Abram Kraizman

Abram Kraizman was born in 1918 in Korosten, north Ukraine. In 1935 his family moved to Kiev, 140 kilometers to the east. Kraizman, who at this time had graduated from school, entered the Kiev Industrial Institute. After the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, he was drafted into the Red Army and sent to a school for military technicians. Three months later, he was sent to the Moscow Region, where the first "guards mortars," i.e. Katiusha rocket-launching units were formed. Kraizman became a military technician of the second class with the 15th Battalion of Guards Mortars.

As a technician supervising the first modern rocket artillery, Kraizman took part in the defense of Moscow and the subsequent counter-offensive of the Red Army from January to April 1942. He participated in the operation at the Kursk Salient in 1943, fought in Belorussia and in Karelia, in the north, and  in the forcing of Oder River in January 1945. He ended  the war in Wismar, Germany. Kraizman recollected how,  in 1943, the Katiusha rockets began to be mounted on a Lend-Lease Studebaker-US6 chassis instead of those of the Soviet-made ZIS-6 trucks, as a result of which  their maneuverability and reliability were greatly improved ("We have to be grateful to America and remember what she did for us during the war", Kraizman remarked in an interview he gave in 2008).

After the war, Kraizman was a member of the Soviet group that took over the German V-2 rocket-manufacturing facilities at Peenemünde and proceeded to move them to the Soviet Union. Later, as an engineer, he cooperated with Sergei Koroliov, the main brain implementing the Soviet space program of the 1950s-60s, working at the famous rocket testing grounds of Kapustin Iar.

In 1991 Kraizman emigrated. In the United States, he settled in Boston. Kraizman died in 2012.