Tag #147288 - Interview #78416 (Meyer Markhasin)

Any humane qualities that a person had at that time vanished and what was left inside was a beast. A very small percentage of people remained normal. There were so many examples of that: for example, a husband beat his wife because she forgot to bring a small slice of bread. Or another example: one of our fellow-students found that his bread card was missing and began to search everybody. The card was found in a sock of another student. And in those times there was an order by Stalin: the death penalty for the theft of bread cards. What followed was that each of the students hit him in turn and we took him to the militia. We never heard about him after that. When I was leaving the besieged city of Leningrad, I saw how a mother was handing over her deceased child-- without tears and without emotions-- to somebody else to bury. Coffins were dragged on sleds to the cemetery all along Leningrad streets. In the institute, where we lived, there were corpses too. We wrapped them in blankets and carried to the foundry laboratory of the institute, because no one felt like taking the dead to the cemetery.