My mother sister's son Yakov Shyshylovskiy raised by my parents. This photo was taken in Kherson before the war.
My mother had a sister who was two years older than my mother. I don't remember her name. My mother sister's husband Shyshylovskiy dedicated himself to the revolution. During the Civil War he was commander of a Jewish partisan unit in Kherson region. Once he visited his brother's family in a Jewish colony near Kherson where his family also lived: my mother's sister and her children. Somebody tracked them down and a gang attacked them. They killed my mother's sister, her husband and his brother. After my mother's sister and her husband perished their three children came to live in our house: Yakov, born in 1916, Grigoriy, born in 1918, and Alexandr, born in 1920. My father didn't adopt them officially and they bore their father's surname of Shyshylovskiy.
Yakov Shyshylovskiy was on the front during WWII, he moved to Nikolaev after the war and became director of a big military plant. He died in the middle 1990s.
