My cousin, Inna Bruk, was born in Kharkov in 1925. Her mother, my aunt, Serafima Menshikova, was from the Chelyabinsk Region. Being the daughter of a White army officer who died in the Civil War and fleeing from the red terror, Serafima moved from the Urals to the Ukrainian SSR before Inna was born. She was followed there by her three younger sisters, including my mother. Initially, Serafima lived in Kharkov, where Inna was born, and then the mother and daughter went to Kiev. After the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, Inna moved with her mother from German-occupied Kiev to a small village in the Kiev Region. There, her mother constantly baked bread for Soviet partisans, which was delivered to the local partisan camp with the help of messengers. Inna Bruk was captured and shot by German invaders in a village near Kiev, along with her mother, on March 18, 1943, on the denunciation of the Ukrainian village head, a traitor and Nazi accomplice. Before the execution, the mother asked not to kill Inna, who was only 17 years old at the time. But Inna ordered her mother not to humiliate herself before the enemy. She let down her luxuriant long hair in front of the executioner and was killed by a German officer with a pistol shot in the head in front of her mother, who was then shot with a machine gun. The Germans drove the whole village to watch the execution. Among the witnesses was one of their sisters, who moved after Inna's mother from the Urals to Kiev, and then to this village. It was she who reported these terrible events to us later. She turned gray that day.