Abram Kopelovich after WWII

This is my photo, taken in Vitebsk in 1949. The school I went to was kind of an elite secondary school. The Physics teacher was the first person to be awarded the order of Lenin in Belarus. The Russian teacher was in the circle of Vladimir Mayakovsky. My friend, Nikolay Tishechkin, became a people's actor of Belarus. There were lots of other Jewish kids in my class and there were no national issues whatsoever. Everyone was a member of the Komsomol, or a Communist pioneer. I had to hide in school the fact that at home we were religious and celebrated religious holidays. I graduated from the Moscow Polygraphic Institute. I was admitted the first year when Jews were accepted, in 1955. The supervisor of our school treated Jews very well, she told me, ?Don't you think that you are not going to be admitted because you are a Jew!?- It was a strong statement then. She was Russian or Latvian, I think.