Tag #118304 - Interview #78256 (Cilja Laud)

Father did not like Stalin and he never held it back from me. Father and his friends often said in my presence that we would be much better off without Stalin, called him blood-thirsty, told us about repressions, the Gulag. There was such a period in Estonia, in the late 1940s, when very few Gulag survivors started coming back. They spoke of the horror of Stalin's camps and it was hard to believe in that. Father understood clearly who Stalin was and explained that to me, though he warned me not to discuss those things with anybody.

Father was frank with the people who were surrounding him he must have said something what he was not supposed to and somebody informed against him. Father was arrested. I recall, I was on the way home from school and saw my father was walking towards me with two men accompanying him on both sides. I asked him where he was going and he kissed me and said that it might the last time we see each other. Fortunately, his fears were not realized. During the litigation he was not accused of political crime, but of larceny. Nobody believed that as they understood that it was connected only with the politics. He was sentenced for a long time, but he was actually in prison for two years and was pardoned. Father's friend Rachmiel Bloomberg helped him a lot while he was in prison.