Tag #155229 - Interview #103686 (Ilia Rozenfeld Biography)

Regardless all problems those were beautiful years of my youth, when I had many friends. We went to operetta and opera theaters, and to concerts of symphonic and classical music in the Pervomayskiy Garden. We often gathered in one apartment, and once my friends sent me to a girl living nearby to pick up a record player from her. I liked the girl and invited her to join us. So I met my future wife Yelena Mestechkina.  Yelena was born to a common, traditional and I would say religious Jewish family in Kiev in 1924. Her grandfather Iosif Mestechkin and her grandmother and her father’s brothers perished in Babi Yar. Yelena, her father and mother were in the evacuation. In 1947, when we met, she was finishing the Kiev Medical College. We dated for few months and got married in the same year of 1947. We had a family dinner party and there was one guest: Yelena’s cousin brother from Moscow. Even my parents couldn’t come from Poltava – this was a hard time. They sent us a greeting telegram.