Tag #152543 - Interview #101417 (Sarah Kaplan)

In March 1937 our cow had a calf. My father slaughtered it. There was a law forbidding the slaughter of cattle. Our neighbor reported on my father to the NKVD 9. He was arrested again and sentenced to 5 years in a camp for the secret slaughter of cattle. The camp was in the Far East, not far from Japan. The inmates starved and the wardens didn’t have sufficient food either. My father talked with the chief warden of the camp and suggested to buy a cow. The chief warden agreed and my father founded a farm. Later they bought a couple more cows and had sufficient dairy products to feed the people in the camp. As an award for decent behavior my father was released before the end of his term. He returned home in April 1941, two months before the Great Patriotic War 10. My father didn’t like to talk about the camp. All I know is that the conditions there were hard. They lived in barracks and slept on straw. There were about 150 of them in one barrack. He only washed himself twice in three years. They starved and worked on a wood-cutting site.