Max Shif

This is a snapshot of the military unit in which my Uncle Max Shif served. He is sitting in the middle of the first row with his fellow soldiers. Max was born in 1893 in Minsk, graduated from a commercial school, and worked as a division head at the Ministry of Commerce in Belorussia. At the beginning of the war he was involved in the evacuation of the documents of the People's Commissariat, so he sent a car for his family in order to evacuate them from Minsk. But his father and sisters remained in Minsk. He learned of that only after a month, when Minsk was already occupied by the Germans. Max survived the war and died in 1946. In 1941 he learned that his children, Yasha and Fanya , had escaped from the ghetto.