Interview with Levon Ohanian
I sit down in an apartment, waiting for Levon Ohanian to come out of the bathroom. He came from Russia, and worked in the German trenches when he was captured. Now he limps and walks with a cane, fading away from the strong man he used to be.
I was born in the city Kerch in the Crimea peninsula. It's a really nice city about 3000 years old, and it used to belong to the Greeks and Romans. After about seven years old, I went to a Russian school. When I finished the school, I went to higher school to learn mechanical engineering, but I could not finish it because the war had started. I was sent off to work for steel company, where there were 20,000 people working already. There they showed us how to make iron, how they making steel, things like that.
If you fight in school or workplace, you would get sent to jail for one year, and it was very strict. The working conditions were not good sixty to seventy years ago, but we managed to do something.
My family was big, really big, let's say about seven people. My mother and father and five children. I was the oldest one of the whole family, and we had a lot of relatives. The Armenian community in our city was about 3000 people, and they all was refugees from Turkey. My father worked for himself, he used to ride carriages. We were not rich, only higher echelon communist people were rich.
After everything they sent us to factories to work for the war effort, and I was getting 350 rubles a month, and at that time you can live with that money. Most working people were quiet for they were scared of being sent to jail, or even Siberia.
Everyone in the city had pictures of Lenin, Marx, Stalin, because you had to have them. In 1936, the teacher made us go and watch a movie about Stalin, and I ask is this good movie? And she said shut up and watch. Children ran away from the movie, and it was a really bad movie. We had many newspapers, and most of them were controlled by government. Once I bring Pravda to my father and he asked what this is? Pravda is no good, don't bring me Pravda.
I was twenty-two years old when they take me to Germany, and they took me to the front. We had to make trenches there, and I pity the younger people. At the time we used to live in a cement house with 200 other people, and walked two miles to the trenches, and we barely had time to sleep. One time I was sent to fix the keys of this man, and he gave me food, and I knew something was wrong. So I ask him what is wrong. And he say's that his fourteen year old son was sent to war, and I could not eat. I was lucky that I was not sent to fight as I was hard of hearing since I was a little child.
After 1945, they let us go because they had lost the war already. From there I went to Stuttgart until the Americans liberated it there. From Germany, the Americans took us to New York; from there I went to Detroit, and from Detroit I went to Los Angeles, where I am today.
Interviewed By Shahan Boghigian