Aron Zuses
Aron Zuses, or Zusis, was born in October 1924 in Novograd-Volynskii, northwestern Ukraine. After Aron's birth, his family moved to Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), Russia. He was 16 years old in June 1941, when the Soviet-German war began. Aron and his mother Gisia were evacuated to the mid-Volga region (central Russia), while his father and elder brother stayed in besieged Leningrad.
In mid-1942, not yet 18 years old, Zuses was conscripted into the Red Army. He was sent to the Morshansk machine-gun and mortar school, whose graduates were subaltern officers. However, when the situation at Stalingrad became dangerous in the fall of 1942, the cadets, who had not yet finished their studies, were sent to the front on the lower Volga.
"I did not regret for a moment that I arrived in Stalingrad without having been promoted to an officer rank" – recalled Zuses. "After my school life, service in a frontline unit seemed paradise. Here, there were no non-commissioned officers or cadets who fiercely hated the Jews; I did not have to hide my circumcised prick in the common bath. Life was different here, there was a different scale of values here, and you were tested by the most difficult thing at the front – physical exercise." [Kniga zhivykh: Vospominaniia ievreiev-frontovikov, uznikov getto i natsistskikh kontslagerei, boitsov partizanskikh otriadov, zashchitnikov blokadnogo Leningrada [The Book of the Living: Memoirs of Jewish Frontline Fighters, Prisoners of Ghettos and Nazi Concentration Camps, Partisan Fighters, Defenders of Besieged Leningrad], St. Petersburg, 1995, p. 324]. Aron recollected how, as a member of a machine-gun crew of four 18-year-old boys, one of them – he Zuses – dragged, without any road, kilometer after kilometer, a heavy Maxim machine-gun (weighing 66 kg), ten boxes of machine-gun ammunition (another 100 kg), and also personal weapons, ammunition, grenades, and the emergency rations.
Just on the day of the enemy's capitulation in Stalingrad in February 1943, Zuses was wounded. After his release from hospital, Zuses was sent to the North Caucasus, in the capacity of the commander of a unit. A short time after that, he was wounded again, this time more seriously. After a six-month stay in a military hospital in Georgia, Zuses was released on crutches and then he was dismissed from the army as a disabled veteran.
Aron's brother Mark Zuses fought on the Leningrad Front. He was awarded the "For the Defense of Leningrad" medal. After the war, he worked as a paramedic on an ambulance in Leningrad. He died in 1990 in Leningrad (St. Petersburg).
After the war, Aron Zuses entered the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute (now Polytechnic University), from which he graduated in 1951, and devoted himself to science: he worked at the Institute for Agrophysics and in 1968 defended his doctoral disseration. In 2001 Zuses left for Israel. He died in 2007 in Ramle, Israel and was buried in a cemetery in Lod.
Aron Zuses had three daughters. His daughter Tatiana Zuses and his granddaughter Anna Zinshtein are well-known St. Petersburg artists.
