The Spring of 1945CHAPTER 13 I lived with Iren and with the family of Vera Berkovich in our pre-war apartment and worked at the editorial office of the newspaper "Sovetskaya Molodezh" (a Soviet newspaper for young people). Boya Berkovich was entrusted with organizing the publication of the newspaper and he was the man who had arranged for my employment there. Iren started attended school, High-school No. 15. I used to cook soup or porridge for her in a small pot and after she came from school she used to warm her food all by herself. This is how we lived through the spring. During the war someone wrote me that Leibeleh Futlik had died, that his family had not heard from him for more than two years. In April 1945 I met Bika, his brother, and extended my condolences regarding his brother's death, to which he happily replied that "Leibeleh had no plans to die in battle! He is alive and well and his army detachment is now based in Lankstini!" That was, of course, a great surprise, but I could not have guessed at the time how things would develop… I had already written about my accidental meeting with Leibeleh Futlik at the railway station on the 30th of June 1945. This meeting was followed by a number of other meetings and by an exchange of letters. All this was started off by a brief note sent to me on the 8th of June 1945. It said the following: "Lyuba! I waited for you the whole week, but to no avail… Please, if you can, come and visit me. I shall be very grateful." Later on, when my Leibeleh was sent away to take part in a special operation of "cleaning up" the local forests from the bandits (Nazi sympathizers among the Latvians who were hiding in the forests trying to evade Soviet authorities – Tr.), I wrote to him daily, not knowing really to what address I had been writing… I still have this note he wrote me and even though he had claimed many times that I had been the initiator of our meetings in the spring of 1945, material evidence stated otherwise.
This is the picture taken by Zyama when I and Iren came to visit him in Lankstini, where his army unit was based at that time. Leibeleh Futlik was serving there too. I am still wearing the red-and-white dress I got at the orphanage and Iren is wearing a little apron I had made for her from one of her old Riga dresses… The summer sun was shining brightly on that day…
Well, that's how we got married. Now there were three of us. At the end of summer we moved to another apartment, at Engels Street. I promised Leibeleh to bear him a daughter and kept my promise.
In the evening of the 8th of May 1946 I went to the maternity clinic, the one on No. 14 Valdemara St, to have my baby. I was alone. While I was waiting for the labour to start I heard outside the ward some people singing and other happy noise: the staff was beginning to celebrate Victory Day. I wanted very much to have my little girl on the 9th of May, the official Victory Day. They told me that even if I give birth at 24.00 at night it will still be considered the 8th of May. Since I was a good girl and Tusya was a good girl too, I gave birth at 24.05, on the 9th of May, on Victory Day! It was not for nothing that I kept looking at the clock while giving birth: will it pass the 12 o'clock mark or not? It did! So, there were now four of us. This is our picture made in the beginning of 1947.
Tusya is 9 months' old here, while Iren would be 10 in July. I made the dresses the girls are wearing and I also knitted the dark-blue vest our Papka is wearing. We started our life together, the best we could. My memoirs have been completed. It took me a long time to write them. I end here. 8th February 1973. Luba Futlik
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