Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

=== Assistant: Very good—we now move into the postwar Soviet Union, where repression begins to thaw... ===
Very good—we now move into the postwar Soviet Union, where repression begins to thaw... but only after one final, terrible freeze.

Between 1948 and 1953, Stalin embarked on a new wave of antisemitic purges, culminating in the infamous “Doctor’s Plot.” But after his death in 1953, the machinery he built began to stall. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviet Union cracked open—slightly—permitting cautious speech, limited cultural experimentation, and even the rehabilitation of some of its own victims.

For the Gershovitz family, this decade marked the end of survival as an organizing principle. Now, they faced the harder question: how to live again.