Tag #153940 - Interview #78048 (lev mistetskiy)

In winter my friend, Haim Sokolovskiy, and I rented a room in Gulyaypole. Our parents paid 10 rubles monthly and our landlady provided meals for the money. We spent winter vacations at home. This was wonderful: we skied and skated on a frozen pool all day long. There were one or two Jewish students per class in my school in Gulyaypole; the rest were Ukrainians. I faced anti-Semitism for the first time. The word 'zhydy' [kike] began to be used after the outbreak of World War II; at my time they called us 'natsmen' - which is short for 'natsionalnoye menshinstvo' ['national minorities'] - and I often heard this word addressed too me.