This is a picture of my family before the war. I am on the left side, extreme left. Next to me is my brother, the oldest brother, the photographer, Moishe or Morris. And then it’s my my sister, the oldest sister, Sonia, who had 2 babies, 2 children but this was before she got married. And then is to the extreme right standing is my sister, Esther, and she’s the one, the good good-natured one. She wrote letters for me and she helped me with education and everything. And a sitting is on the left of course is my mother. To the right is my father and in the center is my uncle. His name is Pesach. He went to Israel before the war and he a came to our town to say goodbye before he’s gone to Israel and when he came he wrote us the first letter from Israel, he wrote, “I am born now.” The day when he came to Israel that’s is the day when he was born. And on the bottom sitting and lying down is my 2 youngest brothers which I liked so much, especially the little one. I have so many things to tell about him. He was only 12 when he was shot and he was working already like an older man in a milk factory and he was bringing home once a week the pay for the week. It was a bottle. We used to call it perigone. This is the water that you squeeze out from cheese in order the cheese to be harder. So he had this water. Before the war, my mother used to give it to the cow.

Oh, this one is very interesting. I like this picture because I, I have to show. This is my group of Partisans and my detachment and I am lying down the third from the right side. Third from the right. And in the back of my head is my red cross box and I am here one girl and all boys. So you can imagine that some time was a little bit hard because um there was nobody with me. Only all boys, all men.

This is my husband and I when we got married. By the way, my brother, the photographer, took this picture of us. This was done the end of 1944 when we got married. We needed a minyan and we couldn’t gather from thousands and thousands of Jews before the war in Minsk, we couldn’t gather 10 Jewish people. So when we came to Germany to the displaced person’s camp, the Rabbis did not accept it our marriage. We had to remarry again.

Every picture has a story. This is a picture when I was accepted into the Partisans but many Jewish people escaped from ghettos, from concentration camps and they were not accepted in the Partisans because they had families. They had little children, so they were in in the woods hiding. But the Partisans had an obligation and they felt they should do it to bring them and to bring them to deliver to them some food so they would survive even without joining the Partisans. And in this picture, I think it’s the 3rd one from the left, is my brother. He is now a Rabbi. He survived. He lives in New York and he brought food to the to one of the Jewish families.

After the killing, I continued to work as a photographer for them and I was hoping maybe there will be somehow a way how I could escape and I could join the Partisans. I could have escaped when the people were alive. But if I would have escaped, the whole family would be killed, another 50 people. Now I am alone but in the meantime, they brought me again the films to develop and they gave me in one of the films I noticed this is the trenches where my family is and though, this picture is the exact, um, trench where my family is shot – my father, my mother, my 2 sisters, my sister’s 2 children and the husband, and my 2 younger brothers and they’re all shot all in those 3 trenches and they covered up and it was very painful for me when I even when I was in the Partisans, I heard, I knew about the trenches. I knew what’s going on and can you imagine how painful it was when I helped. And I took when I developed the film, I made the positives and I made a few copies for myself and that’s how I saved the real pictures where my family’s killed in our town.

Here is my camera, the original camera that I have since 1939. This camera I took pictures when the Russians occupied. I took pictures when the Nazis occupied and I took pictures in the Partisans. This camera was buried in the ground many times when I was in the Partisans and I were attacked and I was on assignment and many time I took it the camera out and it still works. And the same camera all my pictures that I took was all with this particular camera. I would never like to part as long as I live with this camera. It so many memories and so many stories and so many things happen and all the, this camera have seen everything. (Do you have a favorite picture?) Every, every picture almost has it story what to tell and all the stories are my memories so I cannot really separate one from another. Just the one that before the war that I made that I colored myself when I was young. That’s my favorite picture and the favorite picture is good that I have the whole family before killing.