Bella Bogdanova

This is me as a worker at the VEF (State Electrotechnical Factory). The photo was taken in Riga in 1947.

After the war I couldn't study any more and I didn’t want to either. I had to earn money for bread. I was young. I wanted to enjoy myself, to dance.

I knew that I would work at VEF. I didn’t plan to return to Liepaja. Who was I going to look for there? There was that man in the plant’s personnel department, he seemed to have suffered a lot from the Germans as well, so I told him who I was, and he gave me an order for a place at a hostel. They refused to issue a passport to me, but preferred to prolong the temporary identification every three months. A few times I was summoned to security bodies and asked, ‘Why did you survive?’

I started to work at the big VEF factory. I worked on the large telephony equipment for 40 years and in one brigade for 29 years! And my husband, Serapion Bogdanov, also worked at VEF.