Tag #140016 - Interview #90530 (Ella Lukatskaya)

I was born in 1938 in Kiev. My name Ella goes back to the history of our family. Three boys and one girl (it was me) in my mother’s family were named Eleh. We were named after our grandfather Eleh Shaevich Smertenko that died during a pogrom in Kiev in 1905. Our family lived in Yurkovskaya street, Podol[1], Kiev. We lived in an apartment house located in the area that was flooded each year. The population of this neighborhood used to say that they had three misfortunes: pogroms, fire and floods. In those years (1905-10) all these 3 disasters used to happen frequently. But the most frequent were probably pogroms. Most frequently the pogroms were instigated by local Ukrainians living in Podol. But sometimes they were initiated by bandits from other locations. The most ruthless was “Chornaya Sotnia” (sotnia - a militarized unit, consisting of 100 military). My grandfather was killed during one of the pogroms, instigated by this Black hundred gang. On hearing the rattle of a nearing pogrom the tenants went to hide on the attic of the building. My grandmother Haya-Itta was holding my mother, the one year old Shendl. The baby got scared and started crying. The other tenants forced them to leave the attic. They went downstairs and my grandfather went with them, of course. When the thugs broke into the house my grandfather shielding my grandmother and the baby was the first one that they saw. The fatal blow reached my grandfather and he died on the same day. My grandmother and my mother survived. My grandfather was the only breadwinner in the family. He was a shoemaker and worked in a shop.