Gisya Rubinchik's husband Pavel Rubinchik with his friend

This is my husband, Pavel Rubinchik (on the left), as senior lieutenant with his friend, whose name I don?t know. The picture was taken during World War II. I didn't know my future husband at the time. I got acquainted with Pavel, a Jew, at a friend's home. He came from Bryansk region, from the settlement of Zhukovka. He was an engineer, fought at the Leningrad front and was wounded. His wife was evacuated to Kuibyshev during the war, fell in love with another man there and left Pavel. After the war he worked as chief engineer at a Leningrad factory called Weaver. I got married in 1945. We had no wedding celebration at all. What kind of wedding party would it have been anyway, in 1945, after everything that we had gone through?! My husband was 13 years older than me, he had two daughters from his first marriage, and he missed them a lot. His first wife wrote that she couldn't cope with the older daughter, and that he should take her into his new family. He persuaded me. I agreed and cried because of her behavior every other day. His daughter was very spiteful, disliked me and was jealous of her father. We lived in a communal apartment, two rooms were occupied by my husband's relatives. Then we moved to another flat. Our son, Misha, was born in 1947. The delivery was terrible. My son was born disabled. From that moment my excruciating torment began. I corresponded with Academician Filatov and addressed other prominent medical specialists, but my son remained completely helpless. He sees nothing, hears nothing and cannot speak. And he had a bulk of other diseases. How horrible it was in a shared flat with the ill child! How our neighbor scoffed at us! It was another, terrible blow to me when my husband died in 1968. I buried him in the Jewish cemetery.