Lev Markovich
Lev Markovich was born in 1925 in Rudnya (Smolensk Oblast). In the mid-1930s, the family moved to Leningrad.
Before the war, Lev's father, Yankel, was the administrator of a small store that sold a variety of products, including alcohol and beer. Beer yeast would later save the family from starving to death in besieged Leningrad.
At the time of the outbreak of the Soviet-German War in late June 1941, the 16-year-old Lev was learning to drive at the DOSAAF (Volunteer Society for Cooperation with the Army, Aviation, and Navy). In autumn 1941, he received his license, and was then recruited into the Red Army as a driver, despite not yet being 18.
By that time, Leningrad was already under siege. The only access route to the city was the "Road of Life" – an ice road across the frozen Lake Ladoga, which connected Leningrad with the outside world. Lev Markovich evacuated civilians from the city along that route. His working conditions were very harsh: in the bitter winter cold, the vehicles had to move at night to avoid attracting attention; their headlights were muffed with blue filters, limiting visibility to two meters; the drivers of the plywood military trucks had to leave the doors of their compartments open throughout the ride, to be able to escape should the vehicle sink through the ice (in such a situation, closed doors meant certain death, since they froze to the frame of the driver's compartment, and could not be opened in time).
Almost every night, Lev Markovich would ferry the starving, half-dead civilians (most of them women, children, and elderly individuals) in the body of his truck under enemy bombs. According to the rules, the drivers were also required to unload the dead bodies at the end of each trip (usually, only about a half of the evacuees would reach their destination alive). By the next evening, the truck would be loaded with supplies, and the return trip back to besieged Leningrad would begin. The drivers had to work seven days a week for as long as the ice held (i.e., until May 1942).
In January 1943, the Siege of Leningrad was broken (it would not be fully lifted until January 1944). Lev Markovich was then transferred to an artillery battalion of the 1st Baltic Front, where he also served as a driver. He participated in the liberation of Pskov and the northern regions of Belarus and Latvia. He met V-E Day in Riga.
After the end of the war, Lev returned to Leningrad, where he completed a school for dental technicians. After a brief stint as a dental technician, he began to study at the Faculty of Dentistry of the First Leningrad Medical Institute. After graduating, Markovich worked as a dentist at a clinic, while also teaching at a school for dental technicians.
Lev Markovich immigrated to Israel in December 1994, being gravely ill, and died two weeks after the move. He is buried in Ashdod.
