One day, the director summoned me. Entering her office, I saw another man there—a fat, squat, middle-aged Jew. Like all natives of the Altai region, I easily recognized these alien newcomers who had flooded and overrun our land. Their curly, sheepish hair, dark, yellowish skin, and, most importantly, their eyes, filled with hidden meaning—disdainful, crooked, dishonest—in short, NON-RUSSIAN eyes, bulging, dark brown, under pitch-black eyebrows—made one wary and wary of some kind of trick, some kind of nastiness.

With the outbreak of war, Siberia was flooded with Jews fleeing from areas occupied by German troops. Only much later did I learn that they were fleeing to avoid wholesale extermination. They must have really gotten under the Germans' skin, for them to have decided on such a desperate action. But one must be amazed at the shamelessness, insolence, and tenacity of this nation. Having flooded our Siberian cities, where they felt safe, they quickly appropriated all the best state-owned houses and apartments, forcing Russian families to crowd and compact themselves to better accommodate their numerous servants. Like voracious, hungry locusts, insatiable in their greed, they pounced on all sources of existence: instantly, all food warehouses, flour mills, and other food-producing establishments, closed cafeterias, and secret food distributors fell into their hands. Russians were forced to forget even the concept of such delicacies as milk, meat, and eggs. All of these became the exclusive property of the Jews. Their women—black-haired, hook-nosed, and predatory—scurried through secret establishments, carrying off in their purses, hiding from the hungry eyes of the native Russian population, white bread, butter, and pots of dinner from unknown, secret kitchens. And this was despite the fact that the Russian population, the masters of this land, had nothing but a meager ration of surrogate bread rationed on ration cards: 300 grams per day for a dependent (i.e., mostly children), 500 grams for those working in industry. The rural population, the inhabitants of Russian villages and hamlets, did not receive a single gram of bread. In general, for some reason, the Jewish authorities always treated the Russian rural population with particular bias, with particular hatred. And during the war, the famine in the Russian countryside was such that it seemed as if our Jewish authorities had decided to completely eradicate, exterminate, and starve the Russian peasantry to death through a merciless plague. This plague was especially terrible because the rural residents, remaining after the mass repressions during the dispossession of the kulaks and collectivization, were completely defenseless against the arbitrary rule of their insolent rulers. A city dweller, simply by virtue of being a city dweller, is always more developed, more flexible, and better able to adapt to changing circumstances. Moreover, he has a certain amount of room to maneuver. But what was left for a villager after his land, horse, and cow had been taken from him? Darkness, ignorance, a complete lack of understanding of what was happening, and disgusting, mendacious propaganda aggravated the yoke of slavery. Hunger and terror reigned all around, and people were paralyzed with fear. There, at the front, Russia bled to death in the fight against an external enemy; here, in the rear, the internal enemy, like vampires, sucked the last of its lifeblood from it. There, behind the front lines, the German Wehrmacht systematically and mercilessly implemented the "final solution to the Jewish question"—cleansing the land of this worthless, parasitic tribe. Here, in the depths of Russia,Where the Jews took refuge from the threat approaching them, they, rapaciously clinging to the throat of the Russian people, greedily devoured everything that this people produced, as if striving to be satiated with earthly goods before their final destruction.