Tag #146367 - Interview #103743 (Clara Shalenko)

During the Civil War he was in the Bolshevist underground movement. In 1919 my father was sent to the town of Galatz in Romania to take money to Romanian communists for liberation of Russian communists from jail. When my father came to the secret address there was an ambush of gendarmes. My father was scared to death. He had a lot of Party money with him. Gendarmes took my father to sigurantza [secret police of Romania] where they interrogated my father where he got such a lot of money from. My father replied that he was going to his father in the US and his relatives in Odessa collected this amount for his trip. He was imprisoned and convoyed to work every day. My father’s job was to wallpaper rooms in a Romanian lord’s mansion. Romanians Bolsheviks sent their messenger to my father. She called herself his fiancée and brought him food to jail. She managed to give him an escape plan. My father escaped at the time when he was at work at that mansion when his convoy dozed off. He met with Romanian communists at a secret apartment and they helped him to get back to Moscow.