Nathan Balan and his friend Boris Snezhnevski

Nathan Balan and his friend Boris Snezhnevski

This is my brother Nathan Balan, on the left, with his friend Boris Snezhnevski, in the middle, in their amateur photo club in Tiraspol's Palace of Pioneers. The photo was taken in 1935. My older brother Nathan was good at drawing and liked photography. He attended a club of photographers at the town's Palace of Pioneers. I sometimes joined him to go there. Nathan and I had much in common and were very much alike. We were both dark-haired and dark-eyed while our middle brother Abram had red hair. Nathan went to a Jewish elementary school, but he didn't like it there and left it for a Russian school, which was the best school in town. Nathan studied well and was a Komsomol activist. In 1941 Nathan graduated from the secondary school. When the Great Patriotic War began our family was evacuated to Nizhne-Chirskaya village in Stalingrad region. My older brother Nathan was recruited to the army in December 1941. In his letters he wrote about how they marched to Stalingrad - they had to cover a distance of about 100 kilometers - and how they stayed in a school building. Later he wrote from the front. Nathan disappeared in 1943. We don't know where or how it happened.
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