Ella Lukatskaya’s mother's sister Rosalia Smertenko
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Rosalia (Rachel) Smertenko, my aunt, my mother's sister. Photo made in Kiev in 1915.
I know very little about the life of my grandmother's children. There were two other girls after Max, the oldest boy. The name of one of the girls was Hanna, and I don't know the name of the other girl. They left for Palestine in 1912-14. We've never heard from them since then. Rosa, another sister of my mother, her favorite sister, died in Kiev in 1918 from Spanish smallpox. We have pictures of her two brothers Semyon (Shymon) born in 1885 (he perished during the civil war) and Shmuel, born in 1900.
