Tag #147353 - Interview #83476 (Motel Meilakhs)

After graduation I was recommended to enter the post-graduate courses of the Institute of the Jewish Culture at the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. And there I passed candidate’s examinations [21] and wrote a thesis on the history of anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages. This thesis was recommended for defense in March 1936. But on 3rd March I was arrested. I was arrested by two Jews. And I was interrogated by three other Jews. And the reason for my arrest was my thesis. The question of the investigator Borisov – this is a pseudonym – was: ‘Who executed the first Jewish pogroms in the Middle Ages?’ I answered: ‘The crusaders.’ ‘And who were the crusaders?’ I am telling him, ‘Knights and peasants. ‘Oh, peasants? So you are a Trotskist! Lev Trotsky [22] considered peasants to be a reactionary class. You wanted to compromise them here.’

So, the Jewish sector of the university was closed, everyone was put into jail, the Institute of Jewish Culture was shut down. This was the end of Jewish science in Kiev. I spent the years from 1936 to 1941 in Vorkuta. We were making a glade in the woods for the future railroad and I worked in timber cutting. My comrades in the camp were Russians and Tartars and people of other nationalities. We had no national enmity whatsoever.