This is my father David Yarovskiy. Photo made in Kiev in 1926.
My father's name was David Yarovskiy. I know very little about his family. Perhaps, my parents got so much attracted by each other because they both lost their parents. My father's mother died very young. My father was born in 1906 in a town in Poland. I think it was Lodz.
My father, however young he was, was a very smart man. He and his younger brother Fivish opened a private shop that manufactured various goods from horns. They purchased cow horns in the surrounding villages to makee combs, ashtays, pens, etc. and sold them in their shop.
My mother met my father at the synagogue in Podol. My mother was 17 and my father was 16. They fell in love with each other. Perhaps, each of them wanted to get and give the love that was gone from their lives with their mothers' death. My mother told me that they obtaned permission to get married from the synagogue. My mother's older sister Pesia-Liba had no objections against this marriage. She liked David very much. They got married in 1922. Those were hard years, but nevertheless, they had a Jewish wedding with huppah and all Jewish traditions.
NEP ended in 1926 and my father's shop was closed. My father and Fivish found a job at the Kiev meat-packing factory. My father continued to study. After finishing his studies my father became Commercial Director of the Kiev meat-packing factory. From here I make a conclusion that my father studied at the Food Industry Institute.
My father traveled a lot. Some time in 1932 (famine in Ukraine) he saw a 6 or 7 year old homeless Jewish boy at a railway station. The boy was crying and asking for food. My father talked to him and heard that his parents had died and that there was nobody left. My father brought this poor boy home. The boy's name was Motl. My mother accepted him as her own child. They washed the boy and gave him clean clothes and food and he became the favorite boy in the family. He lived in our family until the beginning of the war.
My father and his brother Fivish were called up to the anti-aircraft and chemical defense forces And Aron, my father's older brother, was sent to the front.
21 September 1941. We received the notice about his death at the recruitment ofice. Fivish perished about the same time - they were together in the army and they perished together. Aron, my father's older brother, perished near Warsaw in 1944.
