‘Despite the slave system in collective farms and all the brainwashing, we managed to grow up as Ukrainians’

She is 93 and lives in the village of Dubrynychi in Zakarpattya Oblast in western Ukraine. It is hundreds of kilometers from her native Yarmolyntsi in Khmelnytskyi Oblast. It was there that Olha Pidhorodska was caught up in the Second World War, and she still remembers it in detail.

It is striking that those details of the ‘40s are very similar to the present day: children and women hiding from air strikes in cellars, the sound of warplanes overhead, a bomb crater in the garden, and the same almost magical belief in victory.

And then, all your life, the naive belief that you live with the best Soviet people in the world in the best country in the world...

"Just how they managed to brainwash us into believing that all our lives!" sighs Olha.

"Using the cat to warm up"

The woman has been working as a head teacher at a school in Dubrynychi, Zakarpattya Oblast all her life. She came here 70 years ago by assignment as the Soviet Union practiced such a mixing of residents of different regions, when teachers, doctors, and engineers were sent by state order to work hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away from home.

"I had a degree in math and studied in Kamianets-Podilskyi. I was sent to Uzhhorod with the expectation that I would work there and study at a music college. I sang at the institute, and the teachers said that you can't bury your talent in the ground. 

We came here with a group of more than ten people. Everyone found a place, but mine was taken by some inspector. Three days later, I was offered to go to Dubrynychi. They showed me a point on the map and said it was close to Uzhhorod: 30 km away, with a railroad and a central road. So I went there. A year later, I got married here and stayed."

When Olha came to Zakarpattya, she was 23 years old. She remembers the Second World War well because she was almost 11 when it started. Back then, she and her family lived in Yarmolyntsi, a town near Khmelnytskyi.

"We had five children in our family. My mom and dad worked on a collective farm. My mom baked bread and pies at night and sold them at the market, which was a 10-minute walk away. Dad was a shoemaker and mended people's shoes, and he also shaved and cut hair for the boys – this part-time job of my mom and dad saved us all our lives."

Olha says of her family that "we were not poor, we did not starve, but we never enjoyed the luxury of wealth." She remembers that it was very cold in the house, and she and her siblings would take turns taking the cat on their chests at night to keep warm.

"When we sometimes told our mother that we were hungry, she would immediately cut us off: ‘That's not hunger, you don't know what hunger is!’ She would tell us what happened in 1933, when many people came to the village to ask for food from other villages and cities in Ukraine. From their stories we learned about the tragedy of the Holodomor."

The woman also remembers the family story of the First World War: her father Fedir Lys fought in that war. He was held captive in an Austrian camp for more than four years. Later, Olha's granddaughter Alisa would find the town and documents about that prisoner of war camp.

Olha says that her father returned from captivity as a jack of all trades: he knew how to make bricks, work on various machinery, sew boots, and cut/shave hair. He confessed to his family that he met another woman there. Maybe he had children, Olha says, but she never looked for possible siblings.

"When my mother heard that I was getting married here in Zakarpattya, she was against it. She asked me not to marry a man ‘from those Austrians’. But I lived with my husband for 54 years and 50 days. He died in 2016, and since then I've been alone."

Nine loaves of bread and buried letters of recognition

Olha recalls that her parents were in the collective farm from the very first day. Before it was established, several people in the village were "dekulakized". They were taken to Siberia, and the rest were afraid after that, so they joined the collective farm.

"We had to earn 400 man-days a year, pay taxes for the house, land, and garden. I don't remember my mom ever resting or sleeping. She was a team leader at the collective farm. In the morning, before going to the field, my mother would bake nine loaves of bread every day. She would sell eight at the market and leave a loaf for all five of us in the house, which we ate all day long, with milk. She also cooked some soup. 

There were no delicacies. I remember buying candy from a Jew. But we didn't have a penny for them. Once, my grandmother gave me 5 kopecks because I wrote down my name for her, Olya."

At the same time, her mother never gave her money or bought her candy as a reward, even though she had completed three grades with honors before the war.

"But when the occupation began, my mother buried those letters of recognition (mine and hers, because she was also given them in the collective farm) in the garden because there were pictures of Lenin and Stalin. People in the village said that the Germans would shoot for that. She was afraid. And when the war was over, she never found those letters in the garden."

The first day of the war and the "Our Heavenly Father" in a neighbor's cellar

Olha Fedorivna remembers in detail the first day of the "patriotic" war, as she was taught to say, in June 1941.

"There was a military camp three kilometers away from us. That night, we all woke up to the sound of everything around us. Warplanes were flying to bomb that military camp and Kyiv. People came out of their houses, and in the morning they were told on the radio in the center that the war had started.

They told us to board up the windows and doors, not to turn on the lights at night, and to hide in the cellars. We didn't have a basement at home, so my mom took us to the cellar of our neighbors. The whole street would gather there. The cellar was full of women and children. Everyone was praying. Our mothers knew how to pray, but we did not, we were not taught that. In that cellar I learned the Our Heavenly Father. I remember that it was very scary, we were all crying and huddled around our mother."

The woman also recalls a rumor that was circulating in the village at the time, that if they came, they would shoot unbaptized Ukrainians.

"Under Soviet rule, children were not baptized in the village, because the church had already been destroyed and the priest was repressed. My mother cried every night, saying, what will happen now, Tolya and Olya (my brother and I, because the older ones were baptized) will be shot. So they found a priest somewhere, my father brought him to the house, gathered us with other neighborhood children, lined us up, and baptized us. Then my mother stopped crying."

Soon, the Germans did appear in the village and began to quarter soldiers and officers in various place.

"Our house was made of bricks, so an officer was lodged with us. We were told to make room and move to half of the house, and a German settled where we used to live. He was well-mannered, never rude. With the Germans, civilization came to us as they put a filter on the well. The well was guarded by a young soldier on duty, and we children used to tease him: he would shout ‘Stalin kaputt’ to us, and we would shout back "Hitler kaputt" to him from behind the fence."

Everything else, the woman says, was the same as before the war: people went to work at the collective farm.

"The head of the collective farm told the workers: ‘Steal whatever you see’. That's what people did. He was later summoned to the Gestapo and his fingers were smashed with a hammer. But life under the Germans became easier: people were given a hectare of land, they could have cattle, because there was something to feed them." 

Before retreating, the Germans brought a lot of shells and gunpowder into the forest and blew up everything.

"Not all the gunpowder burned, people collected it and carried it home. Then, after the retreat, there were several cases in our village where houses burned down, and one girl's hand was burned and another's face. And the boys found a grenade in the forest at that place and exploded. One of them lost his arm and the other got hit in the stomach."

"Our lot came and the first thing they did was to clear out all the grain in the village"

Olha also remembers Victory Day well.

"It was a very cold May, I was getting ready for school in the morning, and my friend came running to me: ‘Olya, Olya, there will be no school today - it's a holiday, the war is over!’ And then there was a parade in the city center, and we were screaming and shouting: ‘Hurrah!’".

Although when the Soviet regime came back, the first thing they did was to clear out all the wheat in everyone's homes.

"That year we had to sow the collective farm field with our own grain. So we did. They went from house to house and took everything down to the last grain. Some gave voluntarily, but most were searched. There was no machinery, nothing to plow with. So they ordered people to harness cows. My mother and her neighbor were plowing then, but what kind of cattle could they have if they only ate straw? So my mother and my aunt harnessed themselves to the sides and plowed the collective farm field that way.

Our mom used to say: ‘I will eat dirt, but none of my children will go to the collective farm!’ Three of us eventually got higher education, and two of us got undergraduate degrees."

"Did you give me this land?"

"In the morning of February 24, my youngest granddaughter came and said: ‘Grandma, the war has started.’ I said: ‘It's been going on for a long time, since '14’. - ‘What do you care: the real war has begun!’ I was petrified: how can it be that our cities are being bombed again?" Olha recalls the first day of the full-scale war.

Nowadays, the TV is always on in the woman's house: the old woman listens to the news and the radio. She says she listens all day and cries.

"I can't grasp now how they deliberately hit people, cities, houses. How can one person tell millions that you have to do as I say, not as you want. I live here, and he throws a bomb at me: why? Did you give me that land? Did you feed me? Am I asking you for something? And you sit there and command me to destroy it," the woman does not hold back her emotions.

Despite everything, she does not lose faith in victory. She says she is looking forward to it even more than she did when she was a child.

"My brothers and sisters and I managed to grow up as Ukrainians, despite the slave system in the collective farms, despite the war, even despite all the brainwashing that the communists had been doing for decades. This faith in Ukraine has remained and now gives us the strength to understand who the enemy really is and to support those who are fighting it."

This article is a part of the special project Children of War, in which we tell the stories of Ukrainians who witnessed the Second World War or its aftermath as children and are now experiencing another tragedy in their elderly years.

This piece was created as part of a project funded by the German Federal Foreign Office to support Ukrainian independent journalism.

Author: Tetiana Kohutych