Veniamin Barsky with his second wife, son and his wife’s relatives

Here you can see my father Veniamin Barsky with his second wife, son and his wife’s relatives, whose names I don’t know. The photo was taken in Kremenchug in the 1930s.

My mother’s first name was Malya, last name – Barskaya, and I don’t know her maiden name.

When World War I broke out, my father was called up to serve, and he left her pregnant, alone, with three children. She had a very difficult pregnancy and died in labor because of heavy bleeding. Mozyr was a very small town and nobody could provide first aid to her, so she died in labor. That’s what I learned from my elder sister, Yekaterina, who was born in 1904. I also had an elder brother, Grigory, who was born in 1910.

We were left orphans for our father was at the front. Our elder sister, Yekaterina, substituted Mother for us, because she was very practical. She took care of us, and this was our only hope. We had a lot of problems, even lice, because nobody took real care of us. My poor sister had some problem with her hair – she lost all her hair for some reason.

When our father learned that our mother had died and we three were left as orphans, he, being in the front-line forces, cut off his finger in order to be sent home. He did it on purpose. I don’t know whether anyone understood why he did it, but he was transferred to the reserve and came home to us.

I don’t remember how Father came to Mozyr because I was very young. In general, I remember nothing of our life in Mozyr, not even our house. My sister said that my father got married again then and brought a beautiful woman to our house. But she was not nice to us, so he divorced her.

After that, Father took us all to Kremenchug, Ukraine, where he found a job as a butcher. He was a specialist in preparing meat for making sausages.