Iosif Nemizansky

This is my husband Iosif. He is 39 years old here. The photo was taken in 1951 in Leningrad.

In 1958 I married Iosif Lipovich Nemizansky, everybody called him Iosif Lvovich. He was also a Jew. He was born in 1912 in Nevel. His father came from Nevel. His name was Lipa Nemizansky and I don’t know what his occupation was. His mother’s name was Rakhil, she came from a small Latvian town, Vendan. Her father was a local rabbi and her family was very wealthy. When Lipa and Rakhil got married, they lived in Nevel at first and later moved to Leningrad. My husband had a brother, but he died before the war.

My second husband was not a religious Jew either, like many Jews in Leningrad at that time. Iosif graduated from Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, the Faculty of Metallurgy, and had been working for many years at the open-hearth shop of Kirovsky plant. During the war the family stayed in besieged Leningrad. My husband’s father starved to death during the blockade and was buried in a common grave at the Jewish cemetery. Iosif continued to work at Kirovsky plant until it was evacuated to Chelyabinsk. Both he and his mother, completely dystrophic, were taken out of the city. His mother died right after the war.

I didn’t meet my husband’s parents; I saw them only on photographs. According to the photos, they were beautiful people, very elegantly dressed. My husband, their son, was also a very handsome man. He was twelve years older than me; we lived in harmony for 22 years. We adored each other and called each other only by endearing names: Iosinka, Tanechka. He suffered from infectious polyarthritis. He once caught a flu, and this polyarthritis was an aftereffect. Half of our life I dedicated to taking care of my husband. He continued working at Kirovsky plant, already sick. He had a position of the open-hearth shop manager at that plant.