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Family Is All That Matters 58 hospitals and clubhouses. Meanwhile, Zhenya's parents and elder sister Klara settled in Samarkand. They had suffered a grievous blow: Klara's second baby, an infant girl, died during the journey. The separated members of the family finally managed to get in touch with each other via Zhenya's girliend in Pavlovskiy Posad, and aer a while the stragglers joined the rest of the family in Samarkand. Zhenya, who had completed seven-year middle school, enrolled in the Movie Technician's School. The city was divided into "new" and "old" sections. Leib and Malka lived with their adult daughter Klara, her husband, and their daughter Faya in "new" Samarkand. There were virtually no jobs and hence no workers' rations in Samarkand. In any case, the rations issued to "dependents"—even when redeemable, which was very rare—were too meager to survive on. Yet the family had to live somehow, so the 65-year-old Leib made money by buying things cheap and selling them for a little more. Jewish merchants have excelled at this kind of business throughout the world for ages, but unfortunately in Soviet times the practice was strictly illegal. Leib started selling homemade hard candy instead. In 1943, the authorities approached him and demanded that he pay taxes on his operation by a certain date. Leib replied that his children were at the war ont and he needed to feed his other children. The fine and overdue taxes were beyond his meager means. A few days later, the authorities came to the house, and ripped it apart looking for money. "All the women were crying," remembers Zhenya. "They cut into all of the furniture, pillows, and comforters. Feathers were flying everywhere." Malka urged him to move to another city. Instead Leib went into hiding by living with Zhenya, Lyubov, Rosa, Zina, and her daughter Raya in "old" Samarkand. One day Leib le his hiding place and went outside to get some water, as there were no water supplies in homes. He was betrayed, and was arrested right there on the street. That is the last time anyone ever saw him. The family believes he was kidnapped by the Soviet secret police. Leib was jailed without trial. Zina and Lyubov did everything possible to determine what happened to their father. Was he arrested for selling merchandise in the market without a license? Was he victimized Gulag (Russian: ГУЛАГ) refers to the branch of the secret police that operated the penal system of forced labor camps and associated detention and transit camps and prisons. While these camps housed criminals of all types, the Gulag system has become primarily known as a place for political prisoners and as a mechanism for repressing political opposition to the Soviet Union. Though it imprisoned millions, the name became familiar in the West only with the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago, which likened the scattered camps to a chain of islands. "Gulag" is an acronym, meaning Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei, or Main Camp Administration. Over time, the word Gulag has also come to signify not only the administration of the concentration camps but also the system of Soviet slave labor itself, in all its forms and varieties: labor camps, punishment camps, criminal and political camps, women's camps, children's camps, and transit camps. Even more broadly, "Gulag" has come to mean the Soviet repressive system itself, the set of procedures that prisoners once called the "meat- grinder": the arrests, interrogations, transport in unheated cattle cars, forced labor, destruction of families, years spent in exile, and the early and unnecessary deaths. Gulag Below: Lyubov and Klara Braverman in Moscow, 1949.

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