Maria Komarovskaya’s father, Yakov Komarovsky

My father, Yakov Komarovsky, during his army service. The photo was made in 1941. My father, Yakov Chaimovich Komarovsky, was born in Kiev in 1897. My father left the home early. He took part in the civil war. He was making his own life. During the civil war he fought somewhere in the south of Ukraine. After the civil war my father passed high school exams and entered the Kiev Polytechnic Institute. He was able to learn there for three years. But the time was hard, he had two small children and had to provide for the family, so he had to quit studies and think of earning money. I think he entered the Institute in around 1925. Leva, or Leibl, lived in Chernigov and was a simple worker at a plant. Gersh and Mitya lived in Kiev, but I don't know what they did and where they worked. Their sister Rebecca finished some courses immediately after the Revolution and became a junior school teacher. My father worked as a chief accountant at the printing shop of the People's Commissariat of the Interior. It was considered a very prestigious job. When arrests began at the end of the 1930-s, my father was very afraid that he might be arrested. I remember he would come home sad from work, worried; he talked to my mother in whisper a lot but would not tell me anything. Many people around us were arrested; we even had a new term - "the enemy of the nation". Fortunately, arrests did not touch our family. I only remember worrisome talk about somebody from our house who was arrested. It happened very often because our house was big and many people lived in our yard. My father, Yakov Komarovsky, returned from the war as an invalid. After the war he worked for some time as an accountant, but then he retired. He died in Kiev in 1975. My mother died soon after him - in 1980.