E.N. Did you have, in the family, people who were closer to you in spirit?

V.E. My grandfather, Pavel Efimovich Eremin, was the exact confessor of the Christian faith. Until 1927, he was, continuously for the course of twenty-three years, the church warden. In 1927, in the beginning of the first “anti-religious five years,” he visited on foot the villages of his relatives in the province and diocese of Samara, and gathered signatures which they, incidentally, gave sparingly. For that reason, he had to endure for the first time prison for four years (from 1930-1934), but in 1937 he received ten years without the right of correspondence. But, he was not shot. In 1947, literally a day before his release, he died in a camp on the day of the Exaltation of the Cross. Left over from him was our ancestral tradition that in those days freedom was worse than any camp. Therefore while living there, he steadily prayed for those surrounding him. And there the Lord strengthened him even though in every separation, they tore off his cross, and each night he cut himself a new one. So it happens that a Russian has from God a surprising ability not to despair and not to become depressed. Depression comes sooner to a dilettante soul. So there, they [the prisoners] exchanged addresses with their neighbors by bunk, of course from memory, and gave each other a message that whoever left earlier, would visit the other one’s family. It passed that the neighbor [of my grandfather] by bunk had a son, A Hero of the Soviet Union [an army hero], which gave freedom to the close relatives of these people by a personal order of Stalin. In the beginning of 1946, he [the neighbor] visited my grandmother, who is still living. It is exactly his testimony which we have maintained.