Tag #123554 - Interview #78516 (Eshua Aron Almalech)

When we learned about the process against the Jewish doctors in the Soviet Union [the Doctors’ Plot [11]] from the newspapers, my father had not left for Bulgaria yet. My wife Nedyalka and he thought that this was some kind of provocation by the Stalinist regime. I admit I was in two minds. The communist regime forbade listening to foreign radio stations such as the BBC, Deutsche Welle, Free Europe, the Voice of America. But my wife and I were journalists and we listened to them. In 1956 after the events in Hungary, I started having doubts about socialism, all the more when most of Stalin’s atrocities became public. [Eshua is referring to the Hungarian revolution against the Soviet type communist regime in Hungary.] But in 1968 after the Soviet armies [i.e. the armies of the Warsaw Pact] occupied Prague, I just could not accept it despite my leftist orientation.