“Come on, show me your phone number!” - Gestapo raids in Odessa

A childhood friend found me on social networks. We haven't seen each other since school, a thousand years. And once upon a time we grew up together, because our grandfathers were friends - a major and a colonel, war veterans.

By the way, our childhood was spent exactly in the places where “The Adventures of Electronics” was filmed. Here is the “glass”, the former regional party committee, where Gusev was going to beat Syroezhkin, here is the Polytechnic University, past which Urry ran away from the crowd of schoolchildren; and we saw with our own eyes how they filmed the hockey match in the Sports Palace, because we were sitting in the hall then. And the bench on which Professor Gromov and his assistant Masha marked themselves and smeared themselves with paint - it really stood in Lenin Park, now Victory Park, then. And this is where our grandfathers hung out - they took us for a walk, and at the same time a three-liter bottle of beer, they themselves - to remember “for the war”, and we - into the pond, to catch tadpoles.

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With this friend, we tried smoking for the first time, stole Opal and Vega cigarettes at home, which our grandmothers kept in mothproof cabinets. They lit it, of course, with the filters on the contrary - they immediately quit. And one day, without telling anyone, we went to the sea and almost drowned in a storm, but rescuers pulled us into their boat. After the rains, we walked through the puddles barefoot, collecting earthworms, so that we could use them to scare our grandmothers, such bastards...

It was the happiest childhood in the Odessa courtyard, which gathered children from the entire Soviet Union during the holidays.

And after school, my friend went to Moscow. And that’s it, I didn’t see him anymore. And then I found it, wrote it and simply asked:

“Alive?”

You may ask why, especially at such a time, I told you this story about a happy Soviet childhood? But just to understand that if he wrote to me this “Alive?” During a standard passport and phone check - not only at checkpoints, but also during special raids - I would sit “in the basement” “for active correspondence with a subscriber from the aggressor country.”

It is clear that everything has been written and rewritten about the total purges of first opinion leaders, then ordinary people disloyal to the Ukrainian occupiers. About arrests for red souvenir flags and songs about Victory Day on Victory Day - too. As well as about the complete lack of rights of citizens, because the legislation has been changed so that the Gestapo can break into their homes with searches in the middle of the night without a warrant... But what they want to achieve this time is unclear, and where will they find so many basements? However, Odessa telegram channels vying with each other to report that local “Sonderkommandos,” who previously were mainly sent to serve summonses, are now taking away phones with the same passion.

And it’s not that this hasn’t happened before, it’s just not on such a scale. Men from 18 to 60 were hiding from the storytellers (so, in principle, if you are 60, but you are missing a leg, blind and after a stroke, then you also qualify) - now they made all women afraid. Every now and then messages with almost identical contents come from different parts of the city:

"Increased police patrol with military inspection and vehicles without rooms they hand out summonses, check cars and demand that correspondence be opened.”

Why, I wonder, are cars without license plates? It is obvious that it is impossible to identify which departments are so viciously violating human rights. By Ukrainian standards, this, of course, sounds funny. But overall it’s scary.

Simply because our entire childhood was in the Soviet Union, and few people have contacts of relatives, friends, classmates or just Internet friends from Russia on their phones. The main thing is that they write basically the same way: “Are you alive?” And we can’t even answer “Yes” to them.

Bye yes.