My mother Dvoira (Vera) Minevich (Kolchinskaya), born in 1912. It wos photo for one of her document. This photo was taken in Kiev in 1947.
My mother Dvoira (Vera) Minevich, nee Kolchinskaya, was born in Genichesk, Kherson region, in 1912. She finished a Russian secondary school in 1927. I don't know how my mother turned out to be in Kiev or how she met my father. They got married in 1934. I've never heard them recalling any wedding or a big party. I think they had a civil ceremony and no celebration.
My mother worked very hard in the evacuation. She was a cart driver. She transported firewood on her cart.
My mother fell seriously ill in winter 1942. She got lung hemorrhage in the woods and when she reached the village she was taken to hospital located in the district town. On that same day my brother and I were sent to the children's home in this village, because our deaf grandmother couldn't take care of us. I studied at school. My brother didn't go to school. He was too young at first, but when he reached 8 to go to school he couldn't, because he didn't have winter clothes. My brother went to school at 9. I don't remember any anti-Semitism. We spent 4 years at the children's home and were treated nicely all this time. Our grandmother came to visit us. She was working as a cleaning woman somewhere.
My mother had tuberculosis and stayed in hospital. I remember myself crying a lot calling my mother. This is all I remember about the children's home. After the war my father's brother Isaac took every effort to take us to Kiev. My mother was in the tuberculosis hospital in Moscow at that time. My father's brother David was helping her in Moscow. He was a military doctor in hospital.
My mother never spoke about her attitude towards the Soviet power. She was far from such issues of general character. She lived in her routinely world. She didn't have any education.. She always spoke in a polite manner and her colleagues at the hairdresser's used to say "You talk quite like a teacher". She judged people from their manner to wear clothes or from how they looked. My mother was very unhappy looking at me. I didn't have manicure and didn't like hairdos. My mother used to say that "she is not a girl, she is a boy" about me. Mother died in 1983. She was very ill and I stayed with her all the time before she died.
