.⁵ This was not as common on the western front, where circumcision—particularly among Americans—was more common among non-Jewish soldiers. Some POWs who had been wrongly suspected of being Jewish were even given documents certifying their non-Jewishness if a medical inspection determined they were not circumcised.

Manevich recalls how he only escaped identification as a Jew during one inspection by hiding within a crowd of prisoners. He was unable to avoid another medical exam, and he “felt like a dead man walking” as it approached. He happened to have been seen by a Polish doctor who decided not to reveal Manevich’s identity, highlighting how the survival of captured Jewish POWs could hinge on a combination of chance and individual choices.

British forces liberated Manevich from a POW camp in Germany in 1945, and he soon returned to the Soviet Union. He was expecting a hero’s welcome, but Soviet secret police arrested Manevich and sent him to do heavy labor in a mine. Soviet authorities punished many former Soviet POWs like Manevich as traitors—as well as other Soviet citizens who had spent the war in Germany as forced laborers. Manevich recalls that he was able to return to civilian life only after he “atoned” for being captured during World War II by serving time in two Soviet forced labor camps.

This interview with Lev Genrichovich Manevich was conducted in 2009 as part of the Blavatnik Archive's Veteran Oral History Project (2006–2014), a collection of video interviews with Jewish men and women who fought in the Soviet armed forces during World War II. Manevich was born in Mogilev Oblast in Soviet Belarus in 1923 to Jewish collective farmers and was drafted into the Red Army in 1941.

The role of political officers—Commissars—in the Red Army changed over the course of the war. At the beginning of the war, political officers were responsible for spreading Soviet ideology among the troops and held military rank equal to commanders. By mid–1942 they held less power and mainly focused on improving morale. They had a reputation as devoted Communists.

A series of orders issued by the German Army High Command before the invasion of June 1941 instructed the German military to execute captured Jews, Commissars, Communists, and others regarded as a particular threat to the German occupation of the Soviet Union. See the related item in Experiencing History, Guidelines for the Treatment of Political Commissars.

Some captured troops outed their fellow soldiers to the Germans due to antisemitism, anti-Communism, sympathy to the Nazi cause, the possibility of personal gain, or fear that if they remained silent they would also be punished. For more, see Aron Shneyer, Pariahs among Pariahs: Soviet-Jewish POWs in German Captivity, 1941–1945, translated by Yisrael Cohen (Jerusalem: Yad Vashem, 2016), 235–241.

To learn more, see David Motadel, "Veiled Survivors: Jews, Roma and Muslims in the Years of the Holocaust" in J. Rüger, N. Wachsmann. eds., Rewriting German History (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 288–305. After it became clear that German forces were executing large numbers of circumcised Soviet Muslim soldiers, this identification method was no longer used as a primary way to determine if POWs might be Jewish.

See David Motadel, "Veiled Survivors: Jews, Roma and Muslims in the Years of the Holocaust" in J. Rüger, N. Wachsmann. eds., Rewriting German History (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015), 288–305. After it became clear that German forces were executing large numbers of circumcised Soviet Muslim soldiers, this identification method was no longer used as a primary way to determine if POWs might be Jewish.

Physical inspections did happen on the western front but decreased in frequency during the war. For an example among British POWs see, Russell Wallis, British Pows and the Holocaust: Witnessing the Nazi Atrocities ( London: I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited, 2017), 48.

See Shneyer, Pariahs among Pariahs, 241–42.

Manevich was one of roughly 4 million Soviet citizens forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union from 1945 to 1946. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, “The Motherland Calls: ‘Soft’ Repatriation of Soviet Citizens from Europe, 1945–1953,” The Journal of Modern History, vol. 90, no. 2 (2018): 233–250.

Russian: Bath house or sauna.

Ernst Thälmann was a prominent German Communist leader. After Adolf Hitler ordered the arrest of all Communist functionaries and other political opponents in March of 1933, Thälmann was imprisoned for over a decade. The Nazi SS murdered Thälmann in the Buchenwald camp in 1944.

—How did you end up a prisoner?

It happened in the summer of '42, near the Donets River. Our regiment was encircled, but it fought to the death. An all-around defense with no shells, no cartridges. The order from High Command was to not retreat, but everyone wanted to survive so badly! Those who retreated encountered the barrier troops, or they were sent to Stalingrad to fight. Those who fought to the death were either killed or captured. War is a tragedy, calamity, and catastrophe for all. But for a Jewish soldier, the most frightening thing on earth was to be captured by the Germans. I was not able to evade this fate. Your humble servant, a Belorussian Jew, endured five German-Nazi concentration camps. And not only the German camps, but also two Soviet camps. In a mine near Tula I atoned for having been in a German-Nazi camp. I managed to escape from there, came back to Minsk, to the university, which had held on to my documents and gave them back to me, and then I was demobilized.

—How did you manage to stay alive [as a POW]?

To stay alive? First, I looked like a Belorussian, my mother was a Belorussian.

—You did not look like a Jew.

Exactly. Two of my close friends, they knew. They said to me, "Don’t worry, we won't betray you. But don't you go and reveal yourself either." This was because at the very first inspection, we were lined up and an order was issued: "Jews and commissars—step forward." No one did. He walked through the rows of people and found this little Jew. He teased him, but the latter remained with us. Later, when we were transferred from one camp to the next, they were plucked out, the Jews that is, and were kept elsewhere. They were abused separately. And then they disappeared altogether. They were shot somewhere on the way. That's that.

So how did I survive? The most important thing for me was to get through the medical exam. But I had to get through that only in the last camp, in Germany. We were there for a long time, in the city of Hagen.

—Which city?

Hagen, near the border with France, in Westphalia. We spent a long time in the camp, and before being sent off to work, everyone was taken to the banya. All of our linens were taken for disinfection. It was a good banya; there were lots of people. When we came out of the banya there was a table next to the door manned by a huge Russian-speaking man. He would ask everyone who exited the banya: "Where are you from?" And he looked at each person, from top to bottom. I [of course] understood what he was looking for. I exited only when there was already a big crowd of naked people, and only a few remained in line [to be examined]. I had to go, so I went. Immediately he asked "Where are you from?" At that moment I ran and hid in the crowd of naked people. He went after me, but I crouched down, like a rabbit under a bush. There were still people in line, so he went back [to his post]. He came to look for me later. I don't know if he was Russian or Ukrainian, but he didn't recognize me again. So I survived. There was one other time, right before liberation. Us young people, the youngest were all taken to a medical exam. They wanted to send us to work in a mine. So [we had to go through] another medical examination. Before coming before the medical examiner I felt like a dead man walking. Rumor had it that one of the doctors was German, and the other was Polish. A young Pole, you see. He looked me over from top to bottom, put his hand on my shoulder, and said, "Good for you that you stayed alive."

—The Pole said that?

This young Pole.

—And he let you go?

He let me through. And he declared that the number 84481 is not suited for [work] in the mine. I had a hernia, you see. It's [difficult] to recall this tragic episode.

—[From the audience:] Did you have a tattoo?

No, we didn't have tattoos. We wore metal badges on our arms. No one asked for your last name, just your number—84481.

—How did you escape the camp?

I did not escape the camp, I stayed there until the end.

—And then . . . What happened in the end?

I will tell you in a moment. Right before the end of the war everyone was lined up, given half a loaf of bread, and they marched us, but we didn't know where we were going. We walked for a long time, with shooting going on all around us. Our guards switched a few times. There was an older commandant, and then we were free. There were no guards. We returned back to the ash heap of the camp where we had been living and carried on living; we didn't know what we were supposed to do.

—Where was this?

All of this was in Hagen, Westphalia, Western Germany. While I was at this camp for two years, we were bombed day and night, with nowhere to hide. We were being bombed intermittently by the British and the Americans. The Germans hid in good bomb shelters, but the rest of the camp would just sit it out. The camp had been bombed through and through multiple times. And then we heard that the Americans had come. It [turned out to be] the British, not the Americans. They came into the city and walked all the way through. That is how we ended up free. No one liberated us. The British appeared, and all of the prisoners came out, but neither could communicate with each other. But they explained to us that we were now free and were free to do whatever we wanted. Some of the men began occupying living quarters and apartments [in the city]. A few days later, the Americans arrived. It turned out that some doctor could speak English and he was able to communicate with the Americans. He was assigned as commandant, and he ordered the Russian POWs to gather at the edge of the city that was unharmed and take over the apartments in that area. The Germans were all kicked out, and we took over their apartments. The Americans fed us. We stayed there for an entire month. All of the men gained so much weight, they were unrecognizable. Those packages [they gave us] kept us well fed.

Then, a Soviet officer arrived in a truck, and began speaking from atop a car. He explained the international situation to us and told us that the officers would be taken back to the motherland first, as the motherland needed people. The rest would go on foot. So I claimed to be an officer—I said I was a political deputy. Cars arrived, driven by black drivers; we got in the cars and were driven away. We passed through Bautzen, where Thalmann² died [Ernst Thalmann was imprisoned Bautzen but was later transferred to and shot in Buchenwald —Ed.]. It was a checkpoint, so we stayed there for a few days. Afterwards we were put on a train and taken towards the motherland, which took a long time. Finally we reached Nevel [Nyevyel'], which is on the border of Russia and Belarus. We were greeted with a wind ensemble. All of a sudden we found ourselves behind barbed wire. It was a SMERSH camp where we were all screened. You hear? They screened us, filled out documents about who we were and where we were from. People wrote to their loved ones, wives could come visit their husbands. That is when I received a letter from the kolkhoz saying that my entire family had been killed. For a long time I kept that letter in my breast pocket, but so that it would not burn my heart, I decided to burn it. Everyone was screened, then everyone received their documents. But since I was living under a different name, you see, no documents came for me. That is when I decided to confess that I was not Pyotr Vasilievich Shvedov, but Lev Gennadievich Manevich. I asked [an official], "Which name should I live with?" He replied that I should live by my own name, "You are now Manevich." I, along with about twenty or thirty people, was sent to the mine to work. I felt like the time I spent as a POW was hell, only to realize that I was going even deeper here. I worked for a week and then I ran away with a few other people. It took us a long time to get to Minsk. In Gomel, I was arrested and detained. I explained everything, just like I have explained everything to you just now. A guard had me sign a paper that said that I would leave Gomel and the entire Gomel Oblast within twenty-four hours. So he let me go. I don't really remember . . . I continued on to Minsk . . . and when I arrived in Minsk, I received my documents which were still there. I returned to the SMERSH camp and then was officially demobilized. I thought that I would return home as a hero, because I survived, you see. But they sent me straight to the mine.

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