My grandparents were very private people and never talked to anyone about their lives. After my grandfather passed away in 1998, I was going through his papers. I found many documents that dealt with his arrest, time in GULAG, work records, prison release, and “rehabilitation” paperwork. I started interviewing all of our family members and recording their stories. I poured through photo albums, disintegrating envelopes full of photographs of long-dead family members and friends. The more stories I heard and the more photos I saw, I realized that many family friends I grew up seeing at our dinner table were former prisoners of RechLag. I began tracking my grandfather’s friends and people whom he knew in RechLag. Many responded with their own stories, sending me handwritten manuscripts, photographs, and even book chapters. At this point, I have collected dozens of hours of audio interviews, close to a hundred photographs, and more connections than I ever expected. For the past 20 years, I’ve been working on a book, but whenever I think I’m almost done, new information comes to light. Maybe one day I’ll be able to formally publish my work as a book, but in the meantime, I would like to share what I have written so far – a collection of interconnected stories about growing up in the Soviet Union, being Jewish in the Soviet Union, finding out about my grandparents later in life, and the actual stories of my grandfather Arkadiy and my grandmother Olga.
Dmitriy B. 