Tag #147632 - Interview #94561 (Zinoviy Rukinglaz )

From the early 1930s my father was a member of the tailors’ shop ‘The friends of children’ that in 1937 became the ‘Bolshevichka’ factory. In 1937 [Great Terror] its director Roitman, a Jewish man, was arrested, and then his successor Fitelevich, a Russian man, was also arrested. My father was very concerned and couldn’t sleep at night fearing an arrest since in those years many of his friends who were craftsmen and took part in the revolution of 1917 were arrested, only they were members of the Bolshevik Party and held official posts while my father remained a worker, which probably saved him from arrest. Or perhaps, the NKVD chiefs whose wives were my father’s clients decided to let him be.