Matvey Loshak and friends

This is me with my friends Senya Berkovich (on left) and Nikolay in Kiev during a school vacation. When we were students, there were guys in the street who beat up Jews. I learned to wrestle so I could handle those guys. Senya beat up everyone who used the word 'kike.' That's how we defended our honor and our nationality. In the beginning of the 1950s, the negative attitude toward the Jews intensified. The Jewish students knew that the path to institutes and universities was closed to us. In Kiev, I never would have entered the institute, because there were certain quotas for Jewish students. That is why in 1954 I had to go to university in Uzhgorod. My mother, Sarah Loshak, had been an official at the passport department of the police department. In 1951, however, she was fired for being Jewish.