Tag #135270 - Interview #78133 (Faina Khorunzhenko)

When anti-Semitic campaigns blossomed, the following situation took place in Moscow during the Doctors' Plot [8]. An officer approached my husband and asked him, 'Dmytry, why do you need a Jewish wife? It isn't good timing for that...' To this, my husband replied that he had married a person rather than a nationality, and would appreciate it if no one interfered with his private life. There was another case, when the director of a school in the Komintern district of Moscow, where I was sent to work, looked at my documents and said, 'Oh, but you're an alien!' In his presence, I called the secretary of the party district committee, Yekaterina Furtseva, who later became the Minister of Culture in the Soviet Union. She asked me to pass him the phone, and when she began to talk to him, he turned pale, murmuring, 'I didn't mean quite that.