Tilda and Ari Galpert

Tilda and Ari Galpert

This is a picture my husband Ari Galpert and me, photographed after we had our wedding ceremony at the registry office on 30th April 1947. The photo was taken in Uzhgorod. In 1945, after the liberation from the labor camp in Reichenbach, I heard that my sister Szerena lived in Uzhhorod. I went to the town party committee that had the only telephone in town and asked them to call Szerena and tell her that I was there. In June 1945 my sister took me to Uzhhorod. She had a six-bedroom apartment. Szerena worked at the regional party committee where she was head of department for work with women. She was wealthy and had plenty of food. This was the first time in many years that I had enough food. I went to work. At first I worked at the regional food department: I was responsible for the distribution of food products to stores. I had to go on business trips across the region, but there was no transportation. I didn't like this job. Braun, a Jewish man, was head of the town trade department. He offered me a job and I went to work at the public meals sector in the town trade department. I worked there until 1948. In March 1947 Ari demobilized from the army. He came to meet me in Uzhhorod. Ari and I lived in Szerena's apartment. In late April Ari began to work as mechanic at a waste salvage shop called Utilptom. On 30th April he and I went for a walk to watch how they decorated the town for 1st May. We were walking when it suddenly occurred to us to go register our marriage at the registry office. We had our passports with us and the director of the office registered our marriage. We received our certificate, had our photograph taken by a street photographer and each went to our offices to celebrate 1st May. Ari was back home before I returned from the party. He told my sister that we were married. That was it. He and I always identified ourselves as Jews. We didn't observe any Jewish traditions. We always wrote in application forms that our mother tongue was Yiddish. We also wrote that I was in a concentration camp during the war and Ari in a forced labor battalion. Other Soviet citizens tried to keep quiet about such facts in their biography.
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