Liana Degtiar and her husband Ivan Barbul in the registry office

Liana Degtiar and her husband Ivan Barbul in the registry office

This is me and my husband Ivan Barbul in the registry office - this was our wedding. The photo was taken in Kishinev in 1962. My husband was born into a religious Jewish family in Rezina in 1929. His name was Isaac Rybakov then. During the war, Ivan's parents and four younger children were taken at first to Odessa. They couldn't evacuate from there. Ivan's parents, Betia, Riva and Shmil, perished in the camp in Bogdanovka. Isaac managed to escape from Bogdanovka and returned to the ghetto in Odessa. He escaped several times from the spots of mass shootings. He took hiding under various names, worked as a shepherd in the Ukrainian village of Gandrabury, Ananiev district, Odessa region. In 1943 Ivan Ilich Barbul, a local villager, and his wife Agafia adopted him. They gave him their family name and named him Ivan. In 1944, immediately after Odessa was liberated, Ivan's adoptive father was recruited to the Soviet army. He perished near Iasi. Ivan stayed in Gandrabury and finished secondary school. Ivan graduated from the Faculty of Mathematics of Kishinev Pedagogical College. He worked as a mathematics teacher in the village of Raspopeny and later became director of a school. We met and began to correspond. When Ivan visited Kishinev we spent time together. In summer 1961 we took a boat from Odessa to the Crimea. We arrived at Yalta and then traveled all over the Crimea. We stayed in Gurzuf, took two days climbing mountains, walked to Alushta and went to Yevpatoria. In May 1962 we got married. We had a civil ceremony in the registry office. My colleagues came to congratulate me. They gave us a vacuum cleaner for our wedding. They came to the registry office with this vacuum cleaner in a huge box. I didn't want a big wedding. Even my parents didn't come on this day. We went home from the registry office and made a 'bedlam' there: we laid the table, there was a lot of noise, it was fun. During the following week our relatives and older acquaintances came to congratulate us. Then we went to Soroki where my parents invited their acquaintances.
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