My younger sister Genia Ratzenmar and her daughter Maya. Photo made in Lvov in 1956 when my sister worked at the pharmaceutical factory and Maya was a schoolgirl.
My sister Genia, born in 1912, and I were very close. She finished a Soviet lower secondary school in our town and married Grisha, a Jewish man. He was Komsomol member and atheist. He also came from our town. In the first months of the war Genia's husband perished at the front and Genia and her little daughter Maya were in evacuation somewhere in the Ural. They had a hard time there. After the war when I lived in Lvov my husband told me to let Genia and her daughter live with us until she found a place of her own, because Kamenka was ruined and there was nothing left in it. She stayed with us until she married a Jew from Georgia. Genia observed traditions while living with her parents, but when she married Grisha she stopped observing traditions. Genia was a worker at the pharmaceutical plant. She died in Lvov in 1982. Her daughter Maya (she worked at a pharmaceutical factory) is a pensioner. She comes to see me every now and then. She has a daughter and her husband died of cancer.
