Fania Brantsovskaya and Mikhail Brantsovskiy

Fania Brantsovskaya and Mikhail Brantsovskiy

Here I am with my husband Mikhail Brantsovskiy on vacation in Palanga in the early 1950s. The man on the right is a casual passer-by. After the war I finished the technical school of statistics and in April 1945 I became a statistical analyst in the Central Statistical Department of Lithuania. I worked there till I retired. I was promoted to personnel manager, and then became chief of the registration department. In 1945 the factory where my husband was working burnt down. We were very concerned that my husband might get in trouble. There were many people taken to jail for sabotage or negligence. Fortunately, my husband's investigation officer from the NKVD happened to be a decent man. He knew my husband was not to blame. My husband went to work as chief of department in the Lithuanian Industrial Council and then worked as chief of Department of State Planning of Lithuania for 25 years. He finished Moscow Institute of Engineering and Economics extramurally. We joined the Communist Party following our convictions. We joined it very consciously. We were given two rooms in a four-room apartment. In 1950 my first daughter, Vita was born in this apartment. This name means 'life' in Latin. This was what my husband and I valued to the utmost and what we paid a high price for. In 1956 we received a separate apartment in Gorkogo Street. This was one of the first houses with central heating in Vilnius. It was very cold in the first year. In 1958 my second daughter was born. We named her Dina after my husband's mother. The children went to a nursery school and a kindergarten. They had no grandmothers to help us raise them. My husband held official posts and earned well, but my salaries were rather low. My husband could have free stays in recreation homes each year. I bought a trip from trade unions and went with him. We usually traveled to Palanga, a resort on the Baltic Sea, and once I went to the Caucasus with him, but the hot climate there was too much for me.
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