This is a photo of my mother Serafima Kiselgof (first from left), me, Rita Razumovskaya (in center) and my sister Irina Rozen, nee Kiselgof (first from right), taken in the 1940s, after the Great Patriotic War in some neighborhood of Leningrad.
In 1945 besides studying I was working. Then the rector of Leningrad University was a certain Mr. Vosnesensky and he liked all kinds of pomp, and they announced on the local radio that university students repaired destroyed buildings. Really, we shoveled the fragments, sometimes we found hands, legs, even heads sometimes, and repaired the houses, and I was a plasterer of a very high qualification.
The mother of Alexander Guriev introduced me to her pal Nicolas Razumovsky, whom I married a bit later. the marriage took place on the same day, when Berlin was captured, on 2nd May 1945. Just after this event I moved in with my husband. He came to Leningrad with the Gorny Institute, he was a professor then. For two years we lived on the campus on Maly Avenue, my son was born there. Then we got an apartment on the Fifteenth Line, where thereafter our common family life took place.
My relatives only came back from Siberia in 1946; I even had a chance to go there to visit them. They came back to the same apartment, but only to one room. Before the war they had three rooms, but now they got only one, so they had to live there. Mother didn’t work after the war. She didn’t marry again, despite the fact that she was very beautiful even at 60, and men were courting her. At the end of her life she became crazy: 20 years of ordinary schizophrenia, and then sclerosis too. This was very long and terrifying. She lived then at my middle sister’s, who was married already and lived in Leningrad, on Varshavskaya Street. My younger sister didn’t want to stay with her, and so my middle sister took in our mother. She died in 1993. When she became crazy, she called some unknown male names. Perhaps, she had had some life dramas. Mother died at the age of 96. She was buried at a Russian cemetery, called the Nothern cemetery.
