Our family: I, Asia Matveyuk, my husband Vasiliy Matveyuk, our daughters Galina and Natalia. This photo was taken in Kherson in 1962 after my husband demobilized and we arrived in Ukraine from the Far East where my husband was on service.
My husband Vasiliy was a military. And… like all military we began to move from one harrison to another. We didn't have a place of our own, we didn't even have a kettle, everything we had was military property with inventory numbers. In 1947 our first daughter Galina was born in Odessa. In 1948 Vasiliy went on service to Germany and I stayed in the USSR with my baby. Vasiliy served there for two years and I rented a room in Nikolaev. I was director of a pharmacy. Vasiliy came on vacation every 6 months and two years later after he returned he entered the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad. We lived there for few years and Vasiliy got a rare and sensitive profession of a microbiologist. Later we lived in Riga [today Latvia], Kaliningrad [today Russia] where in 1954 my daughter Natalia was born. In 1957 my husband got an assignment to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy in the Far East, in 7500 km from Kiev.
In Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy I also worked in a pharmacy. We were given a one-bedroom apartment. Our children went to a nursery school and kindergarten. We often got together with other officers' families. We celebrated 1 May and 7 November. We stayed in Kamchatka for four years. Then there was an order of the Party to demobilize one million and two hundred Soviet officers and my husband was one of them. In 1961 we were offered to choose a town to live in: Kiev, Moscow or Leningrad. I was eager to go back to my countryside. I liked Kherson: a warm a hospitable town where the Dnieper flows into the Black Sea, where there is a lot of greenery and flowers, where there are gorgeous markets with plenty of fish, fruit, watermelons and melons. So we decided for Kherson. Since then I've lived here.
I worked as director of a pharmacy in Kherson for many years. I was secretary of the pharmacy department Party organization. My husband was director of a bacteriological laboratory. We were rather well off, but we couldn't afford any luxuries: a car or a dacha. My husband, my girls and I spent vacations on resorts in the Crimea and Caucasus and traveled to Moscow, Kiev and Leningrad. In bigger towns we liked going to theaters, exhibitions and concerts. We had a mixed marriage and never celebrated Jewish or Christian holidays, besides, we were both sincere communists.
