Khanon Laskov
Khanon Laskov was born in 1923 in Kharkov. From the time he was a child he liked to draw. After finishing school in his native town, he worked together with his twin brother Petr as a lathe-operator at a factory. At the beginning of the Soviet-German war, they were evacuated with their factory and their parents to the Urals, in the Soviet interior. Khanon and Petr were drafted into the Red Army and sent to infantry school in Sverdlovsk. However, two months later without finishing the school, they were both sent to Stalingrad, where there ended up in different units.
In the course of a month Laskov took part in the battle of Stalingrad, where the fighting was for every house and street. He was wounded in the chest by a fragment but, after lying for some time in one of the cellars which was set up as a field hospital, he returned to the ranks. At this time he made sketches of many soldiers and officers. When he recovered further, he participated in one of the groups of five men who fought from house to house. Toward the end of his first month in Stalingrad he was again wounded, this time in the hand, but right after being bandaged up, he returned to combat and was wounded again, this time seriously, in the head. He was evacuated to the Urals and spent half a year in hospital. For his fighting in Stalingrad Laskov was awarded the Medal for For Valor and the Medal For the Defense of Stalingrad.
After being invalided out of military service, he worked in the Urals as an accountant at a mine. However, he was soon recalled to the army and sent to guard supplies that were being sent to the front by train. For the next two years, until the very end of the war, he served in that capacity. The trains were often fired upon from the air there were frequent attempts to loot the them, including by armed Ukrainian and Polish nationalist groups. If the guards lost the supplies, they were sent to punishment battalions, which meant certain death. Many of the soldiers who were guarding these trains were killed.
For some time Khanon's twin brother served as a guard for one of the Soviet generals at Stalingrad. After being wounded, Petr died in hospital in February 1944. Their older brother, Miron, was a tank officer and went missing in action in August 1944.
After Khanon Laskov was demobilized in 1946, he returned to Kharkov. With great difficulty he succeeded in getting back his prewar apartment and then began to work as an artist at an art product factory. After completing a three-year course, he worked as a designer. Toward the end of his professional career he worked as a main artist for films and the circus.
In an interview given in 2008 to The Blavatnik Archive Foundation (Number in archive IS051) Khanon stated that until the mid-1980s he was ignorant of the fact that his cousin Chaim Laskov had been chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Forces in the 1960s. Khanon had not known this because in the 1930s and during the war years his father had not mentioned relatives then living in Palestine. After the breakup of the USSR Khanon Laskov moved to Israel.
