Tag #117108 - Interview #78547 (Leo Ginovker)

I got married in 1948. My wife, Irena Beilinson, nee Klas, was a widow. Her husband had served in the navy and died when the war began. She lived with her mother and her seven-year-old son Mikhail. Irena was brought up in a Germanized Jewish family and graduated from a German gymnasium. Her family spoke German to each other, but all the members of her family could also speak Russian and Estonian since most of the other people around them spoke either one of those languages. Before the war her family had owned a haberdashery selling fashionable things. Her family wasn’t religious. During the war they were evacuated to the Urals. I met Irena when she visited my friends whom I rented my room from.

In 1950 they began deporting former convicts again. Supposedly, they had been released too early by mistake. I didn’t want to be deported again, so Irena and I went to Tashkent to stay with Ovsei.