Arnold Fabrikant with his fiancee Nathalia Yampolskaya

This is me with my fiancee Nathalia Yampolskaya. This photo was taken in Odessa on 1st May 1947. I was photographed wearing my uniform since I didn't have any civilian clothes. Natasha is wearing her only single suit and shoes with wooden soles. We are standing by the bronze figure of a lion in the town garden on Deribasovskaya Street. Until spring 1946 I continued my military service in Grodno in Belarus, and in April I came to Odessa on leave. I came to meet with my future wife Natasha Yampolskaya. We had known each other since childhood. We had studied in the same school where she was a Komsomol leader, only she lived in a different district. The Yampolskiy family was in evacuation in Stavropol and then in Stalinabad, in Tajikistan. In evacuation Nathalia studied three years at medical college. The Yampolskiy family was miserably poor after returning from the evacuation. They were allowed to live in the medical college, in a small room near the bacteriological laboratory in which they were breeding guinea pigs and where the smell was disgusting. After demobilization I finally returned to Odessa in September 1946. Admission to colleges was over and I entered the spirit department of the Food Industry Technical School. When I finished it Nathalia was working on her mandatory job assignment in a small mining town near Voroshylovgrad. When I was a last-year student I did my practical training at the vodka factory in Voroshylovgrad. We registered our marriage on the eve of 1st May 1948.