Russian-born Vladimir Rott said that if not for his elementary school physics teacher, he might have never made the transition from a street kid with no academic ambition to a prize-winning engineer and author.
And last month, Rott and his wife, Iya, travelled back to his former home of Belarus to celebrate the 100th birthday of Nokolay Nikolayvich Vdovin, a man Rott calls a “miracle of HaShem.”
Speaking in his Forest Hill home, Rott, 80, a Russian-born Jew of Hungarian descent told The CJN about his hard childhood and the man who took him under his wing.
“I was a street boy. I didn’t have a father. My father was arrested, he was in prison,” Rott said.
His father, an expert in the lumber mill industry, moved to Belarus to develop the local mill. His mother was a “madame” who spoke German, “because they were Hungarian elite,” Rott said in his heavily accented Russian drawl.
Rott was three years old when Stalin arrested his father and sent him to a Siberian gulag, from which he never returned.
“We were thrown in the street. [My mother] had no language. We didn’t have nothing, and we became enemies of the state.”
His mother was forced to do manual labour to support her family. “We were so poor,” he said.
During the war, his family hid their Jewishness and identified as Hungarian.
“My mother was working hard and I wasn’t going to school. Two years in Grade 5. All of a sudden, a Russian officer who was injured in Hungary came. After spending a year in a Hungarian hospital, he returned to Bobruysk [now Belarus],” Rott recalled.
“He came to my mother in the street… told her to go back to Hungary where she would have a better life. She said, ‘But my husband is in prison and I don’t know when he’s coming.’ This was 1949. I was 13.”
She told Vdovin she no longer had Hungarian citizenship, and working hard in Russia wasn’t an issue for her.
“She said, ‘My main problem is Vladimir. Last night he wasn’t home… he doesn’t go to school.’”
Rott said when he went to school the next September, Vdovin, who’d been hired as a new physics teacher, brought him to his class and made him class leader.
“I was so upset, because now I couldn’t miss school, because every day I had to go and report who wasn’t there today.”
Rott said Vdovin, although a bit odd, was an excellent teacher.
“He had a brain injury in the war, and he was a little bit coo-coo, but he was good for us,” Rott said.
“He was very fair and he was not afraid to say, ‘Good for you.’ Because nobody said nothing like that to me. He was able to encourage me.”
Vdovin was Rott’s physics teacher until he graduated after Grade 10. Rott went to university, obtained an engineering degree, got married to his wife and lived in Bobruysk where they had three children.
He was in charge of installing machinery for a Lada car plant that employed 170,000 workers and produced three cars per minute.
Despite his success, in 1974, he left for Canada, looking for a better life outside the USSR, and as with most students and teachers, he lost touch with Vdovin.
About 30 years later, in 2004, Rott planned a family trip to Russia to show his children and grandchildren where and how he grew up.
Having kept in touch with one of his classmates in Belarus, Rott learned Vdovin was still alive and in a nursing home with his wife. Rott decided to visit him, and they spent a day together, reuniting for the first time in 50 years.
Last year, Rott checked in on his then 99-year-old former physics teacher to ask if he could visit him for his 100th birthday. At first, Vdovin tried to talk him out of it, worried that he and his wife were too frail to accommodate him.
“I said, ‘What do I need from you? I just want to hug you. And you will sit between us like a general in a wedding.’”
On Dec. 21, Rott and his wife went to the nursing home to celebrate Vdovin’s 100th birthday, along with Vdovin’s wife, two daughters, and granddaughters.
Reflecting on Vdovin’s role in his life, Rott said, “God brought him to me. In all my books, I always write about miracles. This was one of the miracles… It was a miracle of HaShem that I met him.”