When honouring is painful
Eleonora is the only daughter of late “Holocaust hero, Sobibor Resistance Leader, and Hostage of History” as labels him a subtitle of a book called “Sasha Pechersky” by Selma Leydesdorff. “For the last 15 years I’m drawing a lot of attention from mass media, directors, writers, authorities. But nobody is interested in me – everyone wants to talk only about my father”. Eleonora is disturbed by all the buzz surrounding her father’s memory for one simple reason: it’s too late. While he was alive, he never got any attention. Just the opposite: he was ignored and humiliated in various ways by the Soviet regime. In 1948 he was fired because of his Jewish nationality and for the 5 next years all his attempts to find a job failed. Authorities didn’t want to listen to his story and recognize that he was actually a hero, a leader of a unique operation that helped 53 Jews escape from death at Sobibor Nazi concentration camp. Holocaust remained a suppressed topic during most of the Soviet era. An essay about Sobibor uprising written by famous Soviet writer Kataev was banned from publishing.
During the war, Sasha Pechersky’s family had no doubt that he was killed. Later he admitted that there were moments when he would prefer to be killed instead of going through all the humiliation. After he organized an uprising at Sobibor death camp and escaped with his mates from Nazis, he was detained by Soviet authorities who considered anyone ever captured by Nazis as traitors. Instead of praising Alexander’s heroism and courage, the authorities treated him as a criminal and sent him to a penal military unit for certain death - disciplinary battalions had no mercy to their soldiers. Statistically, no more than 1 out of 10 survived in such units. To his “luck”, Alexander was heavily wounded in a battle and sent to a hospital. That’s how he escaped.
When in 2018 a monument of Sasha Pechersky was inaugurated in Rostov, Eleonora who never goes out because of her Parkinson's disease, put together all her strength and attended the ceremony. A city mayor approached her and asked: “So, I guess you are happy now?” “How can I be happy when all of it is taking place 30 years after my father passed away?” she replied despairingly.
Eleonora’s childhood was full of war-time drama. Being a little girl she underestimated the danger and the cruelty of the moment. The summer of 1941 when the war began she spent like any other summer - in a small village not far from Stalingrad, with her grandmother. One day the village was occupied and set on fire by Nazis. Everything was burnt down. “The village was already in flames when I first saw Nazi aircrafts dropping bombs. I ran to my grandmother shouting “Nanny, they are dropping air balloons, let’s go catch them!”” 7-years-old Eleonora and her old grandmother had to leave their place and look for shelter. Eleonora went barefooted with nothing but a summer dress on her. All her clothes were destroyed in the fire. “I remember how we walked across a field when a Nazi aircraft approached. It was flying low and slow, it was there to kill. My grandmother pushed me to the ground and covered me with her body. She was heavy. I began crying and asking her to get off me, but she only whispered - “Hush, hush, keep silent, don’t let them discover us.”” Only by happy chance, Eleonora escaped death multiple times during the war. For two years she was hiding in the barns of good-hearted Russian farmers who were risking their life to save the Jewish girl.
Nowadays Eleonora lives alone in a neat 2-room flat where she knows by heart every centimeter of the walls: she often loses balance and falls down while walking. She prevents hard bumps by leaning onto the walls every time she feels she is about to fall. “I just lean on the wall and then slowly crawl down.”
Eleonora often experienced anti-Semitism in her life. Like her father, she also couldn’t find a job for quite a while. “I knew I was a brilliant economist, and all employers knew that as well. I’d come to a factory, they’d tell me that they will be happy to hire me, I just need to fill out a simple form. The form always had a “nationality” line. The next day the same people would stare away and make up some stupid reason to reject me. This scenario repeated everywhere for two years.” Being a son of a Jewish father and a Russian mother she never felt herself completely belonging to any nationality. “I was an alien for Russians, but there were also Jews who considered me an alien”.
Nowadays despite all the attention from famous strangers, journalists, filmmakers she feels lonely. She has a daughter who lives separately and rarely can help out because she needs to take care of her own family. She has some old friends, mostly coworkers, who are in touch with her, and, very importantly, “Hesed” Jewish charity homecare worker who cares about her on a regular basis.
Eleonora with Sveta, her Hesed curator
She is very grateful for this help but she also feels that she is dependent on the help of others, and this makes her desperate: “It’s extremely hard. All my life I was helping people, and now I’m dependent on everyone.”