Braine Perlman

This is my husband's mother Braine Perlman. I only know her by this photograph. During the war Braine stayed in Saldus. She did not want to evacuate. Braine and her daughter Mary's family were killed during the Holocaust. I don't know whether they were killed by Germans or Latvians. This photo was taken in Saldus in the 1910s.

My husband Iosif Perlman was born in Saldus, Latvia, in 1901. His father's name was Leizer Perlman, and his mother's name was Braine. I don't know what his father did for a living, but his mother was a housewife.

There were seven children in the family. I don't remember his older brother's name. He moved to Palestine in the late 1910s. Then there were daughters Sofia and Mary, sons Henrich, Benno, Zvi and my future husband Iosif, the youngest in the family. Their family was a religious Jewish family. The boys studied in cheder till the age of 13, when they had their bar mitzvah. All children finished a gymnasium. During the tsarist time Sofia and her father moved to Moscow. Sofia was going to enter the Moscow University, and her father went with her to support her there. However, they had no opportunity to return to Latvia due to the revolution in Russia, when Latvia became an independent state in 1918. Residents of the Soviet Russia were not allowed to travel to Latvia or even correspond with their relatives. They stayed in Moscow and did not see the rest of their family before 1940, when Latvia was annexed to the Soviet Union. Iosif and his brother Henrich went to visit them there. 

When the war began, Iosif's family didn’t want to evacuate. Henrich, his older brother, went to the Territorial Army, and from there he joined the Latvian division. The rest of the family ended up in the ghetto: Iosif's mother, his sister Mary and her family, Henrich's children, Henrich's wife and two children and Benno and his family. Iosif's father Leizer Perlman died in Moscow in 1941, shortly before the war began. He was buried at the Vostriakovskoye Jewish cemetery in Moscow. The rest of the family have no graves. There is only a memorial at the place where they were shot.