My grandmother on my mother's side was a Siberian Russian. She was very pretty and managed to have three kids from different guys. She loved men, her grandson, and persimmons. She worked all her life, mainly as a hotel manager, and was driven by pride.

Her mom, my great-grandmother who was born into a peasant's family, was forced to marry a very rich trader in Siberia - Voropaev. Soon after the wedding though, she escaped with some Polish guy (who looked dark and scary on one picture of them I saw), already being pregnant with my grandma. Voropaev, my great-grandfather, was later executed by Bolsheviks, and his wealth was expropriated.

All of my grandmother's siblings, seven brothers, were killed in World War II, fighting Nazis.

By the end of the war, during the hunger times in evacuation, she had frozen her legs badly while trying to find some food for her first baby on the winter fields, illegally gathering seeds from the ground. She had pain in her legs till the rest of her life.

She wore only dresses, had a very long hair, and most of her life she was married to a war veteran.

At her place in the center of Donetsk, I spent most of my school Summers, three months each year. She did not take females very seriously, was a bit suspicious about me being the daughter of that "clever guy," but she called me "my golden girl" (девочка моя золотая) sometimes.

In her 80s she managed the construction of her three-story house, planted an orchard, and died at 87 from a heart attack, after loosing her second child, and having only one daughter left: my mother.

She left me her property, and never learnt that it would be lost in the undeclared war with Russia. She hated wars so much.