Cutting and tying threads. 90 years without a home, but with liberty

Maya. Saved by the village

1936, the village of Samsonove. Six-year-old Maya was sitting on a bench near the village council. The head of the collective farm noticed her. It turned out that the child was alone because she had lost her foster family: they had been exiled to Solovki. Three years earlier, Maya's own father and mother had been shot as kulaks.

Maya's own parents lived in Telmanove, one of the first German colonies in Donetsk Oblast. Germans were evicted from that area after World War II. It was the most massive deportation of national minorities as about 1.5 million Soviet Germans were expelled to Western Europe.

The orphaned Maya was placed with a local woman. Eventually, she stayed in this village. She was sent to live with one family, then another, who were paid for her care with labor days. Literally, the whole village rescued the child; there was no one in particular who would constantly love and raise her. They didn't know the girl's real name either. She became Maya because her birthday was registered as May 1, Workers' Solidarity Day.

Then came the Second World War, deportation to Germany, working as a servant in a German family, and returning home, but in the famine of 1946, she lost everything again, and Maya was sent to Siberia to gather ears of grain. She grinded these ears into porridge and fed her baby that way. But the child still died soon after.

In Siberia, Maya met Kostiantyn Kaniev, who was also serving an exile. They met in the morning and moved into the same barracks in the evening. They returned to Samsonove together with two children in the mid-1950s.

The collective farm did not want to hire former prisoners, so they created their own prosperity by relying on their own strength. Eventually, they built a large farm and were almost perceived as kulaks in the village.

Maya was considered an eccentric because she was not like the other villagers. She had a large library and read a lot. She helped her fellow villagers, but then she heard dismissive comments from them. Eventually, at the end of her life, she became disillusioned with people in general, trusting only her family.

Hryhoriy. Exiled in New York

Hryhoriy Filimonenko was a German by birth and lived in Bessarabia before World War II. In 1938, he joined the Wehrmacht, where he served until 1945 when he was captured by British troops. The "traitor of the Motherland" was not allowed to return to his native village, but was given a choice: to move to Donbas or Kazakhstan. There was nowhere to return to either. In fact, in 1940, the Soviet government occupied Bessarabia and deported more than 90,000 local Germans from the region.

Hryhoriy settled in New York in Donetsk Oblast. He was a very good carpenter, and that's how he earned his living. He also had a little secret. Hryhoriy was a Catholic, and before perestroika began, he celebrated his religious holidays in hiding.

Hryhoriy hated the Soviet Union, though he never said so out loud. When his son wanted to join the Communist Party, the father warned him: "If you do that, I won't have a son."

Anna. Untying the knots

Anna Chyzhova was Maya's favorite granddaughter and listener to her stories. Anna's parents divorced when she was 10. Her grandmother immediately took her granddaughter to the village and began teaching her how to make blankets. This work requires a long thread without a single knot. Unwinding the knots required a lot of patience and perseverance. Later, when Anna had to leave her home, she realized that by giving her this important task, her grandmother was switching her from the trauma of her parents' divorce to creating something new.

In the village, the well-read, curly-haired girl from a city was openly ridiculed, and they quickly came up with an offensive nickname for her. They called her the word otiets (‘father’), which she used instead of the usual batya in these parts.

When Anna quoted something communist in a fit of enthusiasm, her grandfather would cough and leave the room. Once, she invited them to a celebration in the school cafeteria, but Maya refused to go, saying that there was a portrait of the man who shot her father. When she was a child, a portrait of Stalin hung there, and her grandmother never even stepped foot in the dining room.

Yuriy. The search for identity

Yuriy Filimonenko was Hryhoriy Filimonenko's favorite grandson. He was also the first newborn in the first maternity hospital in Novhorodske. During his grandfather's youth, this village was called New York (on July 1, 2021, the parliament decided to return the village to its historical name).

The grandson also grew up without respect for communist ideology. He did not feel nostalgic for the USSR and did not accept pro-Russian narratives. He studied in Lviv in the early ‘90s, listened to rock music, joined the newly formed Union of Independent Ukrainian Youth, and his mother sewed him red and black flags.

In October 1990, Yura and several other people pitched tents in the center of Donetsk and went on a hunger strike in support of the The main demands of the protesters were to prevent Ukraine from signing a new union treaty, to hold re-elections to the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR on a multi-party basis, to nationalize the Communist Party of the Ukrainian SSR, etc.demands made by students in Kyiv during the Granite Revolution.

At the same time, at the age of 17, Yuriy traveled to Poland, where he saw that people can live in a completely different way. All this diverse experience eventually allowed him to form his own identity and a certain independence in his outlook.

At some point, Yuriy followed in his grandfather's footsteps and converted to Western Catholicism. He liked the orderliness and integrity of this Christian denomination.

Donetsk. Sticky horror and missing persons

We are sitting in a three-room apartment in Odesa's Moldavanka district, the first proper, albeit rented, home in many years for Yuriy, Anna, and their children, 21-year-old Anton and 17-year-old Yehor. Ten years ago, they had to become internally displaced, repeating the fate of their relatives because of Russia's policy.

When the Euromaidan began in Kyiv, Yuriy and Anna supported the protesters, even though almost all of their relatives were against it. They attended rallies in Donetsk. They say that, as a rule, those who had been to Europe and were interested in something other than what was shown on TV and prices in stores were in favor of Euromaidan. But there was one more safeguard against propaganda: historical memory, which did not let them forget that they should not expect anything good from Russia.

The city was being seized by aggressive pro-Russian forces, persecuting people with yellow and blue symbols and enjoying significant local support. The last straw, after which the real repression began, was the fire in the Trade Union Building in Odesa, which killed 31 pro-Russian activists, but at the same time stopped the separatists' attempt to take over the city.

"There was a feeling of terrible, sticky fear. Now they're going to come in, and what are you going to do? You're nothing against them," Anna recalls. Yuriy adds that at some point, there were a lot of ads in Donetsk looking for missing persons.

The Filimonenko family left Donetsk on July 12, 2014. In the evening, Russians began shelling the area where they lived. They chose Odesa as their new home.

Yuriy's two brothers remained in Donetsk. The elder Oleh immediately sided with the separatists and later fled to Moscow. The younger Ruslan fought for the so-called "DPR" for a short time and now lives in the Russian-occupied territory.

"We were friends, we always stood up for each other. We had many friends in common with my elder brother, and we looked very similar, so much so that we were often confused. Each of us made our own choice in 2014," Yuriy says sadly.

For some time, they were living in the suburbs of Odesa, until in June 2016, together with other people, they seized an emergency house in the city center, on Uspenska Street, turning it into a squat for IDPs. It was there that I met Yuriy and Anna and spent several years filming a story about this place.

When it all started, the squat's residents fought for the rights of IDPs, including the right to affordable housing. Over time, there was no trace of this unity. Squatters still live in the house on Uspenska Street, but there has been no electricity for more than a year, and most importantly, the sense of a common cause has disappeared.

Finding your own. Hell and Angel

Yuriy went to war from the first days of the full-scale invasion. First in Mykolaiv Oblast, then in his native Donetsk Oblast, near Yampil, as part of the 79th Brigade. At the end of April 2022, Russian troops broke through the front in that area. Communication with the command was lost, and Yuriy and his fellows had to get out of the encirclement on their own, not knowing where their lot were and where there were foes.

It took him five days to get out. Whenever possible, he slept in basements, dugouts, and once even had to spend the night in a swamp, freezing from the cold. He prayed constantly. To cross the Siverskyi Donets River and get to their friends, they had to attack a Russian checkpoint. When they crossed the river, they came under fire from the Ukrainian military. But everyone survived: out of the 12 people who escaped from the encirclement in Yuriy's group, only one was wounded.

Then there was an inspection, a conflict with the command, and accusations of arbitrary tipoff of positions, which could have resulted in prison. Yuriy says that they tried to pin all the responsibility for the failure of the defense and the loss of territory on him.

A lawyer with the call sign Angel saved him from imprisonment. After those events, Yuriy retrained as an artilleryman and is now fighting with the 148th Artillery Brigade.

Yuriy fought in Yampil again as an artilleryman in late September 2022, when Ukrainian troops liberated the area during a counteroffensive.

Threads between people

Anna found Angel through her friends in the volunteer work she had been involved in since before the outbreak of the full-scale war. The loss of her home prompted her to start her own business for the first time in her life – she opened a small studio with grants received for IDPs.

Anna works with threads again, as if she were sewing up her injuries. Nowadays, soldiers and their wives often come to her studio. Every Sunday, women with similar life stories gather in the basement she rents and sew pillows and underwear for the wounded.

Ten years in a suitcase pocket

I ask Yuriy and Anna what they have lost and what they have gained during these ten years without a permanent home. They unexpectedly and almost unanimously answer that, by and large, they have not lost anything but their home, but their children will carry their traumatic experience with them for a long time. Because, along with their home, their childhood was taken away from them.

"In the first year, we didn't even have money to buy food, we were barely surviving. The children lost weight, but to prevent their grandmother from crying when she saw their hollow cheeks, they puffed them up while taking pictures," Anna smiles.

Their children, Anton and Yehor, arrived with nothing in a city where children had everything. They are still reluctant to spend money on extra clothes, fearing that they might not have enough later.

Yehor's trauma was channeled into a huge collection of soft toys from humanitarian aid that he collected, filling his inner world at least in this way, if his parents cannot buy other toys.

"I spent ten years in some secret pocket of my suitcase. It is only now that I realize this. All this time, we did not have our own permanent home and lived out of our suitcases," Anna sadly admits.

But for themselves, Yuriy and Anna were able to turn the experience of losing their home into new connections and opportunities.

Overcoming trauma

In 2002, a book by Greek psychologist Renos Papadopoulos, Therapeutic Care for Refugees: No Place Like Home Today was published in London. it is one of the most important studies of social and psychological processes that occur with internally displaced persons around the world.

One of the book's main messages is to dispel the stereotype that losing one's home is always a negative process that causes irreparable trauma. The researcher proves that changing the territory of residence and the surrounding society can open up new, unknown opportunities for a person.

Such an experience means a partial loss of a sense of identity, but it can also stimulate active moves to restore and rethink one's self, to find new ways for self-realization. Unless a person stays in a state of learned helplessness and remains in the role of a victim for a long time, waiting only for help from the outside.

During their ten years in Odesa, Yuriy and Anna made new friends and became socially active. In Donetsk, Yuriy worked as a construction worker, and in Odesa he learned a new profession as an industrial climber, while also working with the local self-defense units.

Anna worked as an accountant and computer operator until 2014. In Odesa, she opened her own small business. Now, just like in her childhood, she overcomes adversity by working with threads.

But the main thing they have gained despite the war is social ties. Because they found themselves among their own.

Yuriy returned to Odesa for a short vacation. Today is Catholic Easter, but he does not go to church because he is afraid of strikes and is just tired, he wants to rest before returning to Donetsk Oblast. Meanwhile, they discuss current affairs and tell us that they have applied for a government program to provide housing for combatants. It is clear that they will have to wait a long time for such housing, but it is what it is.

The main thing is that now they are living their own free lives, albeit full of joys and pains. And they believe in the future.

This text was created with the financial support of the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation as part of a series of materials entitled "Traumas of War."