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Moscow—Poznan—Berlin
not been a thick network of tank tracks on the ground, you would not have realized
that a moving artillery barrage had just rolled through here, one of the last
operations of World War II.
the assault on berlin was in full swing when we crossed the German border.
Before that trip, I had flown a great deal from Moscow over various routes, and I
have flown even more since then. But it is difficult, especially now after so many
years, to describe the feeling that I experienced during that flight. For me, in terms
of emotion, this flight was unique.
I was thirty-three years old—about the same age as everyone on that flight,
except for General Petrov, who was ten years our senior.We flew out of Moscow,
where I had lived since I was two years old, and where my father had quite
recently died of dystrophy. We flew over Smolensk. Somewhere down there my
older cousin Misha, the darling of the entire family, had been killed. He had
worked for People’s Commissar Tevosyan and therefore had a deferment. He also
had two sons, and had still volunteered. He was wounded, and after he was released
from the hospital, he returned to the front and died near Smolensk.We flew over
Poland where I was born. I didn’t feel any particular closeness to Poland although
I knew from my parents’ stories about my escapades there up through the age of
two. But somewhere here below us, in Auschwitz or the Warsaw ghetto, my other
cousin, Solomon Zlatin, and his entire family had been annihilated. He had left
Moscow for Poland to join his mother, my aunt Fruma Borisovna, back in 1921,
immediately after the end of the war with Poland.The last time I saw them was
on the platform of the Belorusskiy (at that time it was still the Aleksandrovskiy)
train station, when my parents took me along to see them off. Fruma Borisovna,
my mother’s older sister, had helped my parents a great deal when they had settled
in Lódz and were enduring financial difficulties after wandering around Europe as
emigrants.Then her only son, Solomon; his beautiful wife, Lyuba; and their fiveyear-old
son, Yasha, returned home. Yes, and I was also linked to Poland by
Sigismund Levanevskiy, to whose tragic flight I devoted more than a year of
intense labor. And how much more effort was spent preparing the expeditions to
search for the airplane that had become known worldwide by its number, N-209.
And now we were flying over Germany, who had shattered all of our pre-war
plans, hopes, and way of thinking.
Later on, I directly participated in what would be historical events for humanity,
events that changed the history of the world: the launch of the first artificial
satellite; the first launch of a human being,Yuriy Gagarin, into space; the creation
and launch of the first spacecraft to reach the surface of the moon; and the creation
of the first intercontinental missiles capable of carrying a warhead with a yield of
tens of megatons to America. But never have I had such a feeling of oneness with
human history than on the day of that flight at the end of the war. Perhaps it was
because I had been burdened with enormous worries and responsibilities during
the previous and subsequent events of historical significance. I always had to be
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