Tag #141127 - Interview #77956 (izolda rubinshtein)

In 1936 [during the Great Terror] arrests of the people began. It never occurred to my parents or me that there might have been something wrong. We believed everything the official propaganda was saying about Stalin. I told you the story of Rudayev, our neighbor. When he was arrested we were shocked, but not because an innocent man had been arrested, but because our neighbor was an 'enemy of the people' and we didn't really know that. Many of my father's friends were arrested, and we had no doubts that they were guilty. My parents always believed what the Communist Party said. When somebody we knew was arrested it never occurred to us that he was innocent. We thought, 'What could he have done?' I don't remember whether any of my classmates' parents were arrested. But I remember something else. We met in Kharkov on the 50th anniversary of finishing school. And one of our classmates said, 'Just think about it: none of us was ever arrested. This means, there were no traitors among us'.

I finished school in 1937. I wanted to become a doctor. Now I know that I would have been a miserable doctor: I can't stand the sight of blood and I'm very sensitive, but I always wanted to provide help to people when they needed it. My classmates voted for me to go to a Philology Faculty and their opinion was of the utmost importance to me. A collective's opinion generally was of greatest importance at that time. There were meetings and the collective determined what a person was going to do. I entered the Philology Faculty at Kharkov University. I became a Komsomol [13] member at university. When I was a 3rd-year student I became secretary of the Komsomol unit. I conducted Komsomol meetings and collected Komsomol fees. The good part of my profession is that my pupils remember and visit me.