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This is me, Gherda Kagan, with my parents Raisa Zivik-Kagan and Isaac Kagan. This photo was made in Odessa in 1932.
My parents got married on 11 November 1929, a year before my mother finished her college, on my father's birthday. During my parents' lifetime this day was a major family holiday. After they got married my father went to work at a big factory of tinned food in Tiraspol in 1929. My mother stayed in Odessa, but she often visited my father in Tiraspol. My mother finished her college in 1930. At that time my father was arrested in Tiraspol. He was arrested for being a favorite student of his professor related to 'Prompartia' ('the Industrial Party') [The trial in the end of 1930 wherein the group of engineers were accused of creating anti-Soviet illegal organization.]. The professor was executed and my father managed to survive. He was transferred to a jail in Odessa. They began investigation and half a year later my father was released. Through this period he never had a chance to notify his mother or wife where he was. After my father was arrested my mother went to her sister Yulia in Moscow. My mother worked in 'Selkhozgiz' publishing office in Moscow illustrating agricultural books. She had a hard life in Moscow. There was a coupon system. When my father was released he came to Mother in Moscow. In Moscow he managed to find a job in the people's committee of Food Industry. My father worked there few months. Since he hated routine paperwork he requested a transfer to another job. They sent him to Leningrad where the newly weds settled down in my father sister Clara's apartment.
I was born in Leningrad in 1932. My grandmother Esphir came to Leningrad to take us back home. Being three weeks old I was taken to Odessa in a basket for chemical containers with a lid. When axle boxes in the train caught fire I was handed from one carriage to another in the basket that had turned upside down, as it turned out.
