Abram Radomyselskii was born in 1913 in Kherson, southern Ukraine. His father Kiva was a metalworker who later became the manager of a metalware shop; he died in 1921. In the 1920s, Abram’s extended family (including the family of his mother, the Kashepavas) moved to Baku, Azerbaijan. In 1928, he entered a professional technical school (FZU), finishing it as a metal lathe operator. He went on to work at a car repair factory. In 1933, Radomyselskii was drafted into the Red Army and sent to the Moscow Tank Technical School, which he finished in 1937 as a military technician, 2nd rank (equivalent to a lieutenant). He began his military service in Proskurov (present-day Khmelnytskyi), Ukraine, in the 23rd Tank Brigade of the Red Army. With this brigade, he took part in the Soviet invasion of Poland on September 17-19, 1939, and in the Soviet annexation of the Romanian provinces of Northern Bukovina and Bessarabia in 1940.
At the beginning of the Soviet-German War, Radomyselskii served as deputy commander of a company of the 12th Tank Division (the former 23rd Tank Brigade) in the newly annexed Western Ukraine. On the fifth day of the war, June 26, 1941, he was wounded and shell-shocked during the abortive Red Army counter-offensive near Brody. In August 1941, the decimated 12th Tank Division retreated to Nezhin, eastern Ukraine. In September, Radomyselskii took part in the defense of Dnepropetrovsk (present-day Dnipro), Ukraine.
In February 1942, against the backdrop of the Soviet counter-offensive from Moscow, Radomyselskii was sent to the Moscow Academy of Tank and Mechanized Military Forces. However, that summer he was transferred from the Academy to the 9th Separate Tank Corps, which was operating on the Western Front of the Soviet theater of war. In his memoirs, Abram Radomyselskii notes that there were many Jews in the 9th STC. With this Corps, serving as the commander of its 102nd Mobile Repair Base, he took part in the Kursk Salient operation in July-August 1943, and later, in fall 1943, in the crossing of the Dnieper River in the vicinity of Loiev, southeast Belorussia. In 1944, he took part in the liberation of Belorussia. Only there, as Abram admits in his memoirs, did he and his Jewish comrades begin to grasp the magnitude of the loss of Jewish life at the hands of the Nazis. After August 1944, Radomyselskii saw action in Poland; in February 1945, he set foot on German soil. From 1944 on, he was commander of the Automobile Department of the 9th Tank Corps, holding the rank of major.
In March 1945, Radomyselskii was wounded. Eager to take part in the takeover of Berlin, he escaped from the hospital on the fifth day – only to find himself in another hospital. In April 1945, his 9th Tank Corps entered Berlin from the northeast. It was in this city that Radomyselskii met V-E Day.
Abram Radomyselskii was awarded seven military orders, four of them during the war, and a number of medals.
His memoirs, written in 1992, are now deposited in the Yad Vashem Archives.
