Tag #152578 - Interview #94179 (Gherda Kagan )

There was a staircase behind one wall of or apartment  and my father told me that they couldn’t sleep for months hearing boots tapping on the stairs at night and they didn’t know who was to be arrested that night. During the period of arrests [Great Terror] 19 my parents never discussed this subject in my presence since I was an open-minded girl and a chatterbox. I remember that Ira Ghefter, granddaughter of my grandmother’s sister Luba, visited us before the war. She was a little older than me and I asked her usual questions about where her mother or father was and she avoided answering me as much as she could. When I grew up I got to know that her parents fell victims of arrests. Milliant, director of the institute where my father was working, who contrived polish for lids was arrested in 1937. His wife, a former class tutor of my aunt Yulia in her grammar school, and her sister didn’t have anything to live on and I remember that my family tried to support them.