War Hits Home: Kiev - Early Days of Barborossa                                                                                                   -June to July 1941- Told by Isaak Kobylyanskiy

Soviet, Isaak Kobylyanskiy was 18 years old when the Axis invaded his country on June 22, 1941. At the time of the invasion, Kobylyanskiy was attending the Kiev Industrial Institute, in his hometown in Ukraine, as a freshman. Just three years earlier, Germany and the Soviet Union had signed a non-aggression pact.

“I had an unfavorable sense of Germany at that time,” Kobylyanskiy remembers. Hitler’s invasions of neighboring nations and violent persecutions of Jews and Slavs reinforced Kobylyanskiy’s hatred for fascism.  Like many Soviets, he still believed that Nazism was ‘the most unconcealed and frenzied form of imperialism’ even though Stalin, their leader who said that, had since then formed a “friendship” with Hitler. While he was critical towards his own government’s foreign and domestic policies, Kobylyanskiy stayed a faithful Soviet patriot.

Kiev, Ukraine - June 22, 1941

“The next morning, without talking things over with anyone and without letting my parents and my sweetheart Vera know, I went to my local military registration and enrollment office to enroll voluntarily in the frontline forces. I wrote in my application that I was good in the German language, and I had already been awarded all of the four defense badges…          When I approached the familiar building, I saw that the courtyard of the office was crowded with hundreds of people. There were a few long lines leading to different departments. I found quite a long line of volunteers and joined it. … After two hours of waiting, my turn came, and I entered a small room. A low-ranking officer greeted me with a handshake, read my application, expressed sincere gratitude, and ordered me to wait for my call-up papers.”

Kobylyanskiy continued his summer examinations at the institute the next day but due to the threat of air raids, it was held in the basement.  He received a B instead of his usual A.

“After the first few hours of the war, the appearance of Kiev changed substantially. According to the stringent directives of the house management, all tenants glued their windows over with strips of paper in the form of two large “X” on each part of the window. Alongside many of the buildings one could see sacks of sand. When it was dark, everyone had to curtain off all windows so that no ray of light could make their way through. All the street lighting was off. The headlights of  streetcars, buses, and other vehicles were equipped with midnight blue lamps. The owners of any kind of radio receivers had to deliver their sets to the post offices immediately and keep the receipt.”

Locals cleaned out grocery stores, leaving them empty, while spy-mania and rumors swept the city. On June 25, Kobylyanskiy was commissioned to guard the dormitory’s roof at evenings from 6 p.m. to midnight:      “For all five evenings of my duty nothing dangerous happened either there or in the nearby area. Every time a siren sounded on “Air-raid warning,” I immediately ascended to the roof of the building. But only a few times I did see remote rays of searchlights and flashes of anti-aircraft guns fire or explosions of German bombs. Usually, after about a ten minutes a signal, ‘All clear’  was heard. Probably, German bombers were ordered to bomb other places. In Kiev the bridges across the Dnieper River were their main targets. "

From the very beginning of the war, I expected to hear soon about the Red Army’s successful actions. But the reports made by our headquarters were completely obscure. Within less than a week after the war started, some less seriously injured Red Army men appeared on the streets, and many refugees from the western Ukraine (almost all of them were Jews from Poland) showed up at the railroad station. That was a good reason for me to take a more sober view of the frontline situation.”

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