Liuba Sheinina

Liuba Sheinina was born into a Jewish family in the town of Svisloch, Belarus in 1901. Prior to the war she worked as a surgeon at a hospital in Rostov-on-Don. On June 23, 1941, the day after the outbreak of war, Liuba Sheinina volunteered to join the Red Army. From September she served as a surgeon and head of the medical staff of the Infantry Division Field Hospital. Her only son - Mikhail (Misha), who was called up to the Red Army at the beginning of the war, served as a pilot and was killed apparently during a combat mission.

On February 21, 1942 Liuba Sheinina was awarded the medal for Combat Merit for her devotion as a military doctor and a surgeon. In May 1943 Captain Liuba Sheinina, then commander of the surgery-dressing platoon of the Medical-Sanitation Battalion of the Infantry Division, was awarded the Order of the Red Star.

An article "The Surgeon Liuba Sheinin," that was written by Shlomo Rabinovich for the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee's newspaper Eynikayt and published there on September 16, 1943, describes Liuba's devotion and professionalism, for which she was awarded a further medal.

During the Red Army offensive in East Prussia (January-April 1945) Liuba Sheinina (then a commander and a surgeon of the surgery-dressing platoon of the Medical Sanitation Battalion No.128) successfully performed over 100 varied life-saving operations. The medical personnel under her command operated on or provided medical assistance to approximately 3,000 wounded Red Army soldiers and officers, thus attaining a low level of mortality among the casualties. During the course of the war 646 blood transfusions were carried out under the supervision of Sheinina. She herself donated about 7 liters of blood. For these achievements on May 23, 1945 she was awarded the Order of The Patriotic War, 1st class.

While serving as a military doctor and surgeon, Sheinina also managed to carry out scientific research. One of her studies was highly regarded by the prominent Soviet-Jewish scientist Lina Shtern, a biochemist and physiologist who had served as a member of the Women's and Jewish Anti-Fascist Committees since 1942 (and was the only one of those accused in the JAC trial who was not executed).