Anna Yankovskaya

You will be always remembered

Yankovskaya's bookshelf in her apartment. Behind the frame, she is talking about her mother Sophia, a Belorussian Jew, who had to flee their home in a suburb of Minsk after Nazi invasion of 1941. Her husband was killed. She rode on a horse carriage and walked on foot with her 8yr old son Boris and 2yr old daughter Anna in her left arm, her other arm torn off by an explosion. It was a journey of incredible peril, and these kids had no possessions but their mother. They were stopped by Nazis and released. At one point, Sophia's strength gave out. She wanted to end it all. She left Boris on the shore and walked into the water with Anna in her arm. Standing in the water, she decided to live.

They kept going east, boarded a train, and after many days made it to Tomsk, a city in Siberia, far from war. They were very poor, and Sophia was crippled. But at this point, nothing could break her anymore. She did everything from sewing to milking cows with her one arm, to make ends meet. She educated her kids. She had phenomenal memory and knew several languages, so eventually she started performing translating work, and writing texts. She was incredibly intelligent, and she passed her genes, her values and her love of knowledge to her daughter Anna, who became a renowned scientist, dedicating her life to education, and raising several generations of students.

Anna was a scientist all her life. She, too, had prodigious memory. She remembered over four hundred telephone numbers, and it was faster for her colleagues to ask her than to look them up in a telephone book. She was hyperthymic, "in a perpetual state of mild mania", sleeping four hours a day and working the rest of the time. During her life she published over eight hundred scientific papers. In the post-world war 2 era, Tomsk became a major research and university town. Anna was on the faculty lists of all five universities in Tomsk and taught students as a professor of computer engineering.

Her lifetime friends from the community, distinguished professors spanning universities from Tel Aviv to Boston, remember her as the "soul and moral authority of the entire scientific community", "ready to provide support to any colleague in a difficult situation", "retaining a naive, child-like, romantic attitude towards life", "often thinking about people much better than they deserve".

It is May 2021. Anna Yefimovna lives with her husband, who is nearly blind, and takes care of him; she keeps a glass of water in her 20-yr old microwave oven in case he accidentally turns it on. There is nothing fancy in the 4-bedroom apartment. It is all research and the archives. She proudly shows the cell phone given to her as a present by her grandson, her only living descendant. She has hundreds of photographs of him as a child, back from US, and during his one visit to Tomsk in 2002. Every wall is a shelf, there is barely any furniture except desks, every desk surface is covered with piles of scientific papers; under the desks, there are more paper stalagmites. She disavows money; she rejects it like oil rejects water. With her husband, they live on $500/month. In Russian there is a word "бессребренник", "holy unmercenary" that describes this attitude.

On July 1, 2021, Anna realized she had contracted COVID-19. She called a doctor. Nobody came. When her friends called the clinic, the clinic reported that the visit had already been made (false record: classical state clinic fraud). Two days later, Anna got into a taxi and went to the emergency room herself. The emergency room was full and the doctors suggested she sit on the floor. After spending the night there and not being seen, the honorary processor of computer science went back home. Two days later, her condition had gotten worse. Her friends called the ambulance and she was taken to a hospital. She died there on July 11, 2021 of complications. Some volunteers shipped medicine to her from the US, but it arrived too late. Her last text message to me was, "were you able to talk to my grandson?" She just wanted to know that she was not forgotten, that somebody would tell her story, like she told her mother's story. It fell to me to be that person.

Written by Alexei Lebedev.

The story of Anna Yankovskaya's mother Sophia appears in the first chapter of the book written by Lev Shtuden. It can be downloaded here. The book is in Russian; as far as I know, it hasn't been translated to English. The chapter name is "An Accidental Visitor to Earth."