The book “Memoirs of a Jewish Red Army Soldier” consists of two parts. The first is, in fact, the memoirs of one of the Soviet prisoners of war of Jewish nationality. The author himself, Leonid Isaakovich Kotlyar, entitled them “My soldier’s fate (Testimony of a harsh era).”

His fate was surprising, almost implausible. A nineteen-year-old Kiev boy with a distinctly Jewish appearance volunteered for the front in July 1941, and two months later was captured by the Nazis. He went through prisoner of war camps, lived in the territory of German-occupied Ukraine, was taken to Germany as an Ostarbeiter, was subjected to all sorts of checks several times and, having hidden his nationality for three and a half years, somehow miraculously survived. The first two chapters of the story are devoted to these events. In the third, the author describes what he had to endure before and after the Great Patriotic War. His life included the years of the New Economic Policy; famine of 1933-1934; the purge of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which his father went through; Stalin's SMERSH; the wave of anti-Semitism that swept the USSR in the post-war years (about which, it seems, no one has yet really written); "the doctors' case"; accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, next to which he found himself by the will of fate in the spring of 1986...

The second part of the book is an article by the famous Russian historian P. Polyan about the fate of the captured Jewish Red Army soldiers.