Faina Khorunzhenko with her cousins Moisey and Zhenya Shakhnovsky

This is me with my cousins Moisey, who was killed during the defense of Leningrad, and Zhenya Shakhnovsky. The photo was taken in 1939 in Kremenchug. I was born on 1st May 1920 in the town of Novoukrainka, which used to be in the Odessa region and is now in the Kirovograd region. I finished school in 1938. But as they said, we were unlucky, because in 1937, the Stalinist repression started, and many teachers of our school were arrested. We could never get the whole picture and believed everything we were told. All the teachers of the basic subjects at our school had been arrested. Somebody put all ?B's? to all our high school certificates, so that we would have some grades, but not be able to get special golden medals [for graduation with honors from high school], which would have enabled us to enter institutes and universities without exams. But in general, all our students who studied well entered institutes, including Jews. Moreover, when I was already a student of the Sumy Teachers' Institute, I was rewarded with a Stalin scholarship, which was introduced in 1939 in honor of Stalin's 60th birthday. This was a scholarship worth 700 rubles, while the regular one was only worth 250 rubles. I was always interested in history, and I studied at the history department of my institute. After the war, I graduated from the institute and continued to work there at the Marxism-Leninism chair.