Double executed Odessa citizen Boris Pivenshtein / Memory evening

Hanged by the Nazis, shot by the Stalinists.       Odessa Boris Pivenshtein, twice executed.       Rehabilitated.              At 15:00, an event will be held in the Odessa Literary Museum dedicated to the memory of the undeservedly forgotten and slandered pilot Boris Pivenshtein.              Odessa Boris Pivenshtein was one of the legendary pilots who took part in the rescue of the crew of the ship "Chelyuskin", crushed by polar ice in 1934. In the prewar years, stories about this feat beyond his authorship were published in numerous collections and individual publications, and he himself was awarded the Order of the Red Star. It seemed that the Jewish boy, a native of Odessa slums, guaranteed a brilliant career. With the outbreak of war, he, already with the rank of lieutenant colonel, commanded an air regiment. But fate decreed otherwise ...              In 1943, Pivenstein’s plane was shot down during the fighting in the Donbass. The pilot was captured. In May 1944, the Gestapo delivered him to the Stutthof concentration camp, where he was hanged ...       But the story of Boris Pivenshtein did not end with this terrible event. Eight years after his death, by a decision of the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR of April 4, 1952, he was sentenced in absentia to death with the deprivation of military rank and awards, as a traitor — defector, spy.In 2017, evidence was found that Boris Pivenstein was executed by the Germans in 1944. It was established that the day before his death in the concentration camp of Stutthof, Pivenstein met a prisoner Yuri Tsurkan-Odessa, also a military pilot who had known him since 1937. Turcan returned alive from captivity. In his autobiographical book, The Last Circle of Hell, he wrote that Pivenstein was never a collaborator. Moreover, it is testified that the Gestapo transferred Pivenstein to Stutthof for the purpose of execution. Turcan managed to talk with Pivenstein only a few minutes.              Wanda Turcan, researcher, daughter of Yuri Turcan (author of The Last Circle of Hell, dedicated to the fate of Boris Abramovich) for a long time dealt with the rehabilitation of the pilot, and at the end of 2019 received information that he was a rehabilitator back in 1997, after which the relevant documents were transferred to archives.              At a meeting in the Literary Museum, archival documents will be presented for the first time, proving that Boris Pivenstein was executed in the Stutthof concentration camp, and also explanations are given for forty archival documents in a statement about his rehabilitation.       Thus, the good name of the unfairly defamed Odessa hero Boris Pivenstein will be restored.              Free admission