Yankel Raikhlin was born in the town of Chausy near Mogilev in 1909, in a religious Jewish family. Before the Russian Revolution, he and his brothers attended a cheder, but it was closed down after the end of the Civil War. In 1925, Yankel's elder brother took him to Leningrad. There, Yankel worked at a factory, while studying at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute from 1932 to 1937. After graduating from it, he moved to Mogilev.
In June 1941, immediately after the outbreak of the Soviet-German War, Yankel became a frontline soldier. As captain of the supply corps, he served in a rifle division on the Northwestern Front, and took park in the battles for Moscow and Kursk (the famous "Kursk salient"), and in the liberation of the Baltic region. After being discharged, Yankel returned to Mogilev, where he became chief engineer at a factory.
In 1948, he was dismissed from his job, because he had given his father a traditional Jewish burial. Those were the years of the late Stalinist antisemitic campaign, which resulted in many Soviet Jews losing their jobs and being unofficially banned from certain posts. All manifestations of "Jewishness" were suppressed by the Soviet authorities. Yankel Raikhlin understood all too well what was going on, and he discussed the crimes being committed by the authorities against the Jews with his close friends. While working at the factory, he had employed Jews who had no other way to make a living. At the same time, he was closely following the events in Palestine, and greeted the establishment of the State of Israel with joy. In 1951, he was arrested and put in solitary confinement for six months. He was tortured by his investigators, but did not cave in to their demand to sign a confession of espionage for Israel. In 1952, he was sentenced to ten years of hard labor for “counterrevolutionary activity,” and sent to a camp in Vorkuta, north of the Arctic Circle.
After the death of Stalin in 1953, Yankel Raikhlin was released, and all charges against him were dropped for lack of evidence. He would always remember the day of his liberation, since it happened to be the day of Yom Kippur, which he was observing in the camp, together with the other Jewish inmates.
While he was away in Vorkuta, his family, too, had been hounded and persecuted. They were evicted from their apartment; his wife was threatened with dismissal, while his daughter was harassed at school as the daughter of an “enemy of the people.” Only with the death of Stalin did this persecution cease.
