I went to the ball, but my teacher stopped me at the front door, and told me not to go in because it was expected that the legionaries and branniks would get drunk, which could lead to something bad. I guess she must have had instructions not to let Jewish people in the ballroom of the theater. And she didn't let me in. I was very upset but I couldn't say anything. What could I possibly say in those years of terror? I just left. Then she said: 'Gracia, wait for me please, I will walk you.' She was scared that someone might attack me in the street, as I was alone. She walked me home.
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Displaying 10621 - 10650 of 50826 results
Gracia Albuhaire
We were wearing our yellow stars, of course. Sometimes branniks and legionaries [see Bulgarian Legions] [11] made fun of us. We were pretty girls, and they, pretending that they were making passes at us, were actually poking fun at us as Jewish girls. Otherwise I didn't have any problems in my class, nobody maltreated me there.
Osip Hotinskiy
My grandfather's name was Isaac [Hotinskiy], but I don't know my grandmother's name. I don't know where and when they were born. They lived in Kiev, though during the tsarist regime Jewish families weren't allowed to reside in Kiev, which was beyond the Jewish Pale of Settlement [1]. This ban didn't refer to doctors, lawyers, merchants of Guild I and II [2] and highly skilled craftsmen. Craftsmen were allowed to settle down in Podol [3], a by-river district in Kiev. My grandfather was a tailor and he must have been a skilled master, considering that my father told me that he provided well for his family. My grandmother was a housewife, which was quite common with Jewish women.
My father didn't tell me about his childhood. I think my father and his brother and sisters received secular education besides the traditional Jewish education that was mandatory in Jewish families. They were well- educated people. I think my father's parents were religious. At least, I remember that my grandmother was said to have been buried in accordance with the Jewish traditions.
My father, his brother and sisters knew Yiddish and spoke Russian well.
,
Before WW2
See text in interview
My parents talked little about them, reluctant to mention their relatives abroad [because it was dangerous to keep in touch with relatives abroad] [4]. USSR nationals might have been subject to conviction for espionage, preparation of a terrorist attack at the order of foreign intelligence, and the person would disappear in the Gulag [5]. At that time judicial authorities didn't quite care about establishing credible evidence of crime.
An example for this is what happened to my father's sister Etlia Neifeld [nee Hotinskaya]. Her husband was a rather high-ranking state official. In the 1930s he went to Paris on business and his wife accompanied him. Some time after they returned they were arrested. Etlia's husband was executed and she was sent to the Gulag.
My father's brother Vladimir moved to Moscow in the 1920s. He finished a college and worked in an office. He was married and had a son. During the Great Patriotic War [6] Vladimir was at the front.
My father got fond of revolutionary ideas in his youth. He joined the Communist Party in 1910. By the way, he worked with Lazar Kaganovich [7], who became one of the leading party activists later, in one of the party units. My father met my future mother in this party unit.
My grandfather was a fisherman. He caught and sold fish. My grandmother was a housewife.
The family was rather poor. Mama told me that when she was a child the local wealthy residents allowed the children to pick fallen apples in their gardens. Then the family sold better looking apples and left the worse looking ones for them to eat. When Mama and her brother Shaya were in their teens, they went to work at the timber felling facility to remove the rind from tree trunks with special tools. The children took on any job to help their parents support the family. Mama became an apprentice to a dressmaker.
My grandmother and grandfather were religious. I think they raised their children to be religious too. However, when the children grew up, they left Parichi for bigger towns where some of them got fond of revolutionary ideas and joined the Party, and none of them remained religious.
During the Great Patriotic War Naum and his family evacuated to Moscow where Naum worked as a joiner at the aircraft factory. After the war they moved back to Dnepropetrovsk. Shaya was a tailor in Moscow. He had three sons. During World War II one of his sons perished at the front, the second one died in the 1980s.
Hatzkel was a business oriented and sociable person and went to work as a logistic agent in an office. He often traveled on business. Before the Great Patriotic War he went to Brest to execute contracts. German troops attacked Brest on the first day of the war. There was no more information about Hatzkel. He may have perished on the first day of the war.
Mama moved to Kiev at the age of 16. She went to work at a tailor's shop in Kiev. She got involved in revolutionary activities, probably under the influence of her friends. In 1910 she joined the Communist Party. She was 18 years old. The tsarist government persecuted revolutionaries. In the early 1910s my father was arrested and exiled to Siberia. Mama told me that she was arrested at the age of 17. The gendarmes came early one morning and ordered her to get dressed and follow them. Mama asked them to wait for her outside and let her get dressed, considering that she was a woman. The gendarmes looked at her nodding their heads: 'Oh yeah, a woman,' but they went outside. Mama was sentenced to six months in prison with regards to her young age. After my father returned from exile and Mama returned from jail they continued their revolutionary activities. In 1917 the Revolution took place in Russia [see Russian Revolution of 1917] [9].
Since my parents were atheists they didn't arrange any religious ceremonies with regards to my birth.
I was a baby when my father was sent to Kharkov in connection with his party activities. This happened during the Civil War [10].
In 1925 our family moved to Moscow. My parents received an apartment, luxurious for that time, on 2 Clementovskiy Lane in the center of Moscow: actually, they received two adjacent rooms in a five-bedroom shared apartment [see communal apartment] [11]. There was the family of a colonel living in two other rooms and a single woman living in a little three square-meter room.
I have dim memories about my father. He died in 1927. His premature death probably rescued me and Mama from arrests later [during the so-called Great Terror] [12].
When I was small, Mama worked in the Central Supervisory Commission. She went to work early in the morning and returned home late at night. At first my grandmother stayed with us taking care of me, but all other children wanted Grandmother to move to them and Mama hired a housemaid. When I was old enough, Mama sent me to the kindergarten. Our housemaid or my grandmother picked me from the kindergarten in the evening.
Grandmother Elia-Sheva was religious and never failed to observe Jewish traditions, even though her children were atheists. She lit candles on Friday and prayed over them. On Saturday she tried to do no work. She even asked me to turn on the lights in the evening, if there was nobody else at home. However, I made efforts to struggle 'against her religious delusions.' I remember that grandmother always bought matzah before Pesach and kept it in a box under her bed. She didn't eat bread on holidays. I am ashamed to recall this: in my childhood I enjoyed putting some bread into the box and telling my grandma about it, when she thought she was having matzah.
I started school at the age of eight in 1928. I did well at school and did make much effort for it. I remember the carnivals that Young Octobrists [13], and pioneers [see All-Union pioneer organization] [14] arranged in the streets on religious holidays. We marched the streets singing 'Away with monks, rabbis and priests! We'll climb the heaven and chase away all gods!' I remember the carnival on Piatnitskaya Street near Clementovskiy Lane where we lived at Christmas. This was called the anti-religious Christmas. There were costumes and I made a carton priest with a censer. I pulled the rope and the priest swayed the censer. There were fireworks and we were carrying banners with anti-religious slogans... Our teacher told us that we were not to eat Easter bread. She finished her speech saying a common phrase: 'There is no God.' I remember the school and the yard. There were many children living in the apartment building. We played and ran around in the yard in our free time.
My mother's younger sister Revekka spent a lot of time with me. She was an 'Old Bolshevik' [15] like my mother. It's not that she was old, but this was a common name for those who had joined the Communist Party before the Revolution of 1917. Revekka finished the College of Foreign Trade. She worked at the Trade Representative Office. In 1929 she was sent to work at the Trade Representative Office in Germany.
In 1933 Revekka came to Moscow on business and convinced my mother to let me go with her. We spent a couple of months in Copenhagen, Denmark, and then went to Berlin. I went to the Russian school for the children of employees of the Trade Representative Office.
Hitler came to power in Germany, when we arrived there. I remember how surprised I was to see flags with swastikas on each house in Berlin. At home people put flags only on holidays. Later I got to know that people were ordered to have flags on their houses. I remember fighters wearing brown uniforms marching in the streets. All passers-by were to greet them with their arms stretched when they were marching. My school friend was the daughter of an employee of the Trade Representative Office. I don't remember her first name, but her surname was Grishina. Her father didn't greet the marchers once and two of them started beating him. He screamed that he was a foreigner, but it didn't help. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent its protest to the German government, but they didn't reply. Then employees of the Trade Representative Office started going back home. In 1934 my aunt and I returned to Moscow.
Hitler came to power in Germany, when we arrived there. I remember how surprised I was to see flags with swastikas on each house in Berlin. At home people put flags only on holidays. Later I got to know that people were ordered to have flags on their houses. I remember fighters wearing brown uniforms marching in the streets. All passers-by were to greet them with their arms stretched when they were marching. My school friend was the daughter of an employee of the Trade Representative Office. I don't remember her first name, but her surname was Grishina. Her father didn't greet the marchers once and two of them started beating him. He screamed that he was a foreigner, but it didn't help. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent its protest to the German government, but they didn't reply. Then employees of the Trade Representative Office started going back home. In 1934 my aunt and I returned to Moscow.
Mama was on a long business trip to Uzbekistan. She worked as chief of the machine/tractor yards political department. She was to support cotton harvesting. I was 14 years old and I went to Margelan where Mama was staying. She was a high-ranking official and had a car and a driver who drove her to various districts where she monitored the harvesting processes. At times she was away for several days in a row. I went to a Russian school where I studied the Uzbek language. The Uzbek language was based on the Latin alphabet and in the late 1930s it switched to the Slavonic alphabet. About a year later Mama and I returned to Moscow. I went back to my old school.
This was the period when the arrests [Great Terror] began. 'Enemy of the people' [16] became a common definition. Fortunately, my mother and her sister Revekka were not arrested. One summer I went to a pioneer camp, and when I returned Mama told me that our neighbor, the colonel, had been arrested one night. There was a search of his apartment. We never heard about him again. Later my father's brother Vladimir was arrested. He was a rather high-ranking official at the time. Shortly after his arrest Yezhov [17] was removed and Beriya [18] replaced him. He declared an amnesty, and Vladimir was one of those who were released from jail. My parents' other brothers and sisters were tailors, carpenters and housewives and the authorities took no interest in them. Mama became a party organizer at the dairy factory. She probably wanted to stay away from where she could have been a focus of attention. I don't know.
Many of my schoolmates were children of the party officials who resided in the so-called 'House on the Embankment' in Moscow. I was a Komsomol [19] member already. We frequently had meetings where reports of the schoolchildren whose fathers were arrested were discussed. This even became a standard procedure at some point of time. Each student was asked: 'How could you not notice that your father was against the Soviet power?' There was also a common answer: 'I don't believe that my father acted consciously, he was probably drawn into this. Or maybe, it's a mistake...' To give credit to our teachers, none of the children was expelled from school or the Komsomol, but they were reprimanded for relaxing their vigilance. Neither teachers nor children changed their attitude towards these children. Everybody tried to support and help them while in other schools they were expelled from the Komsomol and the children declared a boycott of the 'son of an enemy of the people.'
It also happened that a student reported that his father was arrested and later that his mother was arrested as well. Once, a terrible incident happened. My schoolmate Zelinskiy's father was arrested. Newspapers published materials about the trial of Zelinskiy and the group of people with him. Zelinskiy confessed that he had arranged train crashes by adding glass bits into grease. Even we, teenagers, understood that this was crap and couldn't be true. We reprimanded Zelinskiy's son like we did the others, when all of a sudden he disappeared. The others continued attending school even if both of their parents were arrested, but he disappeared... This was a fearful time.
It also happened that a student reported that his father was arrested and later that his mother was arrested as well. Once, a terrible incident happened. My schoolmate Zelinskiy's father was arrested. Newspapers published materials about the trial of Zelinskiy and the group of people with him. Zelinskiy confessed that he had arranged train crashes by adding glass bits into grease. Even we, teenagers, understood that this was crap and couldn't be true. We reprimanded Zelinskiy's son like we did the others, when all of a sudden he disappeared. The others continued attending school even if both of their parents were arrested, but he disappeared... This was a fearful time.
I was in love with a girl from my school. Her father had nothing to do with party or business activities, when all of a sudden she told me that her father had been arrested. A couple of months later she came to school shining and informed me that her father was back home. Such occurrences strengthened our faith in the justice of the Party, when a person was arrested as a victim of slander, but then was released when proven not guilty.
There was no anti-Semitism in those years. Though there were many Jews arrested, we never linked their arrest to their national identity. None of my acquaintances, friends or I faced any routinely or state-level anti- Semitism.
I finished school in 1939. I was fond of exact sciences and I entered the Bauman School, present-day Moscow High Technical School. In 1939 a new law on army service was issued. Before this students hadn't been subject to army service before finishing their education, but according to this new law the students were to join the army when they reached the recruitment age. In October all 1st-year students were recruited to the army. I was recruited as a private to a reserve regiment. We were trained to handle a mortar and sent to the Finnish Front [see Soviet-Finnish War] [20]. I arrived there perhaps one week before the war was over. I was a mortar man and carried an 82-mm mortar and a support slab to it. I think on 12th or 14th March the peace treaty with Finland was signed.