Ilia Rozenfeld’s wife Yelena Rozenfeld and son Alexandr Rozenfeld

My wife Yelena Rozenfeld with my son Alexandr Rozenfeld , on son's birthday in Kiev in 1951.

1940s were beautiful years of my youth, when I had many friends. We went to operetta and opera theaters, and to concerts of symphonic and classical music in the Pervomayskiy Garden. We often gathered in one apartment, and once my friends sent me to a girl living nearby to pick up a record player from her. I liked the girl and invited her to join us. So I met my future wife Yelena Mestechkina. Yelena was born to a common, traditional and I would say religious Jewish family in Kiev in 1924. Her grandfather Iosif Mestechkin and her grandmother and her father's brothers perished in Babi Yar. Yelena, her father and mother were in the evacuation. In 1947, when we met, she was finishing the Kiev Medical College. We dated for few months and got married in the same year of 1947. We had a family dinner party and there was one guest: Yelena's cousin brother from Moscow. Even my parents couldn't come from Poltava - this was a hard time. They sent us a greeting telegram.

We moved into my wife parents' small two-bedroom apartment in a two-storied wooden house in 32, Artyoma Street. There were water supply and a toilet in the yard. He house was heated with a stove consuming huge quantities of deficit wood. Yelena and I shared a very small room and her parents and 7-year-old younger sister Zhanna slept in the living room.

On that day in August 1947, when we registered our marriage in a registry office, Yelena went to her first job in the laboratory of the Podol district hospital where she worked for 50 years from then on. In 1949 our son Alexandr was born. He grew up like all Soviet children: he went to a nursery school, kindergarten, and school and spent his vacations in pioneer camps.