Sophia Stelmakher's stepfather Peter Segal

This is my stepfather Peter Segul, my mother's second husband. The photo was taken in Rybnitsa in 1924. I never knew my father. When I was a child I never gave it a thought why my last name was Bekker, the last name of my grandfather. When I was a child my mother told me that my father was working in the Far North and after the war she said that he had perished. I wasn't surprised, since there were many fatherless children after the war. Only when I had a son at the end of the 1950s my mother told me the truth about my father, though she never disclosed his name. She was probably afraid that I would want to find him and didn't want it to happen. In 1947 my mother married Peter Segul, a Jewish man whom she had met a long while before. He also came from Rybnitsa. He was born in 1900. His father was a shoemaker who had several children. Peter was good at music. After the war he finished a conservatory somewhere and returned to Rybnitsa. Peter got a job as a music teacher at the school where my mother was working. He got married and had two daughters. Peter went to the front at the beginning of the war. His wife and daughters perished at the very beginning of the war. He heard that his family perished after he returned from the front. Peter was a very nice and kind person and I liked him a lot. He taught me music; he became a real father to me.