This is the sports group in the Pozemsky school where I studied in Pskov.
In 1986 that school celebrated its 200-year anniversary. Look, there I stand at the far left in sports shorts. All of us are wearing identical sports uniforms.
That's how pupils dressed for physical education classes back then. In this picture, I am in my last year, about to finish school. I had two real friends at school.
One was a Jewish girl named Fanya Arnshtam -- we went together to study in Leningrad in 1931. Our lives seemed to be developing very similarly.
She got married, like me, in 1932, to a man named Grigory Abramovich. But in 1944 Fanya died of tuberculosis. Grigory became a professor at the Shipbuilding Institute in Leningrad.
Fanya is standing second from the left in the second row, she's got typical Jewish appearance. My other good friend was a Russian girl named Zoya Petunina. We stayed friends until her death in 1986. She is sitting in the lowest row on the right.
