Tatiana Nemizanskaya during her student years

In this photo I am a student of the Leningrad Institute of Mines. I am not married yet. I am 23 years old here. In 1945 I entered the Leningrad Institute of Mines and lived in the dormitory on Maly prospect on Vassilyevsky Island. I did not feel any anti-Semitism at the Institute. There were only two Jews at our faculty.

After graduation I was sent or assigned, as it was called, to the city of Karaganda. Assignment was a compulsory appointment for young specialists, everyone was supposed to work for two years at the place of destination. I worked at the Giproshakht Institute, which designed mines. My mother came to Karaganda, but couldn’t stand the local climate and left for Leningrad to her brother’s place. She visited the Leningrad Municipal Party Committee and told them about her fate. They allocated a small room for her, with an area of six square meters, in a communal apartment. I arrived at this room two years later, when I was transferred to the Lengiproshakht Institute. I worked in this institute between 1952 and 1977, for 25 years. We exchanged this room for a bigger one of 13 square meters later on.

I was married twice. My first husband, Naum Bainstein, was a Jew. He was born in Leningrad in the 1920s and worked at the ‘Vibrator’ plant as an office worker. I got acquainted with him after returning from Karaganda, my relative introduced us. However, we lived together for two years, I think, not longer than that. After that we parted very quietly and peacefully and remained friends. Naum is no longer alive by now, but I don’t know when he died.

My second husband was not a religious Jew either, like many Jews in Leningrad at that time. Iosif graduated from Leningrad Polytechnic Institute, the Faculty of Metallurgy, and had been working for many years at the open-hearth shop of Kirovsky plant. During the war the family stayed in besieged Leningrad. My husband’s father starved to death during the blockade and was buried in a common grave at the Jewish cemetery. Iosif continued to work at Kirovsky plant until it was evacuated to Chelyabinsk. Both he and his mother, completely dystrophic, were taken out of the city. His mother died right after the war.

I didn’t meet my husband’s parents; I saw them only on photographs. According to the photos, they were beautiful people, very elegantly dressed. My husband, their son, was also a very handsome man. He was twelve years older than me; we lived in harmony for 22 years.