Haya-Ita Smertenko, my grandmother and my mother's mother, and I. Photo made in 1938 in Kiev.
In 1930s only four of my grandmother's 10 children stayed alive. She lived in Kiev with two of them: her son Max and my mother. All of us lived in one room. My grandmother helped my mother about the house. She died before WWII. She rescued our life by dying. If she had lived longer we wouldn't have been able to evacuate during the war (my grandmother couldn't be moved) and would have stayed in Kiev ending in the Babiy Yar most evidently.
So, I was born in 1938. I was a 2nd child. There were five of us living in that small room in Gorky street: 2 children, my mother and father and our elderly grandmother Haya-Ita. I can hardly remember her. I have pictures of her, though.
