Tag #152397 - Interview #78059 (Yakov Honiksman)

In a month I received a permit to become an employee of the archive of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in Lvov. I worked at the logistics department and had no right to enter a sensitive - secret department. [Editor's note: the secret department of the Ministry of Internal Affairs kept materials about political trials, arrests of innocent people, fabricated cases, etc. Residents got partial access to those archives only in the early 1990s.] I did more than I was authorized to and collected a big archive of files for joint-stock companies of the oil industry. I wrote a letter to the Academy of Sciences asking them whether I might write a thesis on the basis of these documents. They replied that these documents could be the basis for both scientific candidate and doctor's thesis. Later the archive got the order 'fire' with no explanation. I was fired and so was another Jew, Grossman. This happened in 1951.