Ninel Kunina's family

Here you can see our family: I am on my mom’s lap, here I am two years old. Later when I asked Mom why I have such frown, she used to tell me, that I  wanted to wear a white dress and Mom explained, that it wouldn’t look good on the photo. But I didn’t understand it and wanted to wear my favorite dress and played up badly, so she simply spanked me. That is why I look so sad.

Next to us are my brother Volodya and my father Aron. Volodya was three years older than me. He died of tuberculosis at the age of 23. Mom took his death hard. Dad is about 28 years old on this picture, he earned good money.

At that time we lived in Leningrad. My father was highly successful, and in 1934 he was sent to conduct industrialization in Chelyabinsk, where he served as an assistant director of the Chelyabinsk abrasive factory, and Mom for the first time in her life didn’t have to work for one and a half years. She was very homesick, so in 1936 she took me and my brother and left for Leningrad. Two months later Dad was paid off in Chelyabinsk and joined us in Leningrad. And in 1937 the whole governing body of the Chelyabinsk abrasive factory was shot. In that way, being unaware of this at the time, Mom saved Daddy’s life.