Tag #147990 - Interview #78121 (rachel rivkina)

The local people treated Jews unkindly. The Uzbeks repeated every minute, 'Tashkent is mine, I'm the master.' Before the arrival of evacuees, the Uzbeks, in general, didn't know who Jews were. But in Tashkent there were a lot of Russians, who had been exiled there before the war. It was from the Russians that they learned to offend Jews. They called us 'Jillya': that was 'Zhid' [an offensive way to call a Jew in Russia] in the Uzbek language. In evacuation I improved my Yiddish, because in our presence the Uzbeks spoke only their native language, and Jews, to provoke them, spoke only Yiddish.