Part Two: The Braverman Family 59
for not paying a bribe? The family searched
for him in vain in the Samarkand jails. Later
they were told Leib had been transferred to
Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, but no one
could tell them to which prison he had been
sent. Zina and Lyubov went to look for him,
but to no avail.
Aer the war, Rosa, who by that time had
returned to Moscow and enrolled in the
Economics University, managed to wrangle
om Koganovitch a release order for her
father as an elderly head of a large family. Why,
she asked, was this old man with two children
who fought for the Motherland treated so
badly? What was his crime? She immediately
rushed to the prison in Tashkent where the
papers stated he was located, but the warden
denied Leib was ever at the jail. They took her
papers and told her that Leib never existed.
They then confiscated the release letter.
Leib had vanished without a trace. It is
assumed that he disappeared into the Gulag,
where he is presumed to have died in 1943.
No one can be certain what happened to Leib
Braverman. To this day, archive research
has delivered no results. Disappearance is,
unfortunately, the fate of millions of Russians
consumed by the Gulag.
In addition to the grief that comes with the
loss of a loving father, the Braverman family
was doubly burdened by the fact that they
Above: Lyubov (le) and her iends in
Pavlovskiy Posad, 1949.
