Allan Appel Photo
Nina Khlystova and Ralph Friedman
She was a nurse at the front. He was an interpreter for the generals. She has lived at Tower One/Tower East for 15 years; he moved in just two days ago. They met for the first time at the assisted living complex Tuesday afternoon, as veterans of World War Two joined survivors to mark “Yom HaShoah,” or Holocaust Remembrance Day.
In New Haven those veterans are likely to include people like Nina Khlystova and Dr. Ralph Friedman, who both served not in the American army but the Russian.
“If we had no veterans, we’d have no survivors,” said Doris Zelinsky, the president of the Greater New Haven Holocaust Memory, Inc.
Zelinsky was joined by veterans and about 28 Holocaust survivor. Perhaps a dozen live at the Tower One/Tower East senior complex near the train station. The balance who live in the Greater New Haven area.
Helene Rosenberg and Doris Zelinsky (right)
Zelinsky (pictured right with survivor Helene Rosenberg) said her mother was not only rescued from the Nazis by an American soldier — that is, a veteran to be — but the soldier, a non-Jew from Ohio, took it upon himself to arrange for her ultimately to find refuge in the United States.
Tuesday’s annual Holocaust commemoration events included an official proclamation brought by Board of Aldermen President Carl Goldfield (pictured with Rosenberg and survivors Mary Deutsch and Bina Fenig).
Holocaust Remembrance Day used to be held at the Holocaust Memorial at West Park and Whalley avenues. Now it has shifted to Tower One/Tower East; the presence Tuesday of a good number of people on walkers and not a few accompanied also by small melon-shaped oxygen tanks sufficed for explanation as to why.
Of the veterans and survivors both, Zelinsky said, “They’re the same age.”
Through her friend and translator Lucy Kleyman, also a Russian army veteran, Nina Khlystova said that she served as a nurse in a hospital right behind the fighting on what she described as the third Belarussian front.
Friedman, who went on to become a well-established oral surgeon in Hamden and a New Haven police commissioner, served with the partisans and then with the Russian army.
He said he spoke seven languages and therefore served as interpreter for the Russians.
“I was in Berlin two days after Hitler committed suicide. The things I could tell you!” he said.
Tower One/Tower East’s Marketing Director Rebecca Olshansky confirmed that at other events commemorating Russian veterans, including occasions marking their victory over the Nazis in the East (as opposed to western Allies’ V‑E Day), the complex’s spacious party room is overflowing.
People appear in their uniforms decorated with row upon row of medals.
She said the number of Russians moving into Tower One/Tower East is also growing.
Friedman and Khlystova exchanged some brief conversation, in Russian of course.
