Engelina Goldentracht with her husband Michael Goldentracht and their daughter Alla Karelshtein

My husband Michael Goldentracht, our daughter Alla and I. The photo was taken on our daughter's birthday in 1955 in Kiev. In April 1946 I met Michael Goldentracht at a party. He was born to a family of doctors in Kiev in 1920. His father, Grigoriy Goldentracht, was a famous veneorologist in Kiev and his mother, Alexandra, was a doctor, too. She graduated from Moscow Medical Institute. They were Jewish. Michael and his sister Lialia also became doctors. Lialia became a dentist. Michael entered the Kiev Medical Institute and graduated from it during the war, when the Institute was in evacuation in Fergana. In 1942, after receiving their diplomas, all graduates went to the front. Michael worked as a military doctor in hospitals. We got married on 24th June 1946. We had a small wedding party with about 20 guests, my closest friends and relatives. After the wedding we began to live with my parents and brother. My husband was still a military doctor and I went to work at the polyclinic. In 1947 our daughter Alla was born. I quit work and stayed at home for two years. In November 1949 my husband got a job assignment in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, Kamchatka [over 12,000 km from Kiev], and we followed him there. In Kamchatka Michael was a junior, and, later a senior doctor at a tank regiment. I worked at the hospital. Michael was the only Jew among the doctors. The Doctor's Plot and the fight against the cosmopolites didn't affect us. Only once there was a meeting at Michael's workplace to discuss and condemn the Doctor's Plot, directed against Jewish doctors. Such meetings were required to be conducted by the Party leadership. During the meeting someone said that it was necessary to exterminate rats at the military unit. The commander commented, "There, you've learned to persecute people, but can't cope with rats??. People sympathized with my husband, knowing that he was a Jew, and accompanied him home on that evening to show their support. At the beginning of 1954 Michael came to meet me in Kiev, and we later moved to the town of Pavlovsk near Leningrad, where he got a new job assignment as a doctor in a military hospital. We lived in Pavlovsk until 1961.