Vasylenko (Hubchenko), Evelina Ivanivna

VASYLENKO (HUBCHENKO), EVELINA IVANIVNA (b. December 25, 1924, in Kherson).
Translator. Accused of collaborating with the German occupiers. Rehabilitated.
From the family of Ivan Kyrylovych Hubchenko, a highly skilled locksmith and communist, which lived in poverty. Her mother raised four children. Evelina finished nine grades before the war. In the first days of the war, she donated blood for Red Army soldiers. She completed nursing school but was not taken to the front as a minor. She was unable to evacuate. During the German occupation, she hid for five months to avoid being sent to Germany as an Ostarbeiter. To get an exemption from deportation and somehow survive, on the advice of her communist aunt, she went to work as a German translator in a water pipe workshop, then at a steam turbine station, in customs, and at a construction firm. She helped obtain certificates for women who brought food to captive Red Army soldiers. On December 15, 1943, the German occupiers announced a full evacuation of Kherson. Evelina was ordered to retreat with them, but the girl hid. The gendarmerie searched for her. In March 1944, during the retreat, she escaped with her friend Iryna Domashova.
On March 13, 1944, they welcomed the Red Army. She worked clearing ruins. She passed her 10th-grade exams as an external student and in June 1944 entered the mechanical faculty of the Odesa Technological Institute of the Refrigeration and Food Industry. To earn a living, she worked in the library as a lab assistant. She was an excellent student; her photograph was on the institute’s honor roll from the first to the last year. She was the Komsomol secretary for the mechanical faculty. She gave her bread card to her father, yet he died of starvation in 1947. Her brother, a war veteran, became swollen from hunger.
In her fifth year, Hubchenko began to be summoned by the authorities of the Odesa North Black Sea Basin and interrogated about her behavior during the German occupation. However, she was allowed to complete her practical training at a juice factory in Odesa.
On the night of March 15, 1949, Hubchenko was arrested. She was expelled from the Komsomol in absentia. The investigator, Beloglazov, told her: “There is not a single fact to incriminate you, and after the war, everything about you is brilliant—but you will get a sentence, because that’s how things are now.”
On April 29, 1949, the Military Tribunal of the MVS troops of Kherson oblast sentenced Hubchenko under Article 54-3 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR (“aiding the enemy”) to 10 years of imprisonment in corrective labor camps with a loss of rights for 3 years and confiscation of all property (of which she had none).
While in transit, Hubchenko developed a pelvic abscess. In Ukhta, in the Komi ASSR, she was hospitalized. There she was offered a job as a nurse’s aide, but she could not psychologically bear the sight of blood and wounds. As an “undegreed mechanical engineer,” she worked at the thermal power plant of the “Ukhtkombinat.” But an order from Stalin came to transfer all those convicted under Article 54-3 to logging and other hard labor. As a person with a technical education, she was made a brigade leader. Later, she worked in horse-drawn transport in an agricultural camp.
After Stalin’s death, she was de-convoyed. She worked as a rate-setter. “By a resolution of the Military Tribunal of the Taurida Military District dated March 11, 1955, the term was reduced to 6 years without loss of rights, with credit for workdays.” She was released on April 10, 1955.
She returned to her mother in Kherson. The rector of the Odesa Technological Institute, Martynovsky, after reviewing Hubchenko’s character reference and her “engineering practice,” allowed her to defend her diploma in 1956 after passing additional exams. Meanwhile, because of Hubchenko’s conviction, her brothers—war veterans—were not accepted into the party and could not advance their careers, although Hubchenko herself was reinstated in the Komsomol. She worked at a cannery.
On October 31, 1956, she married the recently released political prisoner and translator Mykola VASYLENKO, with whom she had studied in the 9th grade before the war. Their son, Valentyn, was born in 1956, and their grandson, Oleh, in 1979.
Hubchenko worked in a boiler room, in a design bureau, and at a vocational school, but after 18 years, the school’s director decided to remove her from “the education of youth.” Hubchenko then appealed to the prosecutor, demanding a review of her case and her rehabilitation. By a decision of the judicial collegium for criminal cases of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR on April 13, 1971, the military tribunal’s verdict of April 29, 1949, concerning Hubchenko was annulled, and the case was closed due to a lack of evidence. Hubchenko was rehabilitated, and the state paid her 11,000 rubles in compensation.
In 1980, Hubchenko retired, but she continued to work as an operator at the cannery until 1993. She was active in the trade union and the Veterans’ Council, but she left the Council due to disagreements with the leadership over their assessments of Rukh (the People’s Movement of Ukraine) and the UPA. She supported her husband’s work in public organizations.
Bibliography:
Interview with Evelina Ivanivna Hubchenko (Vasylenko) on February 17, 2001, in Kherson: https://museum.khpg.org/1364279823
Interview with M. Vasylenko on February 17, 2001: https://museum.khpg.org/1364235729