Tag #149746 - Interview #78161 (roman reznikov)

There was trouble in our family, too. My father wasn't a good photographer, just a lab assistant. He quit photography in 1950 and got a job as a vendor at the railway station. He didn't even work half a year there. The other shift man there was a Ukrainian. And they played a trick with my father making up a cash shortage of 6,000 rubles. He was arrested and sentenced to ten years of imprisonment for theft. He was sent to the Volga-Don channel construction site. Life and work conditions there were terrible. Life there was like it was in the most horrible Stalin camps. During all these years I addressed the authorities to review my father's case. I even had a meeting with the general prosecutor in Moscow. But only in 1957 my father's case was changed to the sentence 'negligence' changing the term of his imprisonment to two years. By that time my father had already been imprisoned for seven years. When he returned he looked even more awful than he did after he returned from Stalingrad in 1942. My father hardly ever spoke about his life in the camp - these memories were unbearable for him.