Evgenii (Henekh) Inzburg was born in 1920 in Kherson, Ukraine. He began his military service in 1939.
After the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, during the German offensive in the South in the summer of 1942, Inzburg was attached to the 1st Training Battalion of the 15th Infantry Division, where he was trained to be an anti-tank marksman. On 28 June 1942, in the Orel region, where he was head of a 3-man unit, the three of them received the order to stop a massive German tank column that was attempting to outflank his battalion. Inzburg and his two men had one anti-tank rifle.
With his first shot Inzburg succeeding hitting the gasoline tank of the first enemy tank. His second shell hit the ammunition stores of another enemy tank and that tank exploded. After that, Inzburg aimed at the enemy tank that, once it was disabled, would block the advance of the rest of the column. This took several shots. After Inzburg set two other enemy tanks on fire, the German column turned back.
The front newspaper "For the Defeat of the Enemy" hailed this deed in two reports: in a short one on July 6, 1942 and in an editorial on July 7, 1942 "The Heroic Antitank Shooter Inzburg". The newspaper wrote: "Fight like Inzburg, and the enemy will not be able to move one step forward on our soil!" The Russian Jewish poet Iakov Khelemskii wrote the poem "A Word about a Hero" in praise of Inzburg.
However, although Inzburg was awarded the highest Soviet honor, the Order of Lenin, he was promoted only to the rank of sergeant.
After the war, Inzburg settled in Nikolaev, Ukraine.
Ia. Vainshmidt, who prepared an article on Inzburg for Eynikayt, wrote the following:
"I spoke with him in the aftermath of this battle. I glanced at his swarthy noble face and sad dark eyes; I looked at his black curly hair that stuck out from under his soldier's cap, and at his thin hands with the long fingers of a musician. […] He warned me:
– Don't ask me, Comrade Captain, about my relatives or my home. Nothing remains of them. Now my relatives are those who are here around me. My home is my trench and my bunker.
[Thus,]I failed to learn about his parents, where he was born, and where and what he had studied before the war…"
From: GARF 8114-1-17, pp. 29-34, copy YVA JM/26077
