MY FAMILY HISTORY, part 2

This is a part 2 in the two-parts ‘My Family History’ mini-series on Steem. You can find part 1 here.

CHANGE OF PLANS

By the time my great-grandfather’s family made it to Stalingrad, Ukraine had already been occupied by German troops. They could no longer continue their journey towards the original destination. To turn around and head back to Siberia was unthinkable to them. The food and the money they had saved for the journey were running out, as the family was running out of options. Fortunately, the other family they were travelling with offered them to accompany them to Morozovsk in Rostov Oblast in Southern Russia. My great-grandparents accepted the offer and that is how they ended up in Morozovsk – a small place that just had grown from a settlement into a town that same year, a place where my father would meet my mother for the first time a couple of decades later.

FORETELLING COMES TRUE

The first night in Morozovsk my family slept on the ground, on one of the vacant lots in town. In the morning Ivan went to look for a job, Maria went to the local market to buy food, and the children joined some local kids who were heading to the river to play. As I mentioned, none of the kids were accustomed to large bodies of water and none of them could swim. Anna was the first who got caught by the river’s strong flow and began drowning. Leonid jumped into the water to help her. Anna clung onto him and inadvertently drew him down with her. My grandfather Nikolai shouted to his other siblings to stay onshore and not go any closer to the river. He ran to Anna and Leonid’s rescue and, just like them, began to drown himself. He managed to orient himself under the water and, with whatever little oxygen was remaining in his lungs, began to crawl on the river’s bottom back towards the shore. When he emerged from the water gasping for air, his younger brother and sister had already been gone.

The children went back to their parents and had to break the news about the death of their two siblings. Maria wept and swore to stay in Morozovsk, where two of her children were going to be buried on the local cemetery. Besides, she realised she was pregnant again and didn’t want to keep wandering in search of a new home.

Nina, in the centre of the photo to the right, would drown 31 years later, in 1972. And thus the grim foretelling of the Kazakh hermit regarding three of Maria’s children being taken by water would come true.

WAR YEARS

Soon afterwards Ivan got a job at the local railway depot and was temporarily excepted from the ongoing war-time mobilisation. Maria gave birth to her youngest daughter, Valentina (the rightmost woman in the top row on the photo above), in October of 1941. Nikolai found a job working in the fields of the nearby village. There he met my paternal grandmother, Akulina “Lina” Radchenko, who was 17 years old at that time.

In January of 1942 my grandfather turned 18 and got conscripted into the Red Army. His father Ivan followed him and went to war. In July of 1942 Morozovsk got occupied by the German troops. The rest of the family lived in the occupied town, trying to avoid new dangers posed by the invading force, until January 1943, when the Germans retreated.

For a while there were no letters and no news from the front lines, neither from Ivan nor from Nikolai. Only later would the family learn that Ivan had been severely wounded almost as soon as he joined the fighting. Since Morozovsk was occupied at that time, he was sent to stay with his grandmother who was still living in Ol'gino in Omsk Oblast in West Siberia. There he learnt that his only brother, Fyodor Izyumenko, had died at war. Ivan managed to return to his family in Morozovsk in the spring of 1943, once the town was liberated.

Nikolai was fighting in Eastern Europe until the autumn of 1944, when he got under heavy shellfire and suffered a severe concussion. He spent most of the rest of the war in hospital. Once the war ended, Nikolai remained on active duty in the ranks of the Red Army until 1949.

POST-WAR YEARS. NEW GENERATION

Once my grandfather got demobilised from the military, he got to search for Lina and her family. He found them in the Kharkiv province of Ukraine, where my grandmother’s family moved by that time. For seven years Lina had kept waiting for Nikolai, trusting that he would come back from war and find her. My grandparents got married in 1949 and stayed in Ukraine until 1953. My father Leonid – named after his dad’s untimely departed younger brother – was born in January of 1953. In March of the same year Nikolai, Lina, and their baby-son moved back to Morozovsk, where the rest of the Izyumenko family were living. In February of 1956 Lina gave birth to a daughter who was named Tatiana.

My grandparents with my father Leonid (center) 1958

WHAT HAPPENED SINCE THEN

My great-grandmother Maria died in 1978, a year before I was born, so I never got to meet her.

My grandfather Nikolai passed away in 1989. And, just like his wife Lina was waiting for his return from the war for seven years back in the 1940’s, it wasn’t until seven years later that the couple got reunited on the other side after my grandmother’s passing in 1996.

My grandmother Lina at her husband’s grave (ca. 1990)

My great-grandfather Ivan died on the 31^st of December 1989 – on the day when he was informed of his son Nikolai’s death. The family kept the news from him for as long as they could, fearing his reaction.

My great-uncle Ivan, Nikolai’s younger brother, passed away in 2014. He and his family had lived in the same city where I grew up. My parents had kept a close contact with him in all those years and maintain a close relationship with his two daughters (my father’s cousins).

My father’s sister Tatiana (who was also my godmother) passed away on February 7^th this year, after a long and exhausting battle with cancer.

My two great-aunts Lidia and Valentina live in two different cities of Rostov Oblast, my home region. My parents live in a small house with a beautiful garden in Tsimlyansk, where I was born 39 years ago, close to the city where I grew up and lived until I moved to Moscow back in 2001.