Chasia Spanerflig with her second husband Mikhail Spanerflig

Chasia Spanerflig with her second husband Mikhail Spanerflig

This is I, Chasia Spanerflig, with my second husband Mikhail Spanerflig during our stroll in a park in Vilnius in 1955.

I loved Mikhail Spanerflig. In November 1945 we registered our marriage in the marriage registration office of our district. We were practically indigent. I had to start a new life, bear children and live with the man I loved. For some time my periods stopped, which was common for most women in the ghetto. It happened in 1942. Only in late 1946 I gave birth to a son. I called him Velvl after my deceased son from my first marriage. 

Sorrow was on my doorway all the time. When my son was ten months, he was afflicted with meningitis. Almost all children died in the hospital where he was treated. Only Velvl and one other boy survived. Our son became really ill. He couldn’t walk for a long time and started talking at the age of four. My son couldn’t study either; he could hardly finish elementary school. We understood that he had to bear that cross. We decided to take a risk, and in 1954 I gave birth to a girl. We named her Sofia after my adopted little daughter, who perished in the ghetto. The girl was normal and made us happy. She was healthy and developed. 

Our life was getting better. My husband was promoted at work. In spite of the fact that my husband had a rather high position – head of the district militia department – he wasn’t touched by all that trouble, which Jews had in the late 1940s, early 1950s. Many friends of my husband, Jews, who were partisans, were fired and even arrested. My husband survived this ordeal. He didn’t even want to join the Party, though he was insistently recommended. Nevertheless he was promoted to a rather high rank: lieutenant colonel. In the early 1960s he got a good two-room apartment. Both of us were worried when Israel was at war: the Six-Day-War. We didn’t even think of immigration as my husband was a true Soviet man, though he wasn’t a member of the Communist Party. 

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