This interview is about Aleksandr Milenkiy. Aleksandr was born in 1925 in Minsk, Belarus. Aleksandr volunteered in the Red Army Infantry to fight Nazi Germany in the fall of 1942 at age 17 and participated in the big Battle of Kursk in the summer of 1943. In October of 1943 he was captured by Germans, after being wounded crossing the Dnieper river under enemy fire. He was then imprisoned in Sachsenhausen, where he joined an international resistance group opposed to the Nazis. In April, 1945 he was liberated by the US Army during a forced march. Aleksandr came to the US from Belarus in 1992 and died in Shorewood, Wisconsin June 14, 2019. He was 93.
Descendants Stuff podcast is produced by Jakob Feisthauer, Kelsey Snook and Nicole Wines – three descendants of Sachsenhausen prisoners and co-creators of the Sachsenhausen Stuff project.
The Descendants Stuff team would like to extend a special thank you to the team at Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum especially Dr. Astrid Ley, and the members of the educational department’s project “What Voice Do We Have?”, as well as the descendant’s collective Voices of the Next Generation.
Our theme music, “Heil, Sachsenhausen!” was written and performed by former Sachsenhausen prisoner Aleksander Kulisiewicz. Thanks to the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum and the Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection for granting permission for its use.
If you are a Sachsenhausen descendant who would like to share your story, please contact us.