
Nina Leonidovna Jakovleva, the guest of our editorial office, confirms this assumption. The intelligent Mink-dweller Nina Leonidovna also has a collection: the graphic chronicles of her family which started her father, our compatriot, a modest employee with a higher technical education, in the beginning of the century.
— Nina Leonidovna, not long ago collecting cards, herbariums in albums, wishes to remember... were considered as a bad taste which was called narrow-mindedness.
— Probably. But not in our family. To the contrary, my relatives thought that you shouldn’t ever throw out letters. By the way, those cards and photos were preserved because during the Great Patriotic War a German official of a high rank lived in our house in Lvov, in a private residence of the formerly famous lawyer Chudovskiy. The family legend says that the officer of the Wehrmacht planned that after the end of the war that fantastic structure of the XIXth century would remain after him and therefore treated carefully every piece of furniture in the house. As it turned out, Germans hadn’t even opened the bureau. We took the key with us during evacuation. If you remember history the German command has divided Ukraine just in the beginning of the Great Patriotic War… When the war began, I was 5 years old, but I remember well some episodes. My mum and grandmother left Lvov in the emergency and, certainly took only things of the first necessity in evacuation. Our family albums, letters, documents of the house, as well as bills for the public utilities remained during the war in that old bureau which we got together with the residence. We returned to Lvov after war.
— And how did your family get to Lvov from Belarus and later to Minsk?
— It’s a long story. After the graduation from the Gomel railway technical school, father was sent to work in an educational establishment in Dnepropetrovsk. And later, after 1939, he as a professional was transferred to Lvov. My father was Belarusian, Jakovlev Leonid Ivanovich, born in Vilnius in 1906, my mum grew near Mogilyov. In 1935 they got married and took my grandmother, a common country woman, with them. By the way, let me tell you about my grandmother’s impudence. Her name was Andreeva Eudoxia Jakovlevna.

Now I terribly regret I haven’t kept all the memoirs of my grandmother, that I didn’t have time to put down some unknown family facts told by my farther. However, just a couple of years before father’s death, I asked him to write our family history... A book-manuscript appeared. He has been working intellectually all his life: he painted perfectly well, sang romances, wrote prose for himself and even kept a diary. I have brought his memoirs to the editorial office, it contains chapters about Gomel...
Me and my brother came to Minsk at different times, but being already adult people. We sold all our Lvov real estate which equaled only to a 2-roomed apartment in Nesvizh. This is a paradox! Living in Lvov, we wanted to see Belarus so much, though we knew the native land of our parents only from their stories. In 1960 after the graduation from the Lvov polytechnic institute I was sent to work in Minsk. How delighted I was at the time! Now I live with memoirs about Lvov, the city where I was young and happy.
Jeanne Vasanskaya.
Cards from collection of Vladimir Likhodedov