This document is a marriage certificate of my parents, it was issued in 1934 in Kamyen (Belarus), when they have got married. They married in Belarus, therefore the certificate is filled in Belarussian language.
The history of acquaintance of my parents was very simple. Actually, they were related to each other. Avraham Shukhman, my mother's father had a sister, who was a wife of Mendel and mother of my father. I.e. my father's mother was a sister of Avraham Shukhman, my mother's father.
As a girl, she (my father's mother) also was Shukhman. They also became related the following way: Bassya, a daughter of my father's mother, was brought up in the family of my mother's father. And certainly, brothers often visited their sister Bassya in that family, they all were like relatives.
So my father, visiting his sister Bassya, fell in love with my mum, and so did my mum; and their relatives could not dissuade them from this. So against all dissuasions, they decided to get married. By that time my daddy was already a professional soldier, and they went to Belarus to get married. I keep their marriage certificate.
It happened in 1934, and I was born in 1935. I do not know if they had a real Jewish wedding or the wedding was secular. As far as I remember, my parents were not religious and did not stick to Jewish traditions.
In the 1930s traditional way of life became the past, especially in families of the Red Army commanders. Before marriage, mother worked as a seamstress and after marriage father made her stay at home, because a salary of an officer allowed it.
Father served in Levashevo [a village in the northern suburbs of Leningrad] at that time. Mother had only primary education and finished seamstress courses, but being a wife of a commander, she was considered a 'woman-commander' in the military unit.
She was involved in public business and was always busy. I remember how they often left me alone when I was small, and I even remember how I cried. They closed me in the room, I cried for some time and fell asleep.
Having got married, my parents lived in Ossinovaya Roscha. We lived there happily. There were four of us: mother, father, me and my brother Mikhail, who was born on December 20th, 1939.
We moved to Ossinovaya Roscha almost before the others, the military camp was under construction at that time, and their house was still damp, when they moved in. Our family occupied two rooms in one of the apartments.
There was also a small room near the kitchen, where father's aide-de-camp lived. We also had two neighbors, also military men, but I know nothing about them. And in this house we lived until 1941, when the war burst out.
When the war broke out, father left for the frontline with his unit on the first day. His unit was already mobilized and left the Ossinovaya Roscha. In July 1941 father's unit was transferred from one location to the other and father managed to visit us together with his privates.
People were already being evacuated from Leningrad. Germans were quite close to the city at that time and last trains were leaving. Father managed to evacuate us to the Gorky region [region in the basin of Volga river with a center in the town of Gorky, located 1,000 km to the south-east of Leningrad], where his aide-de-camp's mother lived.
In evacuation, my mum received letters from front line from my daddy - the last letter came in August 1942. I keep it as a family relic, because it is the last piece of news from my father. It was written in pencil on a small sheet of paper.
Having written that letter, he got lost, and we did not receive any more letters from him and knew nothing about him. Time passed and we got to know that he perished.
My mum was alive till 2000, and she did not marry any more.
