Here Dad is at his workplace, when he worked as assistant director at a factory in Chelyabinsk.
My father was highly successful, and in 1934 he was sent to conduct industrialization in Chelyabinsk, where he served as an assistant director of the Chelyabinsk abrasive factory, and Mom for the first time in her life didn’t have to work for one and a half years. She was very homesick, so in 1936 she took me and my brother and left for Leningrad. Two months later Dad was paid off in Chelyabinsk and joined us in Leningrad. And in 1937 the whole governing body of the Chelyabinsk abrasive factory was shot. In that way, being unaware of this at the time, Mom saved Daddy’s life.
Daddy was a supply agent; now it is called administrator. He procured everything that was needed for the governing body. While working as an assistant director of the Chelyabinsk abrasive factory, Dad visited Moscow and was at the reception of Ordzhonikidze, the Minister of Heavy Engineering, on account of supplying of factory workers. The point was that there were food difficulties in the country, famine, and there was a rigid order of supply depending on the number of workers. But Father wanted to obtain an improvement of the ration supply, which was permitted only in the presence of such-and-such a number of workers. The crew size at this factory was much smaller, but Dad got the permit from the authorities to make an exception for this factory.
My father was forced to try to get from Ordzhonikidze the permit of making an exception several times, so he repeatedly had to go to Moscow and at long last Ordzhonikidze’s secretary was told: ‘You throw this Jew out, but he will get in through the window, so we are to comply with his request.’ In such a way Dad was able to supply workers with white bread loaves and other foodstuffs. When Ordzhonikidze killed himself, Daddy put his portrait into a black frame. Dad honored him very much and always remembered how Ordzhonikidze helped poor working people.
