Maria Komarovskaya, her mother, Chaya-Beyla Komarovskaya, daughter Margarita, and father, Yakov Komarovsky

From left to right: my mother, Chaya-Beyla Komarovskaya (Bezprozvannaya), I, Maria Komarovskaya, with daughter Margarita, and my father, Yakov Komarovsky. The photo was made in 1958 at a hospital where my father was taken care of, in Kiev. My father, Yakov Chaimovich Komarovsky, was born in Kiev in 1897. My father left the home early. He took part in the civil war. He was making his own life. During the civil war he fought somewhere in the south of Ukraine. After the civil war my father passed high school exams and entered the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. He was able to learn there for three years. But the time was hard, he had two small children and had to provide for the family, so he had to quit studies and think of earning money. I think he entered the Institute in around 1925. My father worked as a chief accountant at the printing shop of the People's Commissariat of the Interior. It was considered a very prestigious job. When arrests began at the end of the 1930-s, my father was very afraid that he might be arrested. I remember he would come home sad from work, worried; he talked to my mother in whisper a lot but would not tell me anything. Many people around us were arrested; we even had a new term - "the enemy of the nation". Fortunately, arrests did not touch our family. I only remember worrisome talk about somebody from our house who was arrested. It happened very often because our house was big and many people lived in our yard. My father, Yakov Komarovsky, returned from the war as an invalid. After the war he worked for some time as an accountant, but then he retired. He died in Kiev in 1975. My mother died soon after him - in 1980. In 1953 I married Naum Iosifovich Polyak. We studied at the same institute but at different courses - my husband came to the institute from the army and graduated one year after me Our living conditions were poor. We lived in one room with parents, my husband and then my baby. Then we also hired a nanny because somebody had to watch the baby when we were gone. So, all these 6 people lived in one 15-meter room. In 1954 our daughter Margarita was born and in 1959 - our second daughter Yevgenia. My husband and I read Jewish papers, go to the Jewish charity "Khesed" center, and receive free meals and other kinds of help. It is certainly a great pity that we are beginning to identify ourselves with the Jews so late, but it is probably a destiny typical to the Jews of my generation in this country.