Sunday, January 18, 2004

Dead people, or rather killed people

Don't know why I am writing this, there is a lot of dead people in the world and mine aren't special in any way. Lots of people were killed during the last century in the Holocaust, Dresden, Leningrad siege, Hiroshima, Chinese Cultural Revoltuion, Stalin's genocide and Pol Pot's genocide, Congo's civil war, Rwanda and god knows where else, and many more will be killed in this century. Many of you reading this probably had relatives who died in the Winter War or Continuation War.

I feel like listing my father's relatives who died an unnatural death. I'll list my mother's relatives too someday, but I'll need more time and disk space for that.

So here:

My grandpa Mulya had a brother Iosif who died in the war. His wife Amalia and daughter Lena were killed by Germans.

Ester-Dvoira Gurevich, my grandma's mother, had a brother Grigory who starved to death during the siege of Leningrad in 1941.

Faivish Gurevich, my grandma's father, had 11 siblings. I don't know what happened to all of them, but here is the death toll for their family:

Brother Azriil had a son, whose name I don't know and who died in the war in 1941.

Brother Shneur was a communist, changed his name to Sergey Gorsky and publicly denounced his father. He died a death that was natural to such people: communists arrested him in 1939 and killed him in prison.

Brother Zalman was a pediatrician in Daugavpils. He hanged himself in a concentration camp several hours before the camp was liberated. Too much hurry is not good for you.

Brother Lev was an engineer in Kiev and was killed by Germans.

There was a sister whose daughter Maria and grandson died in a concentration camp.


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