Chaim Multianer was born in 1916 in Ananiev, north of Odessa in Ukraine. In the late 1930s he graduated from the Kharkov Automobile and Highway Institute (now the Automobile and Highway University), in Eastern Ukraine, with a specialization in roads and bridge construction. In April 1941, students of the last year in the Institute were mobilized for military construction work (roads, airfields, etc.) in "Western Ukraine" (formerly Eastern Poland that was annexed to the Soviet Union in September 1939), close to the new Soviet-German border, where Multianer was stationed when Germany invaded the Soviet Union.
The Red Army retreat of the summer of 1941 brought him to Kharkov. Multianer made a great effort to obtain leave from his service as military engineer to defend his engineering diploma at the Kharkov Institute and succeeded in receiving his diploma on the day of the first enemy air raid on Kharkov, in September 1941.
In October 1941 Multianer was drafted into the Red Army. He was assigned to accompany one thousand recently drafted Don Cossack recruits from Rostov-on-Don to the area of Stalingrad (in southern Russia). The young draftees were quite antisemitic and, probably, only the fact that the draftees were traveling through the Don Host lands, their "Mother Country" and began to desert saved Multianer's life. After arriving in the Stalingrad Region, Multianer was sent to an officers' course. Three months later, during the second Red Army retreat, the cadets were marched, with all their equipment 12-14 hours a day – to the left, eastern bank of the Volga River. There the cadets were promoted to the rank of lieutenant and sent to the front. Multianer requested that he be assigned, according to his military training, as a builder of pontoon bridges rather than a common infantry officer. After his superiors consented, Mutianer began his frontline career as a constructor of temporary bridges, and as a sapper, whose assignment was sometimes to destroy the very bridges he had built.
After the Stalingrad operation, which ended in February 1943, Multianer built makeshift railroads through the North Caucasus, temporary bridges in the Rostov-on-Don area, pontoon bridges and temporary crossings during the battle for the Crimea in 1944, and demined bridges in Hungary in 1945 – all under enemy bombing and shelling. Toward the end of the war, Captain Efim Multianer was awarded two military orders: that of the Red Star and that of the Patriotic War, 2nd Class. After VE-Day, he was transferred to China, where he fought against the Japanese Kwantung Army. He ended the war in Mukden, in northern China as the head of a pontoon-building battalion.
In 1976, Chaim Multianer emigrated from the USSR and settled in Canada.
