Selected text
I remember when Hitler came to power and when the fascists occupied Austria. Our company boycotted Germans; we simply didn't buy German goods. Jewish refugees came from Germany and Austria. There were meetings in synagogues appealing to Jews to unite. Jabotinsky [12] visited us and I heard him speak at a meeting near our synagogue. Other Zionist leaders and Jewish writers came to our town as well. The Jewish Theater staged performances. When the Romanians closed Jewish schools in 1938 my mother went to Bucharest and managed to convince the authorities there to open the schools again. The Romanian fascists blamed my mother that she used people's contributions for Israel to support the Soviet power instead since she was a communist. This wasn't true, of course. The Romanian authorities viewed communists as a threat to their regime and the accusation of favoring communists was a very serious issue at the time. There was a strong anti-Soviet propaganda. Newspapers described the horrors of Stalin's camps and the arrests of millions of innocent victims in the USSR [during the so-called Great Terror] [13] and we believed them because we knew that there was no smoke without fire. We understood that communists were decent people, but the regime in the USSR was horrific. Romanians were more loyal to Zionists. In general, we had an interesting life. We communicated with interesting people that visited our home.
Period
Interview
Boris Dorfman