In the history of the Jewish people, there are lives that seem almost invented—so improbable they are, so full of unexpected and, sadly, often tragic turns. The fate of Yakov Yakovlevich Etinger is precisely such a case. His life became a kind of bridge between two tragedies of the twentieth century: the Nazi Holocaust and the Stalinist repressions. Having passed through both hells, he managed to remain a person who, until his final days, brought knowledge, memory, and hope to others.
Yakov Lazarovich Siterman was born on 12 August 1929 in Minsk. His birth was a true miracle for his parents, who had waited many years for a child. His father, Lazar Yakovlevich Siterman, was one of the most renowned physicians in Belarus—a professor, Doctor of Medical Sciences, Honored Scientist of the Byelorussian SSR, and head of the Department of Propaedeutics of Internal Diseases at the Minsk Medical Institute. His name was known far beyond the republic. Professor Siterman’s monographs on cardiovascular diseases became essential reading for several generations of physicians. He treated high-ranking party officials, well-known writers, actors, and artists—but for him, what mattered was never the patient’s status, but the human being in need of help.
Despite his outstanding professional achievements, Lazar Siterman never sought to join the Communist Party. The professor secretly despised Stalin for the inhumane political regime he had built and, in particular, for the total hypocrisy that was an integral part of that system.
His mother, Vera Solomonovna, came from a wealthy family: her father, Solomon Lifshits, was a first-guild merchant (a pre-revolutionary Russian merchant rank). Lifshits was also a well-known philanthropist: before the Revolution, a hospital for the Jewish poor was built in Minsk with his funds. Vera Solomonovna herself graduated from the Bestuzhev Courses in St. Petersburg—one of the few institutions of higher education available to women in pre-revolutionary Russia. She inherited from her father not only wealth, but his most important quality—the ability to feel compassion for the suffering of others.
A special place in Yakov’s life was held by his nanny, Maria Petrovna Kharetskaya—a simple Belarusian woman who would become like a second mother to him. She spoke to him in her native language, sang Belarusian songs, and told him fairy tales. Yakov repaid her with boundless love and affection.
Despite the outward well-being, Yakov’s prewar childhood was not carefree. In his memoirs, he recalls how tense the atmosphere was in the second half of the 1930s—at the height of the Stalinist repressions. In the building on Karl Marx Street where the Sitermans lived, many researchers, doctors, and ordinary workers were arrested. A significant number of them were Jews. Every night, the security services would take someone away—and those people disappeared without a trace. At the school Yakov attended, many children had lost their parents; his own father expected arrest constantly.
And yet childhood always remains a special, remarkable, and bright time: Yakov studied music and was friends with the neighborhood boys. Nothing foreshadowed the abyss that would open before him and his family just a few years later…
On Saturday, 21 June 1941, Yakov and his parents were at the theater, attending a visiting performance by the Moscow Art Theatre (MKhAT). In the middle of the performance, a general entered the government box and said something to Pavlov, the commander of the Western Military District (later blamed for the failures of the first days of the war and executed on Stalin’s orders)—and he immediately left the theater. Even if Yakov’s parents suspected something, they gave no sign of it: after the performance, the Sitermans went to their summer dacha…
And the very next day, the familiar world collapsed. Upon learning of Germany’s attack, his father immediately left for his hospital to save the wounded. For several days he did not return home, providing aid to soldiers and residents of Minsk, which was subjected to fierce bombardment. The most devastating of these occurred on 24 June, the third day of the war: the city, largely built of wood, was engulfed in flames, and for many days the air was thick with choking smoke.
One of the bombs struck the building where the Sitermans lived. Risking her life, the nanny Maria Kharetskaya managed to save a few valuable items from the fire: an astrakhan coat, rings, and pearls. Later, by selling them, the family avoided starvation in the first months of the occupation.
But in the fire, an archive containing family relics was also lost: among them, letters from the renowned general, a hero of the Russo-Turkish War, Mikhail Skobelev, to Yakov’s great-grandfather Grigory Lifshits—a merchant and philanthropist.
The Sitermans did not manage to evacuate. This was “helped along” by German saboteurs disguised in Soviet uniforms, who spoke flawless Russian. On 26 June, they appeared in the dacha settlement where the Sitermans were staying and reassured everyone that things were going well for the Red Army—that Warsaw and Königsberg had already been taken, so there was nothing to fear.
And on 20 July 1941, an order was issued by the German field commandant on the “establishment of a Jewish residential district in the city of Minsk.” All Jews were required to register with the “Judenrat” (a body of Jewish “self-administration” created by the Nazis) and to wear yellow badges on their chest and back. They were forbidden to walk along central streets or to greet acquaintances who were not Jewish. Yakov recalls how one of his father’s colleagues, seeing the Sitermans from afar, apologized with a gesture and changed his route…
Even the very process of relocation to the ghetto was accompanied by abuse. “Apartments” were allocated at a rate of one and a half (!) square meters per person. In small houses designed for five or six people, there were often twenty-five to thirty. Initially, a strictly delineated area was assigned for the ghetto, but as soon as Jews moved in, a new order would be issued, excluding some streets and including others. Because of this, the Sitermans had to move their belongings from place to place several times. Twelve-year-old Yakov struggled under the weight of a heavy sack filled to the brim with possessions and food…
Several times, the Germans imposed levies: under threat of execution, Jews were forced to hand over all money, gold, silver, and furs. Professor Siterman had to part with a commemorative silver cigarette case, on the lid of which were engraved the names of the donors—professors of the Minsk Medical Institute.
Even before the ghetto was fully organized, the Germans carried out a “selection.” Jewish men between the ages of eighteen and forty-five, with the exception of those in essential trades (stove-makers, masons, painters, plasterers), were later sent to a concentration camp in Drozdy, on the northwestern outskirts of Minsk. Almost all of them were shot. Among those killed were Yakov’s uncle, David Lifshits, as well as family friends—engineers Eisenberg and Pritykin.
In the autumn of 1941, Gestapo officers arrested Professor Lazar Siterman. The Black Book by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman describes in detail the humiliations inflicted on the well-known physician. He was forced to perform the dirtiest work—cleaning cesspits by hand; he was made to kneel in the middle of a square, a football placed on his back, and photographed. In September 1941, Lazar Yakovlevich Siterman was killed in a Minsk prison…
Yakov and his mother were left alone. Life in the ghetto was sheer hell. Germans and local collaborators would burst into houses and wipe out entire families. With the arrival of autumn came cold and disease, and the death toll rose sharply. On the eve of 7 November, rumors spread that the Germans were preparing a large “aktion” (mass killing operation). Risking her life, the nanny Maria made her way to the Sitermans and confirmed their worst fears: troops were already being concentrated around the ghetto. She persuaded Yakov and Vera Solomonovna to leave it. That evening, they climbed over the barbed-wire fence and took shelter with one of Maria’s acquaintances. Then they moved to a neighboring house and hid there in a cellar for several days.
One day, the nanny reported that Jews were being taken out of the ghetto and shot in the outskirts. It was decided to hide at the dacha. The commandant of the dacha settlement, Mankevich, knew the Sitermans well and hid Vera Solomonovna and Yasha under the steps of the porch of their own summer house. There they spent three days—in twenty-degree frost. At one point, their little dog Pushok (who had lived in Minsk for many years and, after the war began, remained at the dacha under Mankevich’s care) sensed his owners and tried to crawl under the porch. By ill luck, German soldiers were standing on the porch at that very moment, but Mankevich, who happened to be nearby, managed to distract them in time. Death passed very close…
Vera Siterman understood perfectly well: if they did nothing, their days were numbered—they could not rely forever on a lucky chance or on their guardian angel Maria, who was already risking her life for them again and again. What frightened her most was for Yasha: she desperately wanted her only son to survive…
However, without the help of trusted friends, it was impossible to get Yakov out of the ghetto. An acquaintance, the doctor Mikhail Vladysik, maintained contact with the partisan underground. He managed to forge a birth certificate, and Yakov Lazarovich Siterman became Yakov Kastusyevich Kharetsky, Maria’s son.
On 7 May 1942, the day of the escape came. At that time, Yakov was sent daily under guard outside the ghetto to clear rubble. His mother walked him to the boundary of the ghetto. Yakov recalls: “We embraced tightly and kissed each other goodbye. I remember her words for the rest of my life: ‘We will probably never see each other again. If you survive, go to Moscow, call your father’s friend, Professor Etinger. I think he will help you. Farewell—do not remember me unkindly.’” Before parting, his mother embraced him once more. As he was leaving, Yakov turned back: a lump rose in his throat, and his eyes filled with tears…
…Seizing the moment, the boy tore off the yellow badges and bolted. At the agreed place, his faithful nanny was already waiting for him.
That day, Maria and Yakov walked through a city whose squares and parks were lined with gallows. The nanny tried to keep him from looking at the horrifying sight, distracting him with conversation, but the swaying bodies were forever imprinted in the living memory of the child. Yakov remembered a nameplate on one of the executed: Ekelchik. He had studied for several years in the same class as his son, a kind and capable boy, and after lessons they often walked together…
Alas, Vera Siterman’s dark premonition proved true. She never saw her son again: she was killed in July 1942 during a horrific pogrom, in which the Nazis murdered about thirty thousand Jews. Yakov was left a complete orphan.
For more than two years, risking her life, Maria Kharetskaya hid the boy in a wooden house on the outskirts of Minsk. He hardly ever went outside—living in constant fear of being discovered…
But Yakov lived to see liberation. On 3 July 1944, units of the Red Army took Minsk by storm. The fourteen-year-old boy was finally able to come out of hiding and reclaim his real name.
And on 12 August 1944, on his fifteenth birthday, Yakov left Minsk for Moscow. In the capital, he stayed with a cousin of his mother’s. And, remembering his mother’s advice, he called Professor Etinger.
The outstanding cardiologist Yakov Gilyarievich Etinger was also a native of Minsk. His father and Yakov’s grandfather, Solomon Lifshits, had been close friends. Yakov Etinger was fluent in three foreign languages—German, French, and English—and had a deep knowledge of art and literature. He was distinguished by a freethinking spirit that was rare for the time: he remained non-party, was not afraid to express his views, listened to “enemy voices” (foreign radio broadcasts), and retold their content to acquaintances. The Etingers’ home was often visited by the outstanding Moscow Art Theatre actor Nikolai Khmelev, the celebrated ballerina Ekaterina Geltzer, well-known artists Nikolai Krymov and Sergey Malyutin, and the writer Alexander Yakovlev. Samuil Marshak presented the professor with his book of Shakespeare translations, inscribing it jokingly: “The sonnets reached the USSR across long centuries—thanks to Etinger, who treated Marshak.”
Professor Etinger and his wife, Revekka Konstantinovna Viktorova, also a physician, welcomed Yakov warmly and wholeheartedly. Soon they took him into their home, and in 1947 Yakov Gilyarievich and Revekka Konstantinovna officially adopted the young man. Thus Yakov Lazarovich Siterman became Yakov Yakovlevich Etinger. In time, Yakov’s nanny, Maria Kharetskaya, also came to live with the Etingers.
Yakov showed remarkable ability in his studies, with a particular passion for history. In 1948, he graduated from secondary school with a silver medal. However, as a Jew, he was not admitted to the full-time program of the History Faculty at Moscow State University, and instead became an external student. At the time, it seemed that, despite the difficulties, life was gradually improving. But new trials lay ahead.
Trouble struck in the autumn of 1950. On 17 October, a man in civilian clothes approached the young Yakov in the street, showed an identification card of a criminal investigation officer, and asked him to come along. The young man had no time to react before he was seized, forced into a car, and driven away. However, he was taken not to Petrovka, but to the Lubyanka. Thus Yakov once again became a prisoner.
The younger Etinger was charged with anti-Soviet activity and propaganda—allegedly, in 1945, he had listened to a Western radio broadcast in which poems by Akhmatova were read. Even more absurd was the investigator’s claim that Yakov’s nanny, Maria Kharetskaya, had collaborated with the Nazis: “It is unlikely that the police would not have noticed you leaving the column. Tell us truthfully how it really was. We have information that your nanny was a police agent, and that thanks to this you managed to escape.” The Chekists also arrested Maria Kharetskaya, but fortunately she was soon released under a travel restriction.
Yakov spent almost half a year in a solitary cell in Lefortovo Prison. Sleeping during the day was strictly forbidden, and at night he faced yet another interrogation. For weeks he was kept in handcuffs; several times he was placed in a punishment cell and brutally beaten with rubber truncheons, on which Yakov noticed a German stamp. At times, his interrogations were attended by the Deputy Minister of State Security himself, the notorious executioner Mikhail Ryumin. He would usually burst into the room and shout at Yakov: “We will strangle all of you Jews. We will show what we can do to you, you kike. What the Germans failed to finish with the Jews, we will finish. We will cleanse our land of Jews.”
A month later, the elder Etinger was arrested. Yakov Gilyarievich—a professor, head of a department at the Second Medical Institute, and a consultant to the Kremlin’s Medical Administration—became one of the victims of the monstrous provocation that went down in history as the Doctors’ Plot. The professor was forced to confess to the “criminal treatment of party and state leaders.” In Lefortovo Prison, he suffered twenty-nine (!) heart attacks, ten of them in the investigator’s office. On 2 March 1951, having returned to his cell after an interrogation, he “walked up to the table, took a bite of bread, took a few steps, and collapsed unconscious.” Even his closest relatives were not informed of his death at the time.
Yakov’s adoptive mother, Revekka Konstantinovna, also could not avoid arrest: she was accused of “failure to report her husband’s terrorist activity.” The elderly, ailing woman was beaten during interrogations, placed in a punishment cell, doused with ice-cold water, kept in handcuffs for days on end, and deprived of sleep. She was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment. In September 1954, Revekka Konstantinovna’s condition deteriorated sharply. Only then was the decision made to release her, although the case under which she had been convicted had been recognized as fabricated a year and a half earlier…
Yakov Etinger, meanwhile, was sentenced in 1951 to ten years in a special labor camp. He was first sent in transit to Kolyma, but from a transfer camp he was returned to Lefortovo: the Chekists were trying to extract from him testimony needed to fabricate the Doctors’ Plot. The young man faced another six months of exhausting interrogations accompanied by beatings. Yet even then he did not break: he categorically rejected all the charges. In March 1952, Yakov was sent back to a camp—this time to Vyatlag in the Kirov region, where he worked in logging.
Yakov knew almost nothing about his parents’ arrest or about the Doctors’ Plot in general—except what he could infer from the interrogations. He heard the TASS announcement about the “doctor-saboteurs” over a loudspeaker in the camp only on 13 January 1953. His father’s name was mentioned—though in reality he had already been dead for two years. Two months later, the prisoners greeted the news of Stalin’s death with jubilation: caps were thrown into the air, while the convoy commander shouted, “Stop immediately, or I’ll shoot every one of you, you bastards!”
In November 1954, Yakov was released from the camp “for lack of corpus delicti.” The Etingers’ property, including their apartment, had been confiscated—his mother and nanny lived with relatives, while Yakov himself stayed with friends. It took many years to obtain official confirmation of the rehabilitation of Yakov Gilyarievich Etinger, and the place of his final resting remained unknown. Yakov commemorated his adoptive father on the gravestone under which Yakov Gilyarievich’s mother was buried, in the Jewish section of Vostryakovskoye Cemetery. The inscription reads: “Professor Yakov Gilyarievich Etinger. Your grave is unknown, but your memory is eternal.” At the same cemetery lies Maria Petrovna Kharetskaya, with the words carved on her grave: “To our dear and beloved nanny. You are always with us.”
After his release, Yakov was reinstated at the History Faculty of Moscow State University, which he successfully graduated from in 1956. His entire subsequent academic career was connected with the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences (IMEMO). He joined the institute as a librarian but gradually rose to the position of chief research fellow, becoming a Doctor of Historical Sciences and a professor. Yakov Yakovlevich specialized in the problems of developing countries and interstate relations in Africa. He authored ten books and around five hundred articles, many of which were published abroad, and became an honorary member of seven foreign academies. Professor Yakov Yakovlevich Etinger never joined the Communist Party.
But the central work of Yakov Etinger’s life became the preservation of the memory of the tragedies he and those closest to him had endured. From the late 1980s, Yakov Etinger became actively involved in the human rights movement. In 1988, he was one of the organizers of Memorial, joining its organizing committee and first working board. He was co-chair of the Moscow Association of Victims of Political Repression and a member of the board of the “Moscow Tribune” club, created by Andrey Sakharov.
A special place in his work was devoted to preserving the memory of the Holocaust. He became one of the initiators of the creation, in 1990, of the Association of Jews—former prisoners of ghettos and Nazi concentration camps, and served as a member of its council. He also took part in the establishment of the scientific and educational center “Holocaust.” He delivered lectures at research centers in Western Europe, the United States, and Israel, as well as at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg.
In the 1990s, Yakov Etinger published numerous articles on the problems of Stalinism, political repression in the USSR, and antisemitism. He became one of the leading researchers of the Doctors’ Plot, publishing archival materials and testimonies. His articles appeared in Russia, the United States, Germany, England, France, Italy, Israel, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, and many other countries.
In 2001, Yakov Etinger’s memoir This Cannot Be Forgotten was published—a book in which he brought together the history of his family, the tragedy of the Minsk ghetto, and the Stalinist repressions. The professor consistently spoke out against the publication of antisemitic literature and against the revival of fascist and extremist organizations.
In 2002, in the journal Lechaim, Yakov Etinger published deeply moving recollections of his biological father. In doing so, he restored from oblivion the name of an outstanding physician and scholar, a sensitive and compassionate man whom the Nazis destroyed simply for being Jewish.
On 27 March 1997, an event took place that became, for Yakov Etinger, an act of restored justice. The commission of the Israeli national memorial to the Holocaust and Heroism, Yad Vashem, posthumously awarded Maria Petrovna Kharetskaya the title of Righteous Among the Nations. The name of this simple Belarusian woman is inscribed on the Wall of Honor in Jerusalem alongside those of the German industrialist Oskar Schindler, the Danish king Christian X of Denmark, and the Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg…
Yakov Yakovlevich Etinger died on 5 August 2014, a week short of his eighty-fifth birthday. He lived a long life—and what a life it was. It contained everything: a happy childhood in his parents’ home, the hell of the ghetto, the miracle of survival, the love and care of his adoptive parents, arrest, the camps, rehabilitation, academic achievement, and human rights work.
In one of his interviews, Yakov Etinger said: “I do not believe in God, but I believe in the human being. I have seen people who did evil, and people who did good. And I have come to understand: good is stronger.” These words are the key to understanding his life. He did not curse the world for the suffering he endured, but sought within it light and hope.
16.04.2026
Author: Mikhail Krivitsky
Translated by Lena Lores
Bibliography and Sources
1. Aspiz, M. The Fate of Two Etingers. Lechaim, 2001, no. 3. https://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/107/aspiz.htm
2. Zmachinskaya, N. F., Malkovets, M. V., Peresada, A. N. Heads of Departments and Professors of the Minsk Medical Institute (1921–1996): A Biographical Reference Book. Minsk, 1999.
3. Kostyrchenko, G. V. Stalin’s Secret Policy: Power and Antisemitism. Moscow, 2001.
4. Kostyrchenko, G. The Doctors’ Plot. Rodina, 1994, no. 7, p. 67.
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6. Russian Jewish Encyclopedia, vol. 3. Moscow, 1997.
7. Ryzhkova, D. A Prisoner Squared. Jewish.ru — Global Jewish Online Center.
8. Sakharov Center. Memoirs of the Gulag and Their Authors: Yakov Yakovlevich Etinger. https://www.sakharov-center.ru/asfcd/auth/?t=author&i=1467
9. Siterman, Lazar Yakovlevich. Belarusian Encyclopedia, in 18 vols. Minsk, 2002, vol. 14, p. 425.
10. The Black Book: The Nazi Crime Against the Jewish People, ed. by Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasily Grossman. Jerusalem, 1980.
11. Shumin, N. S. Lazar Yakovlevich Siterman (1892–1941). Zdravookhranenie, 2015, no. 12, pp. 76–78.
12. Etinger, J. J. The Life and Death of Professor Siterman. Lechaim, 2002, no. 10.
13. Etinger, J. J. This Cannot Be Forgotten: Memoirs, ed. by O. A. Zimarin. Moscow: Ves Mir, 2001. 272 p.
14. Etinger, J. J. A “Sick and Dangerous” Phenomenon: On Hatred Toward Jews Today. Lechaim, 2001, no. 10. https://www.lechaim.ru/ARHIV/114/etinder.htm
Yakov Etinger
1929 – 2014
