Tag #145879 - Interview #94680 (Israel Shlifer )

At that time I got fond of poetry. My friends were intelligent boys. I learned a lot from them. At first I felt like a ‘black sheep’ with them since I came from a smaller town and my friends were more knowledgeable than I in many areas, but gradually I caught up with them. I became interested in literature and poetry. We were fond of forbidden poets for the most part. At that time all poets, but Mayakovsky [18], Yesenin [19], Gumilev [20], Mandelshtam [21], – were forbidden. We got copies of poems that we read and learned by heart. Somehow the Komsomol organization of my school got to know that we read forbidden poets. Probably one of us reported to them. My friends were called to the leaders where NKVD [22] representatives were present. Fortunately, I didn’t have to go there. They asked the boys where they got copies, but my friends answered that they just heard these poets and remembered them. The officers probably didn’t believe them, but they left them. One boy’s parents were so scared that they sent their son to Moscow for a whole year. We could understand their fear: this was the period of 1937-39 [Great Terror] [23] - arrests of ‘enemies of the people’ [24] that emerged all of a sudden from nowhere. Nobody in our family suffered during this period, but my father expected arrest every day. I don’t think he understood that Iosif Stalin himself was to blame for this outrage that took away millions of innocent lives.