Alexandr Rozin and his sisters

This is a picture of my father Alexandr Rozin and his sisters, Lena Moiseyeva, nee Rozina (on the left) and Sophia Rozina. The photo was taken in Voronezh in 1900. My father was born in Voronezh, Russia, in 1896. His family wasn't religious. Voronezh wasn't a Jewish town. It was located outside the Jewish residential area. I don't know how they managed to obtain the permit to reside there. My father's parents didn't know Yiddish. They spoke Russian. My father didn't know one word of Yiddish. Their family was very poor. My father didn't have an education. He had to go to work at the age of ten. His parents taught him to read and write. He worked as an apprentice in various small shops. He read a lot. Even when he was very young, my father already believed that the Soviet power was the best system. My father's sister Sophia was born in Voronezh in 1894. She didn't study at school, but she could read and write. She went to work when she was eleven. I don't know where she worked. She lived in Voronezh. She was married. Her husband Osip, a Jew, died in the late 1920s. After he died, she and her children moved to Kiev. She worked as a nurse at a kindergarten before the war. She had two daughters and a son. Her son Natan, perished at the front. Her older daughter had four children. Sophia got married for the second time after her husband also died at the front. Sophia, her younger daughter Chara and her three children were in evacuation in Frunze, Kirghisia [today Kyrgyzstan], during the war. Chara's husband also perished at the front. They returned to Kiev in 1944. Sophia didn't work after the war. She looked after her grandchildren. My father's third sister, Lena, was born in Voronezh in 1895. She could read and write, but she didn't study anywhere. When she was eleven she began to work at a hat shop and learned to make lovely hats. In the late 1900s she was inspired by revolutionary communist ideas. After the Revolution of 1917, she studied at the Institute of Red Professorship in Kiev. [Editor's note: This institution was later renamed the Institute of Marxism-Leninism; it prepared the party officials.] She was a convinced revolutionary and a member of the Bolshevik Party. She was arrested in 1937 [during the so-called Great Terror]. Her husband Mihail Moiseyev, a Jew, was arrested a few months later and shot in 1937.