Tag #116667 - Interview #78774 (Fania Brantsovskaya)

We were given two rooms in a four-room apartment. The apartment was divided into halves [see communal apartment] [41]. We got a kitchen and two rooms, and our co-tenants got two rooms and the bathroom, so we had to install a bathtub in the kitchen. The bathroom was in the kitchen; we made a curtain to separate it from the kitchen. This other was a Lithuanian family and we became friends. In 1950 my first daughter, Vita [Safian, nee Brantsovskaya] was born in this apartment. This name means 'life' in Latin. This was what my husband and I valued to the utmost and what we paid a high price for. In 1956 we received a separate apartment on Gorkogo [presently Dijoli] Street. This was one of the first houses with central heating in Vilnius. It was very cold in the first year. In 1958 my second daughter was born. We named her Dina [Baver, nee Bratsovskaya] after my husband's mother. The children went to a nursery school and a kindergarten. They had no grandmothers to help us raise them.