The photo taken in 1914: my great-grandfather, Matios Ivan Andreevich (first in the center of the photo) –
Soldiers of the Austrian army (died in the winter of 1914 in Galicia. World War I, 1914-1918).

 

 

 

Hafiya Matios (10.17.1911 – 16.07.1997) is my maternal grandmother; her maiden name was Dzhuryak. Her entire education included four years in a Romanian school. She gave birth to 18 children, six of them survived. She was a longtime head of the village women’s community; villagers called her ‘Solomon’. She was buried in Rostoky. In 2011 my grandmother would’ve turned 100 years old.

Just think of the life story of this woman, born in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, who was young at the time of the Romanian State (1918-1940, 1941- 1944), a mature woman “at the dawn of the Soviet power”, and afterwards lived on a 12-ruble pension (1944 and after); at the sunset of her life she saw the new Ukraine with its new crises (1991-1997).

 

My family

 

 

 

 My father and I

 

My sister with our father

 

My son – a student of the Kiev military lyceum named after Ivan Bohun