Tag #141352 - Interview #102467 (Raissa Makarevich)

My parents got married in 1917, and in 1919 they had their first daughter, my older sister Feiga. At home we called her Fenia. Fenia went to school and took music classes. (It was fashionable to give children music lessons.) After she finished school she worked as an accountant at the plant. Later, she married a Jew named Raikhstadt. Fenia was in evacuation during the war. After the war she continued to work at the plant. She died in Kiev in 1987. Her husband is alive, he is ninety years old. During the war he was at the front, got captured, and went through several concentration camps. He managed to hide the fact that he was Jewish and miraculously survived. He lives with his daughter and my cousin Lina.

In 1920 my older brother Naum was born. He was named after Daddy’s brother Naum. Naum died as a baby. Mamma told me that, because it happened during the pogrom in Kiev, they couldn’t bury the baby's body. People were afraid to leave their homes and there was nobody to bury the dead. Daddy hired a cab and took his dead son to the cemetery to bury him.