Tag #154176 - Interview #90538 (Ignac Neubauer)

In March 1953 Stalin died. I remember well how grown-up men cried in the streets and were not ashamed of their tears. I didn’t have tears or grief for him, though I didn’t know the truth about Stalin’s crimes that Nikita Khrushchev 13 spoke about at the 20th Congress of the Party 14, but I already knew that those Jews who risked their lives to escape from the fascist Hungary to the USSR were sent to the GULAG 15 without trial or investigation. Some of them returned to Subcarpathia after Stalin died, but not all of them. I knew that those Jews who were liberated from concentration camps by Soviet troops were sent to camps for prisoners-of-war or GULAG. Besides, I couldn’t understand why newcomers were saying that the world was going to collapse after Stalin’s death and life was impossible without him. We lived in Subcarpathia without Stalin for many years and without the USSR and it was a good life. Leaders of the state come and go, but life goes on.