Aron and Lisa Gehtmann

This is a picture of my father Aron Gehtmann, and his third wife Lisa Gehtmann, photographed on their wedding day in Kiev in 1947. I returned to Kiev from evacuation in June 1944. I didn't have a place to stay and went to the Ukrainian family that had once given me shelter. They accommodated me again. A month later I got a job as an electric welder in a plumbing trust. I received a salary of 1,000 rubles. I got back the room where I had lived while I was working at the Central Post Office. I got a one-month assignment to restore the mines of Donetsk, along with several other workers, in September. When the month was over we were told that we had to stay for another six months. I left the place without permission, but the management didn't have a problem with that. Shortly after I returned, I was sent to a one-year course of advanced training at the Institute of Electric Welding. I received a stipend of 300 rubles, which wasn't enough to live on. Uncle Abram, my mother's brother, found me soon after he returned from evacuation and we cried after my sister Hana, who died in 1942, together. He began to support me like he did before the war. My cousin Olte told me that Grandfather Srul had let my father know that I survived and was in Kiev. My father asked him to tell me to write to him. I was in a conflict: My father had left me and my sister Hana when we were small children, and we were suffering. At the same time I was longing for a father's warmth, or, just wanted to know that there was someone of my own kinship. In the end, I did write to my father, beginning my letter with the words, 'Hello, my unknown father ?'. He came to Kiev immediately, brought me gifts and money and bought me clothes. My father told me that he and his wife Evdokia lived in Leningrad. They had two children: Boris, born in 1922 and Volodia, born in 1928. My father was at the front, wounded and treated in a hospital in Teheran, where he met his older son Boris. That was the last time he saw him: Boris perished in 1944. Evdokia died during the blockade of Leningrad. Their younger son, Volodia, was taken out of town via the 'Road of Life' and survived. I never saw Volodia; all I know is that he lived in Leningrad after the war. I forgave my father and loved him. He was a very impulsive person; when he liked someone he poured kisses and gifts onto that person. The problem was that he was too full of love and for that reason he had left my mother. In 1947 my father married Lisa, a Jewish woman. This was his third marriage. They lived in Leningrad. He often wrote me, but he only visited me two or three times, always bringing gifts. I couldn't afford to go to see him, but I always wished him well on all holidays. My father died in Leningrad in 1968.