Tag #144599 - Interview #96305 (Molka Mirskaya )

At the end of the 1930s, inter-community relations deteriorated with the foundation of the Fascist party of the Cuzists [6] and legionaries [7]. They used racism and anti-Semitism in their rhetoric, but there were no open collisions and pogroms as there were in Germany. There were cases of moral anti-Semitism, and my mother had to go through that. There was one tram line in Kishinev along the lengthy Armyanskaya Street to the city cemetery. My mother was in the tram car, fashionably dressed in a coat, wearing a hat and gloves. There was a Romanian officer sitting close to her. An ill-kept and poorly dressed elderly Jew got on the tram at one of the stops. He took a seat next to the officer. Then the officer started demanding that the Jew should get up and leave. The old man didn’t get to say a word. Then my mother sat down between the officer and the old man. The officer took off his gloves, hit the old man with them and turned him out of the tram, telling my mother that the old man smelled. Who knows how the officer would have acted if he had found out that my mother was a Jew.