Interview by Sergey Lyashenko
Winter 1942, Ukraine. It was a severe winter that year in Ukraine. The Germans already marched into west Ukraine, pushing the Russians east. Ludmila Panchuck, my grandma, was five years old at the time. The children and old people were sitting at home all the time, not going very far if at all. At home there were barely any supplies for every day life, and if there was it was used with the utmost of care. Also, supplies were being taken away by the army, this made us try and hide our supplies to survive ourselves. But, if the supplies were found then the people who hid them were shot. Everywhere where there was and army all the people lived by the rules of the army. It was forbidden for anybody to go anywhere at night, and not go anywhere before the light came on. This was called commander’s time. If the patrol caught someone, then they were shot. One thing that I remember well was, when a man was running away from the Germans and happened to run across our yard and into the fields. But the Germans didn’t see the man run into the fields, and thought that he was hiding in our house. The Nazis had a translator and wanted us to tell them where the man was, but we didn’t know. So we were lined up against the wall, and where going to be shot, but reluctantly the translator stepped in for us because he was Ukranian. This caused the children to shed a lot of tears, and they were afraid to even go into the yard. The Japanese were opening another front with Russia in the west. The war would have been going for long years against Russia until the Americans dropped an atom bomb on Nagasaki, and Hiroshima. Americans dropped the bomb because they believed that the Japanese were getting a bit too strong for the safety of other countries and themselves. Came the spring of 1944, big changes were happening the Russians were attacking and Germans were retreating. The CCCP took over Ukraine. Stalin was killing all or sending anybody to concentration camps who were the Christians, land owners, and didn’t want to convert to communism. These people were sent to Siberia to work in the coal mines, the starting age for everybody to work. There was girls and boys who were 14 years old. The only thing to eat was bread and it was rationed strictly. Children got a hundred and fifty grams of bread per day. The workers that worked in coal mines got five hundred grams of bread per day. This was being continued until Stalin died. Then the people were allowed to go away and my grandma’s family returned to Ukraine, to be starving for a long time.