Elena’s grandmother’s sister with her husband

My maternal granny's name was Sofia Samuelovna Landa (nee: Kalihman).

She was an uneducated woman, worked as a seamstress in her early years. Granny had two sisters: Ekaterina and Rebecca. Granny was almost twenty years older than her sisters. Most likely, her father lacked money to pay for her education.

When her sisters grew up a little he was rich enough to send the two of them to study. Ithis is the reason why my granny, the only one of the three sisters, didn't get a higher education. Unfortunately, I'm not aware of what Jewish traditions they followed and of things concerning their Jewish experiences.

At the Soviet regime it wasn't customary to talk about such things, and I wasn't told a word about this. Ekaterina was born in 1892. She had graduated from some institution of higher education [I don't know exactly, which one and when], became a lawyer, went to work to Leningrad.

In Leningrad she was a member of the Leningrad Bar of Lawyers and dealt with criminal cases. She was single. She had a lot of gold things and money.

In November 1941, at the time of blockade, she was murdered by neighbours and they got hold of all her valuables. Rebecca was born in Odessa in 1893. She graduated from a medical institute, in youth worked in choleraic barracks.

Then she became a specialist in virology and microbiology, and for many years was a senior scientist of the Institute of Vaccines and Serums in Moscow. She invented a whole series of vaccines, that saved lives of a great number of people.

Rebecca participated in creation of vaccines against spotted fever, typhoid; in the development of of gramizidine, by means of which they cure gas-gangrene.

On this photo are Revekka Samuelovna Mikhelson (maiden name Kalikhman), sister of my grandmother on mother's side (in the center), with her husband Grigorii Anatolevich Mikhelson (right) and daughter Tamara (left).

Tamara was born in 1920 , she graduated from Moscow University in the department of English Language and later finished graduate school. She defended her dissertation very well and became a candidate of Philology.

But she never worked anywhere except for an hourly worker (that is she was never on staff- however many lectures she gave that was what she was paid), because it was written in her passport that she was Jewish and because of this she was never considered staff.

She gave lectures in different institutes for students in Moscow and the Moscow region. Her daughter Natasha is a mathematician.

At the beginning of the war Yura was accepted into the Dzerzhinksy Leningrad Military-Naval Academy and during the war was evacuated with the rest of the academy to Baku.

After the war he graduated from the Moscow Auto-construction Institute and worked for some time at the Moskvich factory.

Then he was the director of a factory for the production of metal construction for hotbeds in Voronezh.