My maternal grandfather Boruch-Benicion Freidman. This photo was probably taken in Kiev. It was kept with other few photographs that my mother took to evacuation. She returned to Kiev with them, and I took these few photographs after my parents died.
My mother came from a small town of Narodichi [about 150 km from Kiev] Kiev region. My grandfather's, my mother's father, name was Boruch-Benicion Freidman. He was born in 1878. I don't know where he was born. My grandfather was a teacher of the cheder in Narodichi. My grandmother Malka Freidman, her maiden name was Chuzhaya, was born in 1876. I don't know where she came from. I don't know how or when my grandmother and grandfather met. They had nine children: three sons and six daughters. My grandmother was a housewife. My grandmother and grandfather spoke Yiddish. They probably celebrated Jewish holidays, but we didn't know about it.
I remember well beginning of the war on 22 June 1941, I was already 14 years old. At 12 o’clock in the afternoon Molotov spoke on the radio, he announced that the war began. When the time came for my mother and me to evacuate she was trying to convince her parents to come with us. My mother and I were the last of the family to leave Kiev. But they didn't want to leave. My grandfather as ill. He seemed to be old to me, but he was only 63 years old. He said: 'I am going to die on the way. I want to die in my bed'. If only we had known that our army would leave Kiev. We would have been more insistent, but since we weren't, they stayed and perished in Babi Yar, but we only heard this from our neighbors in 1944.
