Esfir Berman

This is Esfir Berman, nee Gitina, my mother's younger sister. The picture was taken in Krivoy Rog in 1932. Esfir sent this picture to my mother as a keepsake. I don't know anything about the education of my mother and her siblings. There was no Jewish school in Ingulets where the family lived. Aunt Esfir survived the war. She was a very beautiful and energetic woman. After getting married she lived in Krivoy Rog with her husband. Her husband worked in the mine and she was a medical assistant in the medical office of the mine. When the mobilization began, Esfir's husband was drafted into the army, and Esfir went in the lines as a volunteer to work as a medical assistant in the medical platoon. When the squad where Esfir was enrolled went through Krivoy Rog they were besieged by the Germans. Esfir was sheltered by her acquaintance, a Ukrainian guy, who had worked at the mine before the war. She stayed in his cellar during the period of the siege. That man brought her food and water. At night Esfir came out of the cellar for a little bit. Later on in Krivoy Rog there were more checks carried out by the Germans and the Polizei. Then the daughter of the man who sheltered Esfir gave her peasant clothes and a head kerchief, and took her to her relatives in a village, because it was safer there. Esfir, wearing a peasant kerchief, wasn't detained by the German patrol. When our troops liberated Krivoy Rog, Esfir came back in the lines and stayed there until the end of the war. When she was demobilized she returned to Krivoy Rog. Her husband also came back from the lines. They didn't have children and Esfir adopted the two children of her sister Manya, who was shot by Germans. She raised her niece and nephew, Natalia and Julius. Julius immigrated to France in the 1970s. Esfir died in Krivoy Rog last year.