Dora (Dvoira) Nemirovskaia

Dvoira Nemirovskaia was born in Odessa in 1923. When she was two years old, her mother died and her father Motl, an engineer, moved to Moscow. Dvoira lived in Moscow from 1926. Later her father remarried, to a woman who had a son from her first marriage. Motl adopted him and gave him his last name. Dvoira failed to establish good relations with her step-mother, but really loved her elder "adopted" brother Lev Nemirovskii. Lev was conscripted into the Red Army in the late 1930s, but was dismissed from service because of some medical problem with his legs. Later, when Dvoira was drafted for the military service, Lev, who lived separately from his family, learned about this and sent a letter to her at the front. He wrote that he was ashame that she was fighting and he was not. Despite his exemption from military service, Lev volunteered to join the Army and was accepted. He was killed near Smolensk, in western Russia, in 1943.

In June 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, together with other members of the Komsomol (Young Communist League) Dvoira appeared before  the district committee of the Komsomol and demanded  to be drafted into the Red Army. Instead, they were mobilized for work at various Moscow factories. Dvoira, whose Yiddish name had officially been changed to the more Russian-sounding Dora, was sent to the Krasnyi Proletarii military factory as a quality controller.

Nemirovskaia was drafted for military service as a nurse in May 1942, but got to the front only almost a year later. Just after she had arrived at a medical bunker there, she was lightly wounded and deafened by an artillery shell. Nevertheless, Dora continued to help the wounded soldiers. She later remarked   that there was something positive in losing her hearing: she could not hear the terrible screams of the wounded. Later her hearing was restored.

Nemirovskaia carried dozens of wounded soldiers – mainly men heavier than she was – from the battlefield, and cared for many dozens of others under enemy fire. The instructions for nurses ordered her to move in the battlefield only by crawling, but she recalled that when she heard the screaming of a wounded man, she stood up and ran across the field. She remarked that the Lord in heaven must have decided that she was going to survive.

In June 1944, west of Minsk, Nemirovskaia took part in an infantry attack and was seriously wounded. After a long stay in a military hospital, she was transferred to another division as a typist at the HQ. She ended the war on the island of Rügen in Germany.

Nemirovskaia was awarded two military orders – the Order of Glory and the Order of the Red Banner. However, the Soviet authorities refused to recognize her as a war invalid, thus refusing her the benefits and rights due to such invalids. After the war, she began working as a school teacher, but then turned to journalism. She married and had a son.

In 1990 Nemirovskaia emigrated, settling in Tel Aviv. She died in 2014.