Our first post-war photograph - my husband, my daughter Tamara and I- Faina Saushkina , Lvov, 1946. We were photographed on the occasion of our return from evacuation and reunion with my husband.
Victory Day of 9 May 1945 was a greatest holiday for our family and millions of people. It was a sunny day. People came out into streets greeting and hugging. Many had tears in their eyes - of happiness about the end of the war and grief for their lost ones. I received letters from my husband regularly. He was severely wounded in action on the Dnieper River in 1943 and was in hospital. He had his renal pelvis injured and had a lower part of his body paralyzed. He stayed in hospitals for several years. After victory I continued to live and work in in evacuayion in Chimkent, Middle Asia.
In 1946 my father's brother Misha wrote us. He settled down in Lvov after the Great Patriotic War and called us to come there. My parents, sisters and brother went to Lvov at the end of 1945. But I had to stay in evacuation in Chimkent, Kazakh SSR, due to my work. My daughter attended a kindergarten at the plant. My husband was in hospital in Truskavets near Lvov and my brother and sisters often visited him there. Later I resigned and in the end of 1946 Tamara and I went to Lvov.
The Party district committee in Lvov gave me an assignment to hold a position of director of a food store. I was doing well at work.
After I moved to Lvov I took my husband to a hospital in Lvov. I took him home after my sisters and brother got married and move out and there was sufficient space to take him home. My husband was an invalid. He had functions of his lower limbs restored, but his urinal system atrophied. I loved Alexandr dearly, but I suffered so. We slept together and Alexandr embraced me, but my young body urged for more what I couldn't get from my husband. Every night was a torture for me, but it never even occurred to me to look for what I wanted so somewhere else. So it happened that I had intimate relations with Sasha before he went to the Finnish war in 1939. This was the last time in my life. Alexandr was a very nice person. He loved and protected me as much as he could. He worked at home as a binder for a shop. He also did house chores, even washed windows to help me about the house. He helped Tamara do her homework when she went to school. Alexandr died in 1964. I had opportunities to remarry, but I couldn't do it - Alexandr was the love of my life.
