Semyon Tilipman and his wife Tatiana Tilipman with friends

This is me Semyon Tilipman (first from left standing), my wife Tatiana Tilipman first from left, sitting), my friend Konstantin Shendera and his wife Anastasia. This photo was taken in Radebeul, in Germany, in 1947.

After the Great Patriotuc War I stayed to continue my military service in Radebeul near Dresden in the communications department in the army headquarters. In autumn 1945 I got a two-week leave. I went to visit my wife Tatiana and her parents in Turkestan. On my way back I took her back to Minsk to finish her studies at the Medical College. After finishing it she joined me in Radebeul in 1946. Tatiana was involved in public activities in the women's council of the army. We still laugh that I was on battlefields while she shook hands with commander of the army Katukov. The highest rank I had to deal with during my service was a general, chief of communications while she had interface with the army commander. Many officers' wives came there. Kostia Shendera's wife was a shop assistant at the military department store. We were all friends.

I met Kostia Shendera in the very beginning of war. I was then chief of the telephone facility of a regiment at the Kalinin front. The chief of telegraph facility was Kostia Shendera. Kostia was Russian. We happened to have finished the same faculty in the same college, only we studied in different periods. He was a 5th-year student when I entered the college in 1933. We often recalled our college and common acquaintances. Once I recalled how we, 1st-year students went to work in the fields in Novaya Odessa in Nikolaev region in 1933. We got together in the evenings and sang and talked. I remembered a Ukrainian song that someone I didn't know sang: 'It snowed in the month of June when an old man fell in love with an old woman, cause he liked her…'. Kostia said 'I sang it'. After demobilization Kostia lived near Vinnitsa. I saw him at his 70th birthday in 1971 for the last time. He was a heavy man and suffered from hypertension. Tatiana and I were planning to come to his 75th birthday, but he died before.