Tag #150769 - Interview #97089 (Hava Goldshtein)

In summer 1936 when I was on vacation at home few men wearing military uniforms came for my father. They searched the house shuffling my father’s papers. They took pictures of my father’s parents and relatives from Romania. I remember that when my father was taken away I held of one of the military’s leg like a tick and he could hardly get rid of me. My father was taken to Simferopol, but he returned home after two months. I don’t know how he happened to escape: in such cases people were charged with espionage and ties with foreign intelligence agencies and they disappeared forever. Father never told us, children, what happened to him and what were charges against him, but he never prayed again and put his tallit away. At that time we stopped receiving letters from his relatives in Romania. Only in 1939 after Bessarabia joined the Soviet Union my father received few letters from his family, but father never responded – he was probably afraid of being arrested again.