Leonid Sonkin

Listen to your teachers. Your teachers always wish for you the best. Don’t rush ahead to be an older person. Be as beautiful as you are today. Now is the best time in your life.

Leonid Sonkin

My name is Leonid Sonkin. I was born June 5, 1931 in the Ukraine. World War II began in 1941. I was in the second grade. My father, Simon, went into the Red Army to fight the Nazis. In August 1941, he was killed in a huge battle.

When the Nazis invaded our city, my mother, sisters, and I were evacuated to work in Siberia. My mom, Gitta, worked day and night. I babysat my little sisters until 1943. When I turned twelve, I, too, went to work in the factory. There were a lot of kids working there. We put boxes under our feet to work, because we were so short. All of us slept, ate, and worked in that factory.

When the war ended we came back to the Ukraine. Everything was destroyed. The Nazis killed my grandparents. They put huge stones around their necks and lined them up along the river with other Jewish people; kids, babies, children, old people, everybody. That memory is kept. Even though sixty years have passed, not even a soul will swim in that river.

In 1950, I graduated from college to be a chemical engineer. After graduation, I went into the Red Army. I served on the Iranian border for four years as a guard. During that time parents from Iran were trying to get across to visit their children living in Azerbaizhan. What can you do? You don’t want to shoot them. So I would sometimes just let them go.

We were living in socialism. When I married in 1956 my wife and I received one room to live in. When our son was born we were given one more room. I was in the communist party for forty years. I had to be, because if I wasn’t I couldn’t get work. In the Soviet Union I couldn’t practice Judaism. People were afraid to because the communist system is atheist. To be a Jew was to be looked down upon.

I came to the United States in January of 1993. The Soviet Union began to disintegrate. I came here for a better quality of life. People in America are the same nice people as people are all over the world. When I came to America I had my legs, but they were very sick. They started to get sick when I worked as a child in Siberia. My legs got very cold because there wasn’t heat in the factory. I got gangrene. After I arrived in the United States I lost one leg completely and in the other leg I lost my foot.

I have two sons living here in Minnesota, Boris and Dmitri. I have two grandsons, Eugene and Mark. One grandson is now serving in the United States military. He is driving a tank in Iraq. My wife died in the Ukraine in 1989. I married a second time, two years ago, to a Russian woman named Rimma. She would come with her daughter to clean my apartment. We fell in love. I proposed to her. You’re never too old for love.