Tag #144480 - Interview #78227 (frieda stoyanovskaya)

We lived in the Writers' Building. The war with the Germans became an escape from the fear of arrest for many people. This war was a surprise for us. It is difficult to imagine this now. We had known that it might begin since the end of 1939. There was a map in our teachers' room at school, and every day our geography teacher marked the areas occupied by Hitler. The circle was getting narrower and narrower. But we still believed that it would not happen to us. We also knew about the German attitude towards the Jewish people from newspapers. In 1938 they showed Doctor Mamlock in Kiev. [This was a German film about a remarkable Jewish physician who hoped for salvation. He was killed because he was Jewish.] We were struck by what we saw, but again, we thought it wouldn't happen to us. It was so far from me then that I didn't even associate Denikin's pogrom with what I saw. My husband and I were so far from this kind of development that we planned a second baby. Our second son was born in February 1941.