Tag #146857 - Interview #92368 (Lyudmila Kreslova)

I didn’t respect Stalin. I felt that he was different from other people. When before the war he granted the Germans 18 railroad cars of flour, I began to hate him. I found out about it from the newspapers, which said that Stalin helped the Germans, reckoning that in that case they wouldn’t attack us [25]. I was 19 already and I thought, ‘My God, why would they not attack us?’ I knew that they would start the war, people were talking about it. We had a radio, some black plate, and Stalin said on the air, that if the war started, we wouldn’t give a single inch of our land and would carry out the war on foreign territory. It seemed fine when he said so, but then he gave bread to the Germans, who were our enemies. I understood that he was a sick person. My father also said that something was wrong.

Then Stalin died in 1953, and I rejoiced. One of my husband’s relatives perished at Stalin’s funeral. She was very upset about Stalin’s death. She went to his funeral and she was crushed to death there. I was really surprised by the grief she felt, because I was happy. My husband and I knew that he was already preparing railroad cars to take all Jews to Siberia [26]. My husband was a Communist, but he still remained a Jew.