Tag #149803 - Interview #96998 (Irina Doroshkova )

At 16,when I was in the 10th form, I went to a registry office to obtain my passport. I didn’t have any document since we left all documents at home when we left for evacuation hastily. I had to visit a doctor to have him confirm my age and other details. A day before my mother told me to have my nationality written as Ukrainian. I obtained my passport where in the item line ‘Origin’ was written ‘Ukrainian’. My mother was a Jew, though, and she never changed any information in her passport. I was to enter an institute and she new that there were admission restrictions for Jews. My mother never discussed this subject, but she was eager to help her daughter. My mother strongly believed in communist ideas like millions of her contemporaries without giving a thought to contradictions that were growing: anti-Semitism among them. She loved me dearly and wanted me to have a better life, but she knew that Jews were facing problems in the post war Soviet Union: problems with getting a job or entering an institute. She didn’t think about assimilation.