Bluma Lepiku

This is me. This photo was taken in Tallinn in 1954. After returning to Tallinn from evacuation I went to work as a medical nurse in the navy hospital. I got married in 1950. I met my first husband Victor Vatis at a dancing party at the Palace of officers. Victor was a jealous husband, and insisted that I quit the hospital, because many of the patients were young men. I went to work as a medical nurse in the railroad children's recreation center. I got pregnant, and my pregnancy took a complicated course. The labor didn't go normal and the baby was stillborn. After that we started keeping aloof. We were no longer a family. We were jus two people sharing a room for some vague reason. We divorced in 1953. I worked in the recreation center for three years. The Doctors' Plot had no implications for me. This period was quite unnoticed in our part of the country. I remember the day, when Stalin died in March 1953. Many employees of the recreation center were not just crying: they were grieving and sobbing, as if they had lost their own father. They were lamenting and sobbing. I did not cry and had no feeling of grief. I could not understand why they were grieving. I was telling them that we are all mortal and one day we will go, too. I though to myself: are they so dumb? Don't they know that Stalin was an evildoer? As it happened, they didn't. Stalin was mean in his treatment of doctors. It was a good thing he died and they were rehabilitated. However, even now many people believe that Stalin was a great person and chief. Well, let everybody believe what one wants to believe. For some people Stalin was an evildoer, for others he was an idol, and this won't change. In the children's recreation center I contracted dysentery bacillus from children. I could not go to work with the children before I fully recovered, and I quit working at the center. I went to work as a typist at the railroad office. I issued train and load tickets. I thought it was going to be my temporary job, but when I fully recovered, I did not feel like going back to the center. My work there involved night shifts and continuous nervous tension? So I stayed at my new job.