Zoya Torgovets and others in Roza Levenberg's Komsomol group in school

This picture shows the Komsomol group that was in our school. My close friend Zoya Torgovets is in the front row, center. Another classmate, Leonid Movshovich, is also in the picture. As a girl, I was an Octobrist, then I became a pioneer, then I turned into into a fanatic Komsomol member. We had a Komsomol group, and we would get together at someone's home on Sunday to study the Comunist Manifesto. Very often we would meet at Zoya Torgovets's place; she was the daughter of the town Prosecutor. In the late thirties her father was transferred to Moscow. He was arrested in 1937 and shot. The authorities tried to get us to have Zoya expelled from the Komsomol. Not one single person voted for it, so the leadership of the Komsomol District Committee had her expelled her during our vacations. They also took away her apartment and gave her a little room instead. Her neighbors in this apartment were tormenting her ? they didn't allow her to come into the house. But she managed to finish school with excellent grades and went to Moscow to enter the Moscow Literature Institute. She wasn?t accepted, though, as she was daughter of an 'enemy of the people.' During the war Zoya went to the front as a volunteer and was a machine gunner on the front line. She was wounded and her hand was permanently disabled. After the war she came back to Moscow and completed her studies in the journalism department at the University. She died in the late nineties. Lyolia Movshovich was a very interesting boy. He came to Kiev from France and never said anything about himself. They didn't want to admit him into Komsomol, because his father was in France. Then they received a telephone call from somewhere? and Lyolia was admitted. His father turned out to be our Intelligence officer in France. Lyolia Movshovich died during the war. At school we organized parties dedicated to the Soviet holidays ? May 1, and the anniversary of the October Revolution. We also had a singing and dancing group. We all enjoyed performances where we sang joyful Soviet songs. And we never gave a thought to why people all around us were arrested and disappeared. It was not proper to talk about it at that time -- and to think about it was terrifying.