Liubov Kalenova with siblings

This is my mother, Liubov, with her sister and brothers. In the center is Sarah, a gymnast, and future doctor and director of the Pasteur Institute of Blood Transfusions; Aaron, who became a scientist; Efim (standing) died at a young age. My mother is the one with a bow in her hair. She was a teacher of geography in Tashkent and later director of another school in the Kalininsky region of St. Petersburg. Mother was widowed when she was 24. My father, Boris Nekrasov, was a graduate student and had been exempted from army service. However, during the first days of the war in 1941, he volunteered for the front and was killed in battle on January 23, 1943. I was 6. My mother was left with not only with me, but also with her mother and paralyzed father, Danil Aaronovich Kalenov. I was brought up by my stepfather, Mikhail Rafilovich Rubanenko - a person of high moral qualities and intellect. I began to call him Papa when my little sister, Natasha, was born on August 19, 1947. In 1955, I married Grigorii Abramovich Shkolnikov, an officer who finished among the best at the Pacific Ocean Naval Academy and obtained a post on a submarine in the north. When he was 25 he was removed from his post because of his Jewish background. He wrote to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and the same committee that forced him to leave the submarine offered him a position on a minesweeping trawler, where he quickly became the navigator of the flagship and spent 468 days clearing mines in the Baltic Sea. After my husband's demobilization, we returned to Leningrad. I worked as an engineer, and Grisha worked in the construction bureau of the Svetlana factory. In 1987 he was accused of being a Zionist - at that time in the group there were five Jews and one was planning to leave for Israel - and Grisha was forced to leave Svetlana.