This is the family of my father's brother Gershl Potievskiy. From right to left: Emil, Gershl, wife Annette and daughter Yana. The photo was taken in Omsk in the 1940s, after the war, to be sent to Malin.
In the early 1920s my grandfather on my father's side, Iosele, went to America with his older son whose name I don't know. In the US my grandfather and my father's older brother happened to pass by a demonstration of workers where police used weapons. Many people were killed including my grandfather Iosele and his son.
Besides my father’s brother that perished in America my father had three other brothers and two sisters. The boys finished cheder and studied at the Jewish elementary school. The girls also got primary education.
The youngest of the children – Grisha, or Gershl, was born in 1898. In the early 1920s Grisha entered the machine-building college in Zaporozhiye. He fell in love with his landlady’s daughter, a Jewish girl, Annette. She was a schoolgirl and Grisha promised her that he would wait until she finished school to marry her. They got married after she finished school.
At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War Grisha went to the army. Annette and their two children – son Emila and daughter Yana, who was born few months before the war – went into evacuation. Grisha couldn’t find them for a few years. After the war they met; his wife and children were in Omsk and Grisha joined them after demobilization.
Emil became a good doctor and Yana graduated from the Pedagogical Institute. Uncle Gershl died in the middle of the 1970s and his children Emil and Yana live in the USA with their families.
