A photo of employees of the sugar refinery where my father worked. My father Itsyk Milgrom is the first from the left, the one with moustache is Nikolay Kobetski, their crew leader, and the third one is engineer Poplavski. This photo was taken in Krasilov on October Revolution Day on 7 November 1932. Inscription on the wall in Ukrainian: 'Best performers of saturation shop on the 15th anniversary of October revolution'.
My father didn't have a real education. At about 13 he became an apprentice of painter Skarupski who didn't have children and he taught my father the smallest details of his craft. If it hadn't been for the revolution and Civil War my father would have become a skilled master of his craft. Until the middle 1920s my father worked with Skarupski. After he worked at the sugar refinery.
My father was a worker and earned his living working hard for it. We were rather poor. What my father was earning was not enough and my mother had to go to work. In 1935 my father working in the crew of Nikolay Kobetski, a Polish man, took an obligation with his crew to operate three equipment units instead of one. They became best performers and all crewmembers received bonuses. Since Nikolay was their crew leader the plant built him a nice new house. However, before two years passed all Polish employees were arrested in 1937. Authorities declared them Polish spies. Nikolay was also arrested. Nobody ever saw him or any of those who were arrested again. Sometimes they even had to suspend work at the plant since there were not enough employees. My father didn't sleep at night fearing that they would come for him, but, fortunately, our family didn't suffer the repression of the 1930s.
My father overstrained his back severely at work and was almost an invalid in the end of 1930s. He quit work by 1940.
