Evgenia Bekker and Peter Segul

This is a picture of my mother Evgenia Bekker and her second husband Peter Segul, my stepfather. The photo was taken when they were visiting me in Chernovtsy in 1977. I never knew my father. When I was a child I never gave it a thought why my last name was Bekker, the last name of my grandfather. When I was a child my mother told me that my father was working in the Far North and after the war she said that he had perished. I wasn't surprised, since there were many fatherless children after the war. Only when I had a son at the end of the 1950s my mother told me the truth about my father, though she never disclosed his name. She was probably afraid that I would want to find him and didn't want it to happen. In 1947 my mother married Peter Segul, a Jewish man whom she had met a long while before. He also came from Rybnitsa. He was born in 1900. His father was a shoemaker who had several children. Peter was good at music. After the war he finished a conservatory somewhere and returned to Rybnitsa. Peter got a job as a music teacher at the school where my mother was working. He got married and had two daughters. Peter went to the front at the beginning of the war. His wife and daughters perished at the very beginning of the war. He heard that his family perished after he returned from the front. Peter was a very nice and kind person and I liked him a lot. He taught me music; he became a real father to me. They lived in Dubossary. When Jews began to leave for Israel in the 1970s my husband and I thought about trying our luck. When my mother heard about it she said that this is the country where I was born, where we went through good things and bad things and this was where our dearly departed were buried. She was categorically against my departure and after thinking about it I agreed with her. Peter Segul died in Dubossary in 1988. His grave is near where my grandfather and my grandmother were buried in one of twelve graves of Jews shot by fascists. There wasn't an open cemetery near these graves, but my mother could do it. Teachers and pupils of the school where my mother worked look after those graves. After my stepfather died my mother joined my husband and me. She was 86 and she couldn't live alone. My mother died in 1993. My mother was an atheist and we buried her in the common way.