This photograph of me, my sister and my brother was taken in Yanovichi in 1929. Yanovichi, a small town where I spent my childhood, was a real Jewish shtetl. About 80% of its population was Jewish. Even Russians in our small town spoke Yiddish well. Yanovichi is situated about 20 kilometers away from Vitebsk. There was no railroad. I do not remember any stone houses in Yanovichi, only wooden ones. And I do not remember that Jews in our small town had special occupations. From my parents I learned that in our town all doctors were Jewish (without exception), the most well-known was the therapist Livshits. He was also the most respected person. In our family there were 4 children. My sister Sofye was the only girl in our family, she was born in 1920. My brother Mikhail was born in 1921. I was born in 1924 and my younger brother Jacob in 1929.

When I was 6 years old, we moved to the city of Liozno. It was a regional center and a large railway junction. There my father was offered work at a supply center. After Yanovichi, Liozno seemed to us almost like Paris. All the streets were paved – this almost shocked me. At first we had no place to live, but soon we managed to buy a house of our own. It was not situated in the most Jewish district of the city, our neighbors were mainly Russians.

Our house was not very big (we did not have enough money for a bigger one), but for us it was cozy and quiet. There was stove heating but no water supply. Electricity came much later.

We had a large vegetable garden, a cow and hens. Later we even bought a pig, but only to plump it up for sale (at home we never ate pork). In 1933 people were starving in the Ukraine. In our city there arrived refugees from Ukraine, extremely famished. People stood in lines to buy bread, and the ration decreased day by day. If we had had no vegetable garden, we would have not survived.