Gisya Rubinchik's son Misha Rubinchik

This is a picture of my son, Misha Rubinchik. He has been handicapped since childhood. I got married in 1945. I got acquainted with my husband, Pavel Abramovich Rubinchik, a Jew, at a friend's home. He came from Bryansk region, from the settlement of Zhukovka. He was an engineer. After the war he worked as chief engineer at a Leningrad factory called Weaver. 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. I moved to another flat with my son after the death of my husband. Some people helped me. The flat was hard to obtain. So many doors I had to knock at: the district party committee, the city department of national healthcare, and so on. I had to go through many hardships. I haven't left my home for as long as three years now, because of my illness. I'm almost blind. But when I think back of everything that I lived through, I consider myself a happy person. God saved my life, while all my folks were buried alive. Nothing remained of them, just a few photos survived by miracle.