Letters from the North. War at the Arctic Circle, 1941 – 1944

Translator Evgeny Shafirovich

Compiler Evgeny Shafirovich

© Yakov Shafirovich, 2025

© Evgeny Shafirovich, translation, 2025

© Evgeny Shafirovich, compiler, 2025

ISBN 978-5-0065-6375-9

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

This book is a collection of letters sent by my father to his mother and other relatives during World War II. He was drafted into the Red Army on May 24, 1941, about one month before his 19^>th birthday and the German invasion of the Soviet Union. He was a well-read guy and a member of a drama club in his hometown Noginsk, near Moscow. It should be noted that despite the arrest of his father as a “Polish spy” in 1938, at that time he certainly was a “true believer,” according to Sharansky’s classification of people living under a totalitarian regime. During the war, he was on the Karelian front. Until June 1944, he was at the Arctic Circle, near Kandalaksha, where they defended the railroad that connected Murmansk, a strategic port on the Barents Sea, to the rest of the country. Although the German and Finnish troops failed to reach their goals and the general situation there could be described as “all quiet on the Western Front,” he was wounded twice. In June 1944 he was transferred to the south, specifically to the southern bank of the Svir River near Lake Ladoga, where a large-scale offensive against the Finnish troops just began. There he was soon wounded the third time and, after a long recovery, discharged from the military. He came back home on November 28, 1944. Soon after, he began to work as an assistant electrician and to study electrical engineering while working full time. Then he worked as an electrical engineer until retirement. He died on May 2, 1995, a few days before the 50^>th anniversary of the end of war in Europe.

I think his letters are rather interesting because, as he noted a few times, he wrote everything he thought. All available letters are published without any omissions. American English was used in the translation, except for the dates. Many thanks to Luba Shafirovich for her help with translating to English.

This book presents letters written by my father Yakov Volfovich Shafirovich in the period from May 1941 to November 1944. Most letters were addressed to his mother Olga Nikolaevna Shafirovich and her sister Nadezhda (Nadya) Nikolaevna Soboleva, who both lived in the city of Noginsk, Moscow Region, at house No. 96 on Rogozhskaya Street.1 They stored these letters. In the last years of his life (he died on 2 May 1995), my father sorted them out and put them in large notebooks, obviously for better preservation. In 2018, I read and scanned the letters, after which I decided that they might be of interest to other people as well. Despite his young age (18—22 years old), Yakov wrote, it seems to me, quite well, and the reader will find there many interesting details about the life of people under the extreme conditions of the front and the Arctic Circle. At the same time, as he noted himself, he wrote everything he thought, without embellishment. Also interesting are his reflections on the “Hamlet’s question” that arose periodically – to agree to be trained for becoming an officer and thereby reduce the likelihood of death, at least for the duration of his training, or to disagree but to have the opportunity to become an engineer after the war (if not killed).

To make it easier to understand the letters, it is necessary to give a little information about the family in which my father grew up. Olga Nikolaevna was born in 1887 in the family of Nikolai Ivanovich Sobolev and Anna Grigorievna Soboleva. They lived in the city of Bogorodsk (renamed Noginsk in 1930), in a house opposite the Epiphany Cathedral on Tsarskaya (now Rabochaya) Street. Her first husband’s name was Sergei Balashov, and she had two children from him – Olga (Lyalya) and Sergei. During the war, Olga Nikolaevna sewed soldiers’ uniforms on a Singer sewing machine, which still exists (I did my homework using the top of this sewing machine as a desk when I was in elementary school).

Volf Lazarevich Shafirovich was born in 1885 in the town of Volpa, Grodno province. In 1915, because of the war, he was evacuated to Bogorodsk, where he worked as an accountant in a chemical workshop, and in 1920 he married Olga Nikolaevna. Yakov was born on 26 June 1922 in Bogorodsk. Since 1936, Volf worked in the supply department at Akrikhin plant. In 1938, he was “taken away” as people said that time. I knew from my father that Volf was arrested on the 18^>th of March, the day of the Paris Commune (thanks to which I remember both the day of his arrest and the day of that Commune). He was accused of spying for Poland and shot on 13 August 1938 in Butovo.2 Relatives were informed that Volf received ten years without the right to correspond. He was rehabilitated posthumously in 1958.

Despite these circumstances, Yakov was brought up in the spirit of Marxist-Leninist ideology and was an active Komsomol member, and during the war he joined the Party. Later on, his worldview changed. I remember he told me that while dealing with the letters he read them and was surprised at his naivety.