This is my mother Ida Lifshytz (nee Pinchusovich). This photograph was taken shortly before my mother died, in Kharkov in 1940. We received it after my mother passed away.
My mother's family lived in Kherson in the east of Ukraine [500 km from Kiev]. My mother and her two sisters were born there. My mother Ida was born in 1915. In the late 1920s her family moved to Kharkov.
I do not know the history of acquaintance of my parents, I was too small, when my mum died and I didn’t have time to ask her anything. I know only, that my parents got married in 1933 in Kharkov. It was an ordinary wedding of their time: they registered their marriage in a registry office and in the evening they had a small dinner. My father received a room in a communal apartment from his plant and my parents moved in there. I was born on 20 July 1934 in Kharkov. From the time I remember I lived with my grandmother Maria, my mother's mother. My mother was always ill: she had a congenital heart disease. My mother couldn't take care of me and my grandmother was raising me.
I saw my mother rarely, only when my grandmother took me there visiting. In 1940 doctors offered my mother to have a surgery in Kiev. Heart surgeries were just beginning to be performed. My father was going to take a vacation, accompany my mother to Kiev and wait there until she could go back home. Regretfully, it didn't happen this way. My mother died shortly before she was to go to Kiev in 1940. My father was a member of the Party and a Jewish funeral was out of the question. My mother was cremated and buried in the town cemetery in Kharkov.
