Tag #151643 - Interview #78225 (Iosif Gurevich)

The arrests that began in 1936 [during the so-called Great Terror] [14] didn't involve our family. My father was either a joiner or a loader and Soviet authorities weren't interested in him, although they sometimes did arrest workers like my father if somebody reported on them. I remember posters on the walls saying, 'Be watchful - an enemy is near!' Some of my classmates' parents were arrested, but their children continued their studies and nobody mentioned to them that they were children of 'enemies of the people'. I remember the 'Black Maria' driving in our street, and my parents sighing with relief whenever it passed by. [Editor's note: 'Black Maria' was the name for the dark vehicles of the NKVD [15] in which arrested people were driven off from their homes to their first interrogation. They were vans with small barred windows painted black.