Tag #145902 - Interview #94680 (Israel Shlifer )

I still know no explanation of how I kept my job when in 1949, at the height of state anti-Semitism and during the campaign against cosmopolitans [31] my father was arrested in Tashkent and sentenced under a political article of the law. My mother wrote me that he was charged of espionage for Germany and nonsense like that. I understood that my father was innocent. I knew this was a state policy against Jews, but what could I do? I knew that my management had to know about my father’s arrest, but they showed no sign of this and I pretended nothing happened. My father never told me about what he was accused of. They might have remembered his Bund membership. To tell the truth, they didn’t beat him. They used another thing: they kept him in a single cell for the first year. Then his friends managed to help him and my father was taken to a camp near Tashkent. My father actually performed the duties of chief accountant in the camp. He had a privilege: he was allowed to sleep on the sofa in his office instead of going back to the barrack. Besides, he made reports to the bank management. They spoke to him rather than calling an official chief accountant. My father went to the bank with a guard and my mother was waiting there for him with hot lunch. Then my mother moved to Kiev. My father was released in 1954, a year after Stalin died. He was exculpated from all charges.