Children of the Holocaust Valentina Yakorevskaya

CHILDREN of the HOLOCAUST

Valentina Yakorevskaya

Valentina Yakorevskaya

Born 1938 in Mozyr, Belarus When the Germans invaded Moyzr, Belarus, Valentina was 2 years old and her sister was an infant. As soon as the Nazis started rounding up Jews, they went into hiding with their mother and then fled east into the Soviet Union.

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Valentina Yakorevskaya, age 2, a few months before the Germans invaded her city, Mozyr, in Belarus.

Valentina’s mother, Fira Tamarkina, was 27 years old when she became a refugee with three-year-old Valentina and two-month-old Mila.

Valentina’s father was conscripted by letter in 1941.

Valentina’s father, Vladimir Zelenkovskiy, was 35 years old when he was sent to the front to fight the Germans. She never saw him again.

Valentina’s father, (right) with a fellow soldier.

In 1944, Valentina’s mother received a letter from the government informing her that her husband had been killed in the war.

The man who would become her husband, Solomon Yakorevskiy, at age 20. A Jew from Siberia, he enlisted to fight the Nazis when he was 17 years old.

Valentina’s husband, Solomon, rose through the ranks of the Soviet army during World War II. But after the war, he experienced anti-Semitic discrimination in the military.

Valentina’s maternal grandmother, Lyubova Tamarkina (right), and her sister, date unknown. They lived in a forced labor camp (gulag) in Siberia.

Lyubova Tamarkina, date unknown.

Lyubova Tamarkina in 1912.

Valentina, age 16, in Minsk.

Valentina in 1957. She was in her second year at the Belarus State Institute of National Economics, where she earned a degree with highest honors in industrial economics. But when it was discovered that she had a Jewish mother, employers wouldn’t hire her.

Valentina (right) age 19, with sister, Mila, age 16.

Valentina and sister, Mila, in 1959 in Belarus.

Valentina and Solomon as newlyweds, 1959.

Valentina with her son, Vladimir, and grandmother Lyubova.

Valentina with her husband, Solomon, and son, Vladimir, in 1974.

Valentina and Solomon emigrated to the United States in 1993 and settled in Tucson, Arizona.

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