Anna Tarskaya

This is my wife Anna Tarskaya, nee Shamray. She gave me this photo shortly before our wedding. It was taken in Moscow in 1952. I met my wife, Anna Tarskaya, nee Shamrai, on a hiking tour in 1952, when I worked as a senior instructor for tourists. I had high skills in orientation and azimuth orientation. I was 27 then. I looked well, was a strong and quick young man. I had finished college and was chief of laboratory. I was chief of the whole tourist hiking base and I chose the prettiest girls and the strongest young men for my group. I liked my future wife Anna. She was a small, pretty slim girl, but very quick and business-like. We saw each other for a year until 1953, when I had to leave Moscow for Tajikistan. When I returned I thought Anna had forgotten me, though I remembered her. Anna was Russian, but nationality didn't matter to me. I called her and we met and began to see each other again. Then we got married in 1957. There was a big joyous wedding to which Anna's friends and my relatives and friends came, but of course, there were no Jewish or Russian traditions observed. Anna couldn't get a higher education because of the war. She worked at the bullet plant during the war. This was terrible work: they worked on the conveyor placing bullets into cases. Every day another girl lost her finger in an accident. Anna was accurate and hardworking. The NKVD office noticed her and sent her to a course of typewriting, stenography and German. She finished the course with honors and spoke fluent German. She was sent to Germany on an intelligence task at the end of the war. She worked for an organization purchasing and shipping out documentation and consumables of missile equipment. Their organization was disclosed and she saved them from execution by writing an explanatory note that those were outdated documents that had been shipped and lost. In Germany she worked for the Soviet Military administration and they didn't dismiss her for a long time as they were interested in her knowledge of all German office and bureaucratic rules. She returned to Russia in 1947. In Moscow she was chief of department 1 [secret] in an academic institute and later she became human resource manager. My parents and hers didn't mind that I was a Jew and she was Russian. My wife and I lived in harmony. After finishing school she went to study in Moscow College of Fine Chemical Technology. She studied in the evening department and went to work at daytime. After finishing the college she went to work at the academic institute. She worked well and was going to defend a dissertation of candidate of sciences when perestroika began. She began to receive a very low salary at the institute.