Tag #151380 - Interview #78122 (Simon Gonopolskiy)

So at the beginning of the 1940s we lived in the same neighborhood, but in another apartment. We had the biggest room in a three-bedroom communal apartment. The windows faced the south and in summer we had shutters on the windows for protection from extremely strong sunshine. The room was modestly furnished: there was a wardrobe, a bookcase with books in Russian, my parents' bed and my folding bed. There was a sofa where our frequent guests, friends of my parents, slept sometimes. A young girl, our relative from Petroverovka, stayed in our room when she studied at university. We got along well with the Volkovs, our Russian neighbors. We lived just near Privoz [market]. There were Russian and Jewish traders. They often spoke Yiddish, but always argued in Russian. Our neighbor Manya was an irrefutable authority in our house. She watched that everything was in order in our yard and would even reprimand young housewives that got too carried away with a chat and forgot about making lunch for their husbands, or a newly-wed spouse coming home late. Nobody felt hurt for being told off.