Tag #153033 - Interview #103525 (Sarra Nikiforenko)

Once during a party where I sang Ukrainian and Jewish songs a young man approached me. He was Vitaliy Nikiforenko. He was a student of the Institute of Food Industry in Kiev. He was on vacation in his hometown visiting his parents. He asked my permission to take me home. He was looking at me with admiring eyes. I had never had a non-Jewish friend before and I was concerned a little bit. I avoided him at the beginning. I didn’t want to date with him. He came to see my sister Sonia and said ‘If you don’t tell Sarra to come to see me I will go to the river and drown myself’. Sonia got scared, ran to me and said ‘Here came your sweetheart’. Boris, my brother, said ‘Give him a stick and let him beat this kind of ideas out of his head’. I had to go see him and say ‘Don’t be stupid’. To make the long story short we were destined to be together. I have no regrets about it.

Vitaliy, born in 1908, came from Smela: we were neighbors. I knew his parents and they knew me. They didn’t mind my being a Jew. Vitaliy came from a very nice family. His father was a teacher at College – I don’t remember at which, and his mother was a teacher, but she didn’t work. They had a son and a daughter. My parents were a little concerned since I was the first one in our family to have a non-Jewish spouse. They knew Vitaliy’s family. They bought fish from Vitaliy’s grandfather, but still they were a non-Jewish family. My father said to Vitaly ‘Yoy need to know that if you hurt Sarra just once you will lose her’.

We saw each other for a year. I finished College and Vitaliy graduated from the Institute in 1930. He wrote me nice letters.