Vladimir Lewin papers

Vladimir Lewin was born on 29 April 1922 in Pinsk, Poland (Pinsk, Belarus) to Lazar (1891-1967) and Judyta (née Minkowicz, d. 1942). He had one sister, Deborah (d. 1942). After the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Vladimir fled Pinsk. He first went to Ukraine where he enrolled in a coal mining school, but left soon after and went to Uzbekistan to join the Polish army under Władysław Anders’ command (Anders’ Army), but was rejected for being Jewish. He then ended up in Siberia in a labor battalion in early 1943 where he worked in a coalmine in Kopeisk, but soon deserted his post. Vladimir made his way to Chelyabinsk where he contracted typhoid and malaria. He was then conscripted into the Red Army and sent to the 1st Ukrainian Front where he was wounded in January 1944. After his recovery he was transferred to the Polish People’s Army. They arrived in Lublin, Poland in July 1944 and Vladimir remained there for the duration of the war. He was reunited with his father in Lublin. Lazar survived the Holocaust in Negin, Ukraine, but his mother, sister, and grandmother Rykel Lewin were all murdered in Pinsk in October 1942. Lazar later immigrated to the United States. After Vladimir finished his military service in 1946, he moved to Warsaw where he became a reporter for the Jewish press agency. He immigrated to the United States in 1970.