Tag #116159 - Interview #100368 (Dobre Rozenbergene )

In 1940 I went to a new school. It was our Yiddish lyceum, which was now called secondary school. The classes were taught by the same teachers in the Jewish language, so we felt no difference so far. Some lessons were in Russian. First, it was a little bit hard for me. My parents knew Russian very well and helped me a lot. Pioneer [9] and Komsomol organizations [10] appeared instead of the Zionist ones. I didn’t even think of joining them as our family was classified as rich and we had to get ready for the worst: exile to Siberia. There was no official information in this regard, but there were rumors that our family was on the deportation lists. I often think that it would have been better, if our family had been exiled: it might have saved my parents and brother. We were not exiled. Probably, we would have been, as many of our pals, less well-off than we were, had been exiled. Grandmother Elke took the changes very hard. She had heart trouble. She kept to bed and died a couple of weeks before the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War.