Samuel Eirus' uncle

This photograph shows Jacob, the elder brother of my father.
I guess he is about 22 years old here.

I do not know when Jacob was born. In Leningrad he married a Russian girl Antonina. They had got a daughter. When he was arrested in 1937, his wife changed her surname for her maiden name. I think she also changed their daughter's surname…

At that time a lot of people did it: they were afraid to be relatives of enemies of the people. Authorities used to inform former coworkers of every new enemy of the people.

I know nothing about Antonina's profession, but they often visited us and I remember that they were a family of real intellectuals. You see, that was the time of liquidation of Russian intelligentsia.

They were engineers, very good specialists. Unfortunately I know very little about them. Asking my Mom, I tried to learn something only about my father. Of course I had to ask more…

In 1937 authorities started mass repressions. My grandmother's sons were arrested first. They took all her sons except Emil, the youngest, who was a schoolboy at that time.

Special NKVD Troika (no public trial) sentenced my father and his elder brother Jacob to 10 years of camps without right of correspondence. As we got to know much later (after Stalin's death) it meant execution (at bottom of fact).

I have no photographs of Grigory.