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Arkady Shulman

CENTURY OF HIS LIFE

Grigory Moiseevich Pruss. 2010.

He is 98. He lives alone in a two-roomed apartment on the third floor. He uses a walking frame to move around his apartment. There’s no house intercom system and you have to call a neighbor to get in. But for a community care worker and a post card on the Victory Day from the military registration and enlistment office, he is hardly ever visited. His apartment has that musty smell of old age.

And it seems that he no longer lives in this world... But when I came to see him, he let me in, then was crossing back to his chair for three minutes, and, finally, sat himself on it, he immediately asked:

- Why don’t you use me? I still can lecture and tell about different interesting things.

He wants to be involved but hardly realizes that physically he is not strong enough.

Grigory Moiseevich Pruss was born in 1914 in Pukhovichi. Before the war he managed not only to graduate from the Minsk Medical Institute and complete a post-graduate course, but also to defend a PhD thesis “Chest wounds”. No one knew at the time that very soon he would have to test his research work almost daily in the war.

Grigory Pruss.
Pre-war photo.

Grigory Moiseevich served in the army from 1940. The photo of that time on the wall in his apartment shows him with no shoulder straps, no orders… He went through the war with his hospital till final victory. Colonel of Medical Service. He’s got the Order of the Red Star, the Order of the Patriotic War, medals.

His father, Moisei Pruss, died before the war. We can say that he was lucky. He didn't see the Nazis and policemen kill his wife and five children.

…After the war, Grigory Moiseevich continued to serve in the army, and then came to Vitebsk and began teaching at the Department of Physiology of the Vitebsk Medical Institute. He worked for almost forty years.

I wanted to talk with him about many things, but saw that it was hard for him to talk. We took pictures of the veteran and said goodbye.

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