Tag #129238 - Interview #100063 (Edith Umova)

The Soviet regime didn’t affect our family. My father continued working at the theater, and my mother retained her job at the factory. We weren’t wealthy, and our family didn’t undergo any oppressions. My father’s brother Elias was recruited into the reserve troops. Tsypa accepted the Soviet regime with enthusiasm. She joined either the Komsomol [5], or the Party; I can’t remember which one it was. She was dedicated to ideas, while the others kept living their routine life. 

I was four years old when the war began. We heard that Germany had attacked the Soviet Union as we were listening to Molotov’s speech [6] on the radio. Surely, after Hitler’s army invaded Poland in 1939 [7] all residents of Estonia were aware that the fascists were exterminating Jews. However, many people didn’t take it seriously. I think Jews particularly had to evacuate from Estonia. They just had to escape, but many people stayed at home. In Estonia Jews always lived side by side with their German neighbors and they never faced negative attitudes in this respect. They were probably hoping that the fascists were going to treat the Estonian Jews somehow differently. Besides, many people had been so scared of the resettlement that took place in Estonia [8] just one week before the war that they were more afraid of the Bolsheviks [9] than the Germans.