Tag #149940 - Interview #90532 (Grigoriy Fihtman)

There were many Jewish children at school and there were also Russian and Ukrainian children. I got along well with all schoolmates, but there was one anti-Semitic boy named Grigoriy Zabolotny. Since I was short I sat at the first or second desk. Grigoriy sat behind me and constantly picked on me. I said to him: ‘But your name and mine is Grigoriy’ and he replied: ‘Yes, but you are a different Grigoriy’. He made it clear to me that my name wasn’t Grigoriy, and in truth I was Gershl, Jew. Zabolotny and his buddies were meeting schoolchildren by the front door before school. They lined up by the walls in the corridor and pushed everybody from one wall to another. If you dropped your bag, for example, and bent to pick it, they hit you on your back. So I tried to come to school shortly before classes and when the bell rang they had to go to the classroom and I followed them.  Zabolotny pulled girls, particularly Jewish girls, by their plates and wrote things with chalk on their back. However, I never heard him saying ‘zhyd’ [abusive word for a Jew].