Children’s dress, 1952
Elena (Olena) Fridrih (Friedrich) was born on June 3, 1946, in Schitomyr, Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, as the daughter of Solomon Fridrih and Natalja Putowa. She studies in Kyiv and subsequently works as a physics engineer. In 1992, she emigrates with her entire family from the now-independent Ukraine to the Federal Republic of Germany. She cites fear of the consequences of the Chernobyl reactor disaster in April 1986 as the reason. As the daughter of a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother, Elena is eligible to enter Germany as a ‘Jewish contingent refugee,’ but does not qualify as a Jew according to Jewish religious laws (Halacha). Since interfaith marriages were very common in the atheistic Soviet Union, many people who immigrated from post-Soviet countries as ‘contingent refugees’ find themselves in this situation. In the Federal Republic, the Fridrihs initially live in Gelsenkirchen. Elena works as a caregiver for the elderly, and her husband, a doctor of physics, works as a taxi driver. She has since become a grandmother. In 1952, the 62-year-old Tatjana Putowa (Putova) sewed a children’s dress for her five-year-old granddaughter Elena Fridrih from old fabrics and embroidered it. Born in 1946 in Ukrainian Schitomyr, Elena grows up under difficult conditions of the post-war years. The limited supplies are compounded by a complicated family history. Her maternal grandfather, Andrei (Andrej) Putow (Putov), a physicist, worked under the German occupation and was arrested after the arrival of the Red Army. According to family lore, he was coerced into working in a ‘sharashka,’ a secret research facility in Leningrad, while in custody. Elena’s father, Solomon Fridrih, participated in the war as a military doctor for the Red Army from 1942. The dress was kept as a family heirloom and brought along during their emigration to the Federal Republic of Germany in 1992.
