Liana Degtiar with her classmates

This is me (1st from the left), with my classmates Lusia Sivolobchik (in the center) and Ira Treiger, in the ninth grade. This photo was taken in Soroki in 1950. I went to the fourth grade in Soroki. Our teacher, Yelena Fyodorovna, was very good to us. All the children liked her. I made friends with Ira Treiger. Before 1940 her family also lived in Bucharest. Ira's grandmother lived near Soroki. In 1940 her family went to Ira's grandmother on vacation. Ira's aunt and her adoptive daughter went with them. When the Soviet troops came to Bessarabia and closed the border, they stayed in Soroki. The aunt's husband, a Hungarian, stayed in Romania. Ira's aunt was a communist and had even been taken to camps for her underground activities. When the Great Patriotic War began, Ira's father was recruited to the front. Ira, her mother and grandmother evacuated to Russia, I've forgotten the place. Her mother had tuberculosis and died. Ira's father perished at the front. Ira was raised by her aunt. I had another friend: Lusia Sivolobchik, a Belarussian. We studied and played together. Ira and I went to a music school, when we were in the fourth grade. We attended piano classes. In the ninth grade I stopped going to the music school. I had to prepare for college. There were two schools: a Russian secondary school named after Pushkin, in the two-storied former gymnasium building, and a Moldovan school, also two-storied. It also housed an evening school. There was a club where they showed movies and had dancing parties. We liked going to the movies, of course. We had parties at school. Later, a cinema theater was built in the town. There was a park in the center, and another park near my school. We went to school across the park. In winter we went to skate on the Dnestr. We read a lot and shared our opinions. We celebrated birthdays together. We often did our homework together also. Successful students helped their school mates who weren't so good at their studies. I helped my two friends, both had the name of Tamara, with mathematics. My favorite subjects were physics and mathematics. I liked literature, but I hated history. I had problems with remembering dates, and chronological tables were my weakness. We were in the ninth grade, when our favorite teacher of mathematics died. We didn't like the new teacher and made noise in his lessons. We were fastidious. Our director wanted to offer my father to teach at our school part time. He was well known for his mathematical talents, though he taught technical subjects in his college, but I said, 'I don't want you to teach me. Let someone else do it.' They found a good teacher. His name was Nikolay Ivanovich Zadorozhniy. He had graduated from Moscow State University. He had done a postgraduate course in Moscow. I finished school with a silver medal in 1951.