Golda Tsyrulnik and Lyova Slobodskoy with Komsomol members

Golda Tsyrulnik and Lyova Slobodskoy with Komsomol members

This is a group picture of the first Komsomol members in Kiev. In the lower row on the right is my aunt Golda Fridelevna Tsyrulnik, my mother's sister. First on the right in the upper row is my uncle Lyova Zelmanovich Slobodskoy, my father's brother.
I don't have any information about the other people in the picture. The picture was taken in Skwira, in 1926 by photographer L.B. Popel, Skvyra, Lenin Street.

My father's younger brother, Lyova, was born in 1908. He was a very active Komsomol member, one of the organizers of the Komsomol unit in Skvyra. He died at the front in Ukraine during World War II. My mother's sister, Aunt Golda, was also an active Komsomol member.

We knew very well what was going on in the 1930s because Aunt Golda's husband, Semyon Novobratskiy, was repressed. He was raised in an orphanage, and he was promoted in the Party and was a delegate of the Congress and Party organization in Vorontsovo-Gorodische. And he was a Jew. Once they came and took him away. When they took him to their office an NKVD employee said to him, 'You understand, Semyon, that I can't do anything. All I can do is to allow you make a phone call'. He called my father immediately.

Aunt Golda - she was also a party member - was a woman with a strong character. She went there, put her party membership card on the table and said that if her husband was an 'enemy of the people' she couldn't be a party member, and left. Late in the evening an acquaintance of theirs came and said, 'Leave immediately'. My father went there and took her to Kiev right away. There they separated. My aunt and her younger son were in Belaya Tserkov at her brother Gershl's, her second oldest son stayed with us and her older daughter was in Dnepropetrovsk. My aunt changed her name but she was afraid all her life and kept it a secret. She always took on minor jobs as a cleaning woman or something the like because she was afraid of being recognized. However she was summoned to the authorities during the rehabilitation. They told her that her husband had been rehabilitated and that she would receive compensation. She replied that she wouldn't accept anything for her husband. She took the certificate and left. But she was on the lists for an apartment and she received it promptly, strangely enough.

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