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This is me, Gherda Kagan (standing in the center) with my cousin brother Victor Oswald and cousin sister Yelena Zivik. This photo was made in Odessa in 1936. It was summer and we came to my uncle's David dacha.
There was a children's club in the house of scientists and I often went there. There was a huge picture of Stalin holding a little girl on the wall. We knew that her name was Ghelia Markizova and she handed Stalin a bouquet of flowers at the congress. I envied Ghelia terribly. I have a small bust of young Lenin at home. There was a whole iconostasis on red goffered paper over my desk: Lenin, Stalin, Kaganovich, Voroshilov, Kalinin. When I was 6 I had an audition in the house of scientists and when they asked me to sing something I didn't sing them about a hedgehog or New Year tree, but I sang a heroic Soviet song 'Partisan sailor Zhelezniak' and the commission was amused.
Victor Oswald my mother's sister Yulia's son was born in Moscow in 1928. During the war Yulia and her son were in evacuation in Tbilisi. Victor's father Grigoriy Oswald perished at the war. His 14-year-old Victor and his friend decided to go to the front. Militia captured them at a railway station when they were eager to return after they saw so many wounded going by trains. After the war they returned to Odessa. Victor finished Odessa Polytechnic College and got a job assignment in Komsomolsk-on-Amur. Later he moved to Kishinev where he worked as an engineer at a plant. Yulia lived with her son in her last years and died in 1970. Victor died in 1993.
