These are my brothers:
Volf is first from left, my sister Feiga is in the middle, and on the far right is Mordekhai.
Mother died and our relatives took Feiga to live with them in Leningrad.
They decided to take this picture. It was taken in Kherson in 1929.
In 1929, after my mother died, my father got married a second time. Aunt Khaya in fact married him off. Father remained alone with four children:
Mordekhai, born in 1917, Volf, born in 1920, my sister Feiga and me. Mum's sister, Aunt Fani, was a very smart woman; she wrote letters to father after my mother's death:
'Don't seek a mother for your children, you won't be able to find any. Better look for a wife, you are to live with her!' But aunt Khaya found a woman. I don't know how she managed to do it. Her name was Anna Lazarevna.
She was a Jewess. She took my father's last name. She gave birth to two children: Lena and Ilya. Their whole family perished during the war in Kherson.
Anna Lazarevna was able to tell my younger brother Volf, 'Go buy some bread in the store, school can wait.' She never loved us, father's children. They lived in dad's apartment and their life wasn't going right.
Dad started to drink, though he had never drunk before. He was at the head of a sewing workshop at the Society of the Blind in Kherson. He was the only person with eyesight there.
He worked in administration and wasn't able to get evacuated when the war broke out. Their neighbor wrote to me later; her signature was crossed out, I think, by the military censorship: the signature and last line were snipped off.
She wrote that 9,000 Jews and 6,000 Russians had perished. It wasn't possible to leave Kherson: the railroad was cut off and the ships weren't able to carry everyone, so father remained there.
All citizens were taken out of the city, a ditch was dug out and people were executed. They all perished. My father perished too. It happened at the end of 1943 or the beginning of 1944.
