Tag #150346 - Interview #94447 (Larisa Radomyselskaya)

Neither my grandmother nor Sarra were religious and I didn’t know anything about Jewish traditions or holidays. Of course, I was too small at the time to make any assessments of the situation, but later I came to understanding many things. It was 1936-37, the period of mass arrests [during the Great Terror] [3]. Everybody was suspected of espionage and of being an enemy of the Soviet people. My father had relatives in Palestine and this might become reason enough to arrest him, even though we had no information about them. Besides, Soviet authorities struggled against religion [4]. They were closing temples, arresting clergymen and persecuting believers. This is the way it was. Perhaps, this was the reason why even the word ‘Jew’ was said in whisper in our home. Fortunately, my father wasn’t arrested, but later I got to know that there had been arrests at his work.