Lena said: Let's go to my mother, she is waiting for me after matins.

That's how I came to church. Everything else is clear to you even without my story.

About Fr. Arsenius. Two years ago, we came to him for the first time through Lena Mother, and now I go and go, each time taking away from him the incomparable joy of comprehending the faith, instruction and guidance on how a believer should live in our modern society.

I wrote my story to you in one long evening, I wrote it, forcing myself to remember the past, although it is not so past, Lena and I have been married for only four years. Yuri

KORSUN-YERSHI

In 1932, I, Yulia and Sonya were arrested. In those years, they mainly took believers, or, as they called it then, churchmen.

The three of us came to Fr. Arseny as girls, at the time of my arrest I was 23, Yulia and Sonya were 24 years old. They were friends and were everywhere together in church, on visits, in theaters, trips, museums.

We sat in one cell in Butyrki, the cell was large, about forty people, almost all the churchmen and, mostly, young people. They held him for three weeks, summoned him twice to the investigator, summoned him for the third time, and read out the sentence of exile from Moscow for four years. The sentence was strange, everyone was sentenced to three years of exile, the next step was a camp. They released her and offered to go to Arkhangelsk, and there, they said, they would assign a place of residence. I was a fourth-year student at a medical institute, Yulia worked at a factory as a seamstress, and Sonya worked as a draftswoman in some design bureau.

At home, crying, mom and dad rushed to fuss, begging, but everything turned out to be fruitless, the same was with Yulia and Sonya. Ten days later we left for Arkhangelsk and arrived without incident. They came to the NKVD, gave us a referral to the district center, the name of which we had not heard before.

We climbed up the Northern Dvina for two hundred kilometers, got from the pier on horseback and ended up in our district center. While we were traveling on the steamer, we saw that there was hunger all around, the shops were empty, bread was not sold, only clamps, arches and tracks were hanging. On the way, they ate what they took with them from Moscow.

After much persuasion, they allowed us to spend the night in the corridor of the peasant's house, in the morning we went to the district department. Whispered conversations, rumors are some more terrible than others. We came to the commissioner, it was the turn of the exiles. Shouting, swearing, swearing, just don't beat me. Some for logging, some for rafting or building roads, everyone indiscriminately: men, women, young people, old people. It's scary, we pray to ourselves.

We approached, submitted documents, we wanted to say something. He looked sideways and started shouting at a contra, a prostitute, and through the word obscenity.

Yulia is tall, beautiful, a real Russian beauty, I looked at her and almost began to beat her. He shouts: Bastard! I've eaten up on workers' food!

I took the documents and went somewhere. In the queue they say: Girls, they will send you to the forest, to death, and you, tall, to the boss in bed (this is about Yulia).