Gomza-Spohady
Yaroslav Homza. Memoirs.
(From the book: Yaroslav Homza. Articles, Memoirs, Poems. Haidamaka Publishing House, Ocheretiane, 2002.)
ALMOST A BIOGRAPHY
I was born into the peasant family of Yurko and Nastia Homza on September 18, 1927, in the village of Monastyrets, Stryi Raion, Lviv Oblast. I completed three grades in the village state school with “Ruthenian” as the language of instruction, and from the fourth grade, I was a student at the Stryi “Ridna Shkola” (Native School), and from 1939, at Secondary School No. 10 in Stryi. I did not finish school because various “liberators” brought our family to a state of complete poverty—there wasn’t a crumb of bread in the house—so there was no time for studies. In February 1942, along with my father, I was forced to “voluntarily” go to work in Germany. I worked for a *Bauer* [farmer] in the village of Ganzerin in Pomerania, and my father worked in the neighboring village of Kepitz.
I established contacts with various Ukrainian organizations, primarily with the “Ukrainian National Alliance” and the “Ukrainian Community.” I spent all my earnings on newspapers and books, which I distributed among the Ukrainian Ostarbeiters. The most important newspapers were “Ukrainskyi Visnyk” (Berlin), “Nastup” (Prague), and “Ukrainska Diisnist” (Berlin), and the magazine “Proboiem” (Prague).
In April 1945, after the “liberation,” I was arrested by the “Smersh” organs of the 3rd Shock Army and sentenced by a Military Tribunal under Article 58-1a of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR to 10 years of imprisonment and 5 years of disenfranchisement for “anti-Soviet activity” (distributing Ukrainian press and books among Ukrainian Ostarbeiters) and “ties with the anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist organizations S.H.D. [Union of Hetmanite Statists] and OUN.” I served my sentence in Siblag (Antibes) and Steplag (Kengir and Dzhezkazgan). I was released in 1955 after completing my sentence.
I left for the Donetsk region, where my parents had moved and where I still live today. Here, I worked as a laborer, first at the Ocheretyne brick factory, and then at the Avdiivka coke and chemical plant. At the same time, I studied and finished secondary school (in 1968), German language courses (in 1969), and the Ukrainian department of the philological faculty of Donetsk State University (1974). From 1972 until my retirement, I worked as a teacher of German and Ukrainian language and Ukrainian literature at the Ocheretyne Secondary School.
The entire time after my release, I was under the close surveillance of the KGB, secretly until 1972, and openly from 1972 onward. This meant constant summons, warnings, threats, blackmail of family members, searches, etc., right up to 1990.
Despite this, from the very beginning of the Ukrainian revival, I became involved and took an active part in public work: in the T. Shevchenko Ukrainian Language Society, the Society of the Repressed, Rukh, the UGS [Ukrainian Helsinki Group], the URP [Ukrainian Republican Party], and the OUN. I published a samvydav [samizdat] journal, “Kaiala,” which ceased to exist after two issues due to a lack of any funds or technical means.
(Published in the newspaper “Molod Ukrainy,” Kyiv, 1999, No. 40)
IN GERMANY
In No. 7 of “Ukrainskyi Zasiv” (Kharkiv), an article by Mykhailo Ivanchenko, “The Restless Muse of the Ostarbeiters,” appeared, which was interesting to me (and I think, not just to me). It was interesting not only to me as a reader of the journal, but also as someone who was, to a certain extent, involved in what was written, who read and distributed all of it, and who served 10 years in Soviet Corrective Labor Camps for it (and not only for it).
Truth be told, I was never in any of the German camps, nor was I published anywhere, but I worked for a *Bauer* in the village of Ganzerin in Pomerania and read and distributed almost all the publications that Mr. Ivanchenko mentions in his article-memoir. In addition, I received all the periodicals published by the poet Bohdan Kravtsiv, the author of the collection “Under Foreign Stars,” which I knew, with its unforgettable lines:
Із серця їдь
Не витравить зміїна
Семи тих літер
Слова – УКРАЇНА.
I read and re-read the magazine “Dozvillia” with great pleasure, and the historical novella about the Cossack Zhurliay was “The Adventures of a Young Knight” by Spyrydon Cherkasenko, which was serialized in that magazine. Cherkasenko himself—a well-known poet and writer—traversed a complex path from a socialist to a hetmanite monarchist.
Не раз вночі на чужині
Мене навідує видіння:
Гетьман суворий на коні.
Майдан. Софія. Безгоміння.
– Я кликав вас під булаву.
Щоби згадати давню славу
І на руїнах вже нову
Створити власную державу...
This poem was almost an anthem for the hetmanites; it was even published as a separate leaflet.
Besides the names mentioned by Ivanchenko, I remember the poet Hai-Holovko:
Сідайте в ряд. Про землю я
Скажу, з якої лихо ллється:
Ота ненависна земля
Росією іздавна зветься.
На тій ненависній землі,
Від крові нашої багровий,
Сидить у царському Кремлі
На троні змій п’ятиголовий.
Дихне він першою – летить
Вогню пекельного багаття
І Україна вся горить
І шле йому страшне прокляття...
He also penned the lines dedicated to the memory of Taras Shevchenko:
Всміхайся, звитяжче, з свого п’єдесталу,
Бо шлях ми до тебе квітками услали,
Бо прапор свободи тримаєм в руках,
І сонце мечами нам вказує шлях.
The last poem, I believe, was published in the magazine “Doroha,” which came from Lviv. This magazine also published “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” in a translation by O. Kovalenko-Romankivskyi.
“Zvirolovy” (The Animal Hunters), the first edition of I. Bahrianyi’s novel now known as “Tyhrolovy” (The Tiger Trappers), was published not by the UPA underground, but by the “Ukrainian Publishing House” in Kraków–Lviv, as the first issue of the “Vechirnia Hodyna” (Evening Hour) library series. I had a few other books from this library, but they are not memorable to me. But I read “Zvirolovy” in a single night.
I received books mostly from Yury Tyshchenko in Prague or from Borys Tyshchenko in Vienna. Some books also came from Berlin. Among them, I should mention “Zolote Slovo” (The Golden Word), Yury Klen’s “Caravels,” D. Dontsov’s “The Spirit of Our Antiquity,” and “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” in translations by many Ukrainian poets. However, the most popular were the historical novellas of A. Kashchenko.
Almost my entire salary was spent on acquiring books and periodicals. And I received and read almost all the Ukrainian periodicals that were published in the territory of what was then Germany. These included Bohdan Kravtsiv’s publications: “Holos,” “Visti,” “Ukrainets,” “Khliborob,” “Dozvillia”—all from Berlin; Stepan Rossokha’s (OUN): “Nastup” with the bi-weekly supplement “Natsionalist,” the magazine “Proboiem,” the almanac “Surmy”—all from Prague; “Ukrainskyi Visnyk”—the organ of the UNO—Berlin; “Ukrainska Diisnist”—the organ of the Ukrainian Community—Berlin. In 1945, the newspaper “Zemlia” and a number of handwritten journals were published, among which the “Military-Scientific Almanac” is worth mentioning.
“Ukrainskyi Visnyk” published in-depth articles about the poets and scholars of the Ukrainian Renaissance of the 1920s-30s who were shot and tortured. From the pages of “Dozvillia,” I became acquainted with the writer V. Chaplenko, the poets O. Oles, T. Osmachka, Y. Klen, and many others.
Of the people mentioned by M. Ivanchenko, I am personally acquainted only with Petro Rotach. But not from Germany. We met during the “stagnation” era, had common acquaintances in Lviv, Warsaw, and Bucharest, and corresponded until about 1991.
In 1989, the samvydav journal “Porohy” was published in Sicheslav [Dnipropetrovsk]. The editor-in-chief was the poet I. Sokulskyi, and I was a member of the editorial board. That year in Donetsk, under my editorship, two issues of a similar journal, “Kaiala,” were released. Petro Rotach was a dear and welcome author in these publications. Both “Porohy” and “Kaiala” ceased to exist for financial reasons—due to a complete lack of funds.
(Published in the collection “Zona,” Kyiv, 1998, pp. 252-254)
FROM BERLIN TO ANTIBES
My trial took place in the latter half of April 1945 in one of the suburbs of Berlin. This procedure was carried out by the Military Tribunal of the 3rd Shock Army, consisting of two men and one woman, in the presence of a military convoy. From their grace, I received 10 years of imprisonment and 5 years of disenfranchisement under Article 58-1a of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR. The materials for the article were diligently prepared by an MVD investigator, a captain, either Kudriavtsev or Kudriashov, commander of a “Smersh” counter-intelligence platoon.
“Never mind,” he said before sending me off to the USSR, “even though you’re a nationalist, you’re a young lad. You’ll work, get re-educated, and you’ll come out a real Soviet man.”
At the trial, I behaved courageously, answering directly and openly. This was evident from the behavior of the guards as they led me from the courtroom to my cell, and in the following days when they took me out for walks. They showed no brutality, but were somehow downcast and pensive.
A few days later, the departure “to the Motherland”; covered trucks, a strict convoy. The transport gradually grew, the covered trucks were replaced by railway cars—“telatnyks” [cattle cars]—and by the time we reached Brest, it was already a substantial echelon. The absolute majority of the prisoners were “traitors to the Motherland,” that is, former Soviet POWs and Ostarbeiters, as well as soldiers of the Soviet Army. The latter fell under Soviet justice under Article 58-10 (“anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda”) and 59—“banditry, robbery, and looting.” One of these robbers, Captain Selianinov, traveled with me all the way to Antibes.
The echelon arrived in Brest without any incidents. The windows of the “cattle cars” were, for some reason, not boarded up, only barred. Through them, the territory of Poland was clearly visible. I noticed that the western part of Poland (Poznań Voivodeship) with its villages and cities strongly resembled Germany: the same brick houses under red tiles, cultivated fields. And further east (Warsaw Voivodeship), everything strongly resembled, as I later became convinced, Belarus: the same shabby villages, neglected fields, dirty towns. This was the consequence of the centuries-long occupation of Poland by Austria, Prussia, and Russia after the Fourth Partition of Poland at the beginning of the 19th century.
The transport arrived in Brest in the evening. A light rain was drizzling. They herded us into the prison yard, sat us on the cobblestones, and kept us there all night. Only in the morning were we handed over to the prison administration.
The guards here were particularly cruel, beating prisoners for any offense: not standing correctly, not turning correctly, and so on. The vast majority of these henchmen were former Red partisans.
The contingent of prisoners here was significantly expanded and diversified with Belarusians from the surrounding areas, mostly for collaboration with the German occupation authorities. They all arrived with food from home, and people like Selianinov fed well off them. I was very surprised by their low national consciousness. For example, they expressed the view that Belarus could not be an independent state because it never had been. Ukraine was a different matter, they had their own princes, hetmans. Even under the Germans in Volhynia, Ataman Taras Bulba was active. There was nothing similar in Belarus. For some reason, they considered me a Pole, although I always and everywhere used only the Ukrainian language and declared that I was Ukrainian. But most of them insisted that I was a “little Pole.” And one former soldier, a native of the Green Wedge [Zelenyi Klyn], Senior Lieutenant Tolstoles, once said: “My father was a real *khokhol*, Tovstolis, but I am Ru-us-sian.”
They didn’t keep us in Brest for long. A new transport was formed and sent to the transit prison in Orsha. This is in eastern Belarus. All around were still fresh traces of the war: ruins, fire sites.
Here, a large transport was finally formed for dispatch to Siberia. But the contingent of prisoners remained basically the same: former prisoners of war, Ostarbeiters, Soviet soldiers, Belarusian peasants. I remember one Muscovite who had fought the entire war from Moscow to Berlin and received 10 years for anti-Soviet agitation: somewhere in Germany, he had expressed the opinion that the Germans lived better than the “Russians.” One captain, a very respectable man, also got a ten-year sentence for nothing. All these prisoners, except for the bandits and looters, treated me very well, because I was the only teenager, a “patsan,” among them. And one advised me: “Don’t admit that you are Ukrainian, say you are Russian, and it will be easier for you in the camps.”
And so, a new echelon passed Smolensk and rushed across the expanses of the “vast Motherland” to the northeast. The “cattle” cars were overflowing with “traitors to the Motherland.” At stops, there were checks with cudgels on the walls of the cars and on the backs of prisoners, a half-starved existence. Although the same could be observed in the expanses of that “Motherland.” For example, when the train stopped at Shyriinka station in Kostroma Oblast, despite the threats and shouts of the convoy, children and teenagers surrounded it, begging for food.
All the way to Antibes, the robberies in the cars continued. The looters, in collusion with the convoy, took clothes from the peasants and exchanged them for tobacco or moonshine.
I left Germany decently dressed. On the transport, first, back in Orsha, they took my good trousers and in return gave me some homespun ones, dyed with elderberry, which they had taken from one of the Belarusian peasants. I arrived in Antibes without a jacket or cap, and instead of leather shoes, I had slippers made from a soldier’s greatcoat. In the camp, the *blatnye* [professional criminals] took my short coat, giving me a trimmed soldier’s greatcoat in return.
And what seemed strange to me: the robbers felt as comfortable as a fish in water—they met no resistance, no protest from anyone. Later, in Antibes, when three jackals took my newly received bread ration, the whole brigade just silently sympathized.
We arrived at our destination in the middle of summer, meaning we had traveled from Berlin for about three months, half of us sick, exhausted by hunger. I was among the latter. Only the looters and those who had left Orsha with a supply of dried bread arrived healthy. And people like me were immediately sent to the semi-hospital barracks for reinforcement.
Antibes is a railway siding or “half-station” not far from Mariinsk station in Kemerovo Oblast. Here was one of the departments of Siblag, the center of which was in Mariinsk. The department (“sovkhoz” [state farm]) had four camp points: the first, not far from the half-station and divided by barbed wire into three zones: male, female, and a production zone with various workshops and services. The second and third were two or three kilometers from the first. But there were only economic facilities there: cowsheds, pigsties, warehouses for agricultural products, etc. The civilian management and the unenclosed service personnel from among the common prisoners lived there. And for field and construction work, guarded brigades were brought from the first camp point. The fourth—Tiumenivka and Zhakivka—was ten to fifteen kilometers away. Unenclosed common prisoners also worked there. Although sometimes guarded brigades were taken there as well. But there was no production effect from this: by the time they got there, they worked for an hour or two—and it was already time to return. But that is another topic.
In Antibes, only a part of the most weakened prisoners was unloaded. The others were taken further—to Mariinsk for transit.
(Published in the newspapers “Ukrainske Slovo,” Kyiv; “Molod Ukrainy,” Kyiv, 1999, No. 40)
ANTIBES
In the summer of 1945, our transport arrived from Orsha to Antibes. The weakened part of the prisoners was housed in the first camp point of the Antibes department of Siblag (a “sovkhoz”). At that time, the camp point was small; on its territory there were several long barrack-dugouts. I don’t remember how many there were, but not many. The territory of the camp point was surrounded by a stockade, on the inner and outer sides of which there were more barbed wire fences, and at the corners stood guard towers (“vyshkas”) with guards (“popkas”), armed with submachine guns or rifles. The camp point was divided into two zones: a larger male zone and a smaller female zone, separated by a high wall with barbed wire on top and towers at both ends. There was only one checkpoint (“vakhta”). There was also a third zone, for economic and production purposes.
I ended up in a barrack for the very weakened (“OP”), which stood first from the checkpoint. There were also frail old men here, some of whom could no longer walk and almost all of whom died by winter. Among them were several generals from the tsarist army.
I recovered quite quickly, but thanks to the barrack elder Mykola Radchenko, I stayed there for some time as a member of the service staff. At the next medical examination, I was assigned “medium labor” and sent to a field brigade. Initially, two such brigades were organized—Shashkov’s brigade and Karatkevich’s brigade, about forty men each. Both foremen were Belarusians and came from some kind of “labor intelligentsia.” Later, Kolesnikov’s brigade was formed. All members of these brigades were “traitors to the Motherland.” During my five years in Antibes, I had to work on various agricultural field jobs, such as mowing, threshing, digging potatoes, weeding, fertilizing the fields, and so on. I remember once, in early spring, we were spreading manure in a field at the second camp point. The chief arrived. We asked him to bring us some food supplement, even the potatoes they give to the pigs. He replied:
“If one of my pigs dies, I will have to answer for it, but if you die—they’ll send others to take your place.”
In the autumn, when we were digging potatoes, a whole brigade of “inspectors”—all sorts of office workers from among the civilian employees—followed us with shovels. If a potato was found behind someone, that person was deprived of their bonus evening meal or had their bread ration reduced. But soon the frosts hit, snow fell, and buried whole fields of those potatoes.
There was a slogan: “Harvest the crops without losses in any weather.” And they mowed, raked, tied, and stacked the wheat “in any weather.” As a result, the wheat in the stacks first heated up, rotted, and then froze so hard that during threshing, the sheaves had to be chopped with an axe. But there were no grains left. They had rotted and turned to dust.
In winter, we went logging. This was ordinary firewood and building material procurement for the internal needs of the camp. This was not the taiga with its vast forests. In that region, there were only so-called “kolki”—small forest plots of aspen and birch.
At one of the regular medical examinations, I was assigned “heavy labor” and transferred to the sawyers’ brigade. This was indeed very hard work: we sawed mainly aspen logs into boards and beams.
Once I fell ill with pneumonia and ended up in the hospital. After my recovery, Dr. Novikov kept me on to work as an orderly. There I met Ivan Horbachov and Mykola Fisher. The first also worked as an orderly, and the second as a paramedic. Both were Ukrainian emigrants who had lived in Gdynia before their arrest. Both were members of the local branch of the UNO (Ukrainian National Alliance). During the liberation struggle, Horbachov had worked at Tiutiunnyk’s headquarters, and Fisher had served in the Mazepa Regiment. An elderly Mykola Galagan, a professor from Prague and head of the local UNO organization, was in the semi-inpatient ward. He was an exceptionally erudite and highly cultured man. A Kuban colonel, Veremeiev or Yeremeiev, was also there. He loved to sing:
А на Україні там сонечко сяє,
Козацтво гуляє, гуляє,
Нас виглядає...
A relatively young prisoner named Shirokov, from the Kursk region, also loved Ukrainian songs. He had lived in the Donetsk region for a long time and knew the Ukrainian language well. His favorite song was:
Ой у полі вітер віє, а жито половіє,
А козак дівчину та вірнесенько любить,
А зайнять не посміє...
Mykola Radchenko organized an amateur arts group through the KVC [Cultural-Educational Unit]. Women from the female zone also participated. The “artists” staged short one-act plays and sang songs, mostly Ukrainian. They were also invited to other camp departments, including the Siblag administration, which was based in Mariinsk.
Thanks to an accountant from Moscow named Gusev, I became thoroughly acquainted with the historical works of M. Kostomarov and the works of the American writer T. Dreiser. His wife sent him books.
I also remember an agronomist from near Bila Tserkva, either Zadorozhnyi or Zavhorodnii, who took part in the anti-Hetmanate uprising of the Directory and personally knew S. Petliura.
There were also staunch Russian great-power chauvinists, among whom the Zimin brothers, the teacher Molchanov, and the accountant Karchenkov were particularly memorable.
There was no shortage of real criminals—“zakonniks” [thieves-in-law] and “suki” [collaborators]—who constantly feuded and stabbed each other.
Some of my friends could not withstand the hardships and privations—they fell ill and died at a young age. These were Varganych from Transcarpathia and Yatsenko from Bataysk on the Don, who fell ill with tuberculosis, and Drozd from Lemkivshchyna.
There were three young Hungarians in our camp—Zsigmond Nagy, Szabó, and Zsigmond Farkas. There were also several Poles and a few German prisoners of war. All of them were repatriated to their countries in the early 1950s.
One seriously ill Mongol, who had long since served his sentence but, having no family or tribe, had been in the camp hospital for five years. I remember a comedy: during the elections to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR, the camp guards brought him a small ballot box and a ballot. He took it, held it for a moment in his feeble hands, and without looking at its contents, solemnly dropped it into the box. This meant that he had voted “for.”
It happened that sometimes someone would escape, but they were caught with the help of local residents, who were paid for this with flour or sugar. Such escapees were terribly abused. I remember how one of them—Yermachenko—beaten so badly that there was not a living spot on him, bloody, undressed, tied to a log, was brought to the camp to teach others a lesson. But some former army officer, who had miraculously managed to keep his officer’s uniform, succeeded in escaping.
I cannot fail to mention with a “kind word” the head of the KVC, the wife of the camp department chief Captain Bezhaev—“Bezhaikha,” as the prisoners called her. She became famous for the fact that, also being the camp judge, she would add to camp sentences for any offense using appropriately selected articles of the Criminal Code. For example, once, a Belarusian peasant named Voronin, a teacher named Shkliarevskyi, also from Belarus, and I managed to sneak a kilogram of peas each into the camp. A stool pigeon named Klymenko reported us, and she added one year of camp time to each of our sentences.
One day our brigade was being led from Tiumenivka to Antibes. We were walking through a village and took a break. We noticed that among the black log “izbas” stood a white-washed house. I asked the guard what that meant. “Oh, that’s some dumb *khokhol* who whitewashes his house,” was the reply.
Once I was taken to chop firewood for one of the camp authorities or guards. I heard the hostess talking to her daughter in Ukrainian. I asked if they were Ukrainian. “No, we’re local *khokhly*!”
During my time in Antibes, the camp point expanded significantly. Two new barracks were built, and the number of prisoners grew. Unfortunately, much has been forgotten, much I remember as if in a fog, as almost half a century has passed.
And finally, at the end of 1949 or the beginning of 1950, almost all the “political” prisoners were sent to Steplag. I was among them.
(Published in the newspapers “Ukrainske Slovo,” Kyiv, 1999, No. 4; “Molod Ukrainy,” Kyiv, 1999, No. 41.)
OUR PROFESSOR FROM PRAGUE
A separate memory from Antibes.
The impetus for writing this memoir was a mention by M. Zhulynskyi in his article “Oleksandr Oles” (“Literaturna Ukraina,” No. 48, 1985) that next to the poet’s grave “are buried other of our countrymen whom fate cast into Prague after the revolution. Unknown to me, and to all of us—Doctor Mykola Galagan...”
Galagan... That surname has never faded from my memory. I can see him before me now as if he were alive; a tall, slender figure of an elderly man with noble facial features and blue eyes. This was, as I was told, Professor Galagan from Prague. Ulas Samchuk, in his documentary memoir-novel “Na bilomu koni” (On a White Horse) (Suchasnist publishing house, New York–Munich, 1965), characterizes this man as follows: “an eternal dreamer in the guise of a diplomat and statesman in a frock coat and top hat—Mykola Galagan...”
Samchuk’s characterization precisely matches what has been preserved in my memory. Of course, he no longer had a frock coat or a top hat then. But even the wretched camp clothes were always in proper order on him, and he himself was always trim and neat.
At that time, Galagan, as a frail and elderly man, was constantly in the semi-inpatient ward, where I, after treatment, worked as an orderly thanks to Dr. Novikov. It was both pleasant and interesting for me, an 18-year-old boy, to listen to his intelligent speech, the speech of a highly erudite, highly educated, highly cultured man.
He mostly communicated with another such cultured man from the Ternopil region (I don’t remember his name), from whom I learned that Galagan came from the Kyiv region or from Kyiv itself. In 1918, he was in the diplomatic service (as a representative of Ukraine in Hungary), and after Ukraine’s defeat in the liberation struggle, he settled in Prague, was an active member of the Ukrainian Community, a lecturer at some higher educational institution, and the author of several scholarly works. One of them supposedly even received a favorable review in the Soviet press.
However, this in no way prevented the Bolshevik “liberators” from arresting him as a “traitor, betrayer of the motherland,” and an “enemy” of the Ukrainian people (!) and throwing him into a concentration camp.
The second person with whom Galagan often spent his leisure time was a Kuban colonel, Veremeiev (or Yeremeiev), an energetic, lively man. The colonel loved to hum:
А на Вкраїні,
там сонечко сяє,
Козацтво гуляє,
гуляє, нас виглядає...
This was somewhere between 1945-1947 on the Antibes island of the Siblag group of the Gulag archipelago, at the first camp point.
Either the aforementioned gentleman from Ternopil gave inaccurate information, or my memory has not preserved it quite accurately, because, as U. Samchuk writes on page 66 of the mentioned book, M. Galagan participated not in the Ukrainian Community, but in the Ukrainian National Alliance (UNO) and was its long-time chairman. For the modern Ukrainian reader, I will quote additional information about Galagan, previously unknown to me, which U. Samchuk provides on the indicated page: “A former prominent figure of the Social-Democratic Party, a political figure of the UNR [Ukrainian People's Republic], the Ukrainian ambassador to Hungary, a board member of the well-known Ukrainian Public Committee of Shapoval’s time in Prague, an active figure within the national community.
The Carpathian events, in which he also took an active part, took a considerable toll on him. He was arrested in Khust, miraculously escaped execution, survived Hungarian imprisonment in Tiachiv, but, despite this, did not give up his positions, was always active...”
As I have already said, Galagan was always in the semi-inpatient ward, and I later worked in the field and repair-construction brigades at the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th camp points and lost all contact with him. And even later, while already in Kengir, I learned that some prisoners, citizens of the “people’s democracies,” were being repatriated. Perhaps Mykola Galagan was among the repatriates. In any case, his subsequent fate is unknown to me...
(Published in the newspaper “Poklyk Sumlinnia,” Lviv, 1993, No. 19)
LET US REMEMBER THEM BY NAME
One of the 1993 issues of “Poklyk Sumlinnia” contained my memoir about Mykola Galagan. Besides him, two other members of the Ukrainian National Alliance were in Antibes. Both were from Gdynia.
The first was Ivan Serhiyovych Horbachov, a native of the Kharkiv region. He was a staff sergeant in Yurko Tiutiunnyk’s division. In Gdynia, he had his own shop and left a wife and daughter there, while his son worked in West Germany for some industrial firm at the end of the war. In Antibes, Horbachov worked as an orderly in the inpatient ward. He was an intelligent, polite man. He managed to establish contact with his brother, who lived and worked as a doctor in Taganrog. His brother also turned out to be a decent person and helped Ivan with food, that is, he sent him parcels.
The second was Mykola Valerianovych Fisher, a native of the North Caucasus. After the revolution, he was among the White Guards, and then in Ukraine, he joined the Mazepa Regiment. In Antibes, he worked as a paramedic in the inpatient ward.
After the defeat in the liberation struggle, both ended up in internment camps in Poland, and then settled in Gdynia. Both were active members of the UNO, which became the reason for their arrest by the Soviet punitive organs, and a military tribunal “measured out” eight years of “corrective labor camps” for each of them.
After 1950, their fate is unknown; I only know that they wrote somewhere, seeking release and a return to their families.
Below I provide data on people—prisoners of Antibes—whose names have not faded from my memory.
Zavhorodnii—an agronomist from near Bila Tserkva. A participant in the 1918 anti-Hetmanate uprising. He personally knew Petliura and Konovalets. He was the first to suggest to me that, despite all the misfortunes, the unification of Ukrainian lands into one state, albeit a fictitious USSR, also had a positive significance—it contributed to the consolidation of the Ukrainian nation. He often received parcels from home with Ukrainian newspapers and magazines. Reading them, he helped me with his comments, that is, he taught me to read between the lines.
Gusev—an accountant from Moscow, a cultured, highly educated man. He also received parcels from home with various literature and gladly let me read. It was thanks to him that I thoroughly read almost all the main historical works of M. Kostomarov back then—“The Little Russian Hetman Zinovy Bohdan Khmelnytsky,” “The Hetmanate of Vyhovsky,” “The Hetmanate of Yury Khmelnytsky,” “The Ruin,” “Mazepa,” “The Stenka Razin Rebellion.” It was here that I first became acquainted with world classics: Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy” and “Sister Carrie,” Stendhal’s “The Red and the Black” and “The Charterhouse of Parma,” Maupassant’s “Bel-Ami,” Hugo’s “The Hunchback of Notre-Dame,” some works by Jack London and Henryk Sienkiewicz, and I often read the newspaper “The British Ally.”
The Zimin brothers and Molchanov—Russian intellectual-chauvinists. Molchanov once, after listening to a concert by B. Hmyria on the radio, said: “Some kind of Asiatic stuff.” Zimin, seeing in a newspaper that Zavhorodnii and I were looking at the newly approved state anthem, coat of arms, and flag of the Ukrainian SSR, sneered: “Don’t think that what happened to India will happen to Ukraine,” which had just gained independence. And in a conversation with Molchanov, he added: “The *khokhly*—they are all nationalists.”
By the way, there was a story circulating about those Ukrainian SSR symbols, either an anecdote that seemed like the truth, or the truth that seemed like an anecdote. When the Ukrainian SSR was admitted to the UN, the real coat of arms (the trident) and flag (blue and yellow) of Ukraine were placed at the designated spot for Ukraine in the hall. D. Manuilsky, who was representing the Ukrainian SSR at the UN at the time, said: “This is not my country’s coat of arms and flag.” “Then what is your coat of arms and flag?” “I will call Moscow and give you an answer in 24 hours.” And so, by the grace of Moscow, the coat of arms and flag of the Ukrainian SSR came into being.
Yegorov—an artist from Leningrad. He drew for the KVC (“Cultural-Educational Unit”), as well as holiday cards for prisoners.
Zayko—a young man from the Kholm region. I remember him because he literally “forgot” the Ukrainian language in a few months.
Bilovskyi—a teacher from the Chernihiv region. An intelligent and exceptionally kind-hearted man. Because of this, he suffered particular abuse and ridicule from all sorts of scoundrels. He died in Antibes.
Voronin—a peasant, and Shkliarevskyi—a teacher from Belarus. Together with me, based on a denunciation by some Klymenko who worked at the checkpoint, we received additional camp sentences of one year each. The camp court, presided over by the head of the KVC, Bezhaieva, passed the sentence.
Riabchun—a boy from Volhynia. He worked as an assistant to a Polish mason-stove-maker, who, to show his superiority, endlessly commanded: “Rapchun—water, Rapchun—clay, Rapchun—straw!”
Chinikalov—a young man. He served as an orderly to the commander of the First Don Regiment in the German service. According to him, it was a very heroic anti-Bolshevik regiment, and the commander had been the chief of police in Novocherkassk before the war. Chinikalov told how the “Western allies” treacherously handed over the disarmed Cossacks, along with their families, to the Bolsheviks for certain death or captivity. Many of them committed suicide, jumping from trucks as they crossed a bridge, straight into the river; sometimes these were women with small children.
Yatsenko—also a Cossack, a native of Bataysk on the Don. He served in some Don regiment that fought on the German side in Yugoslavia against Tito’s partisans. During that time, he learned Serbian and knew several Serbian songs. In the camp, he fell ill with tuberculosis.
Karatkevich and Shashkov—intellectuals from Belarus. They were foremen in the c they did not lose their human dignity. I worked for some time in Shashkov’s brigade. Once, while working at the second camp point (spreading manure on the field), Shashkov asked the camp point chief to bring us at least some of the potatoes that were boiled for the pigs. The camp point chief, Lukianchenko or Lukianchikov, replied: “If one of my pigs dies—I’ll be held accountable, but if you fascists die—they’ll send others to take your place.”
Besides Shashkov, I also had to work in the brigades of Kolesnikov and Shirokov. Although the latter was from somewhere in the Kursk region, he had lived for some time in the Donetsk region and knew many Ukrainian songs. He especially loved:
Ой у полі вітер віє,
А жито половіє,
А козак дівчину та вірнесенько любить,
А занять не посміє...
Hrynyshyn—a native of Drohobych, where he had a small restaurant. A soldier of the “Galicia” Division, he was captured by the Bolsheviks near Brody, and later, in a camp in Stalinogorsk near Moscow, the NKVD officers knocked out all his teeth.
Kulakovskyi—a former Denikin officer, a violinist, a cheerful man and a joker, a lover of “salty” anecdotes. A native of Podillia.
A poet from Kyiv, whose name I don’t remember. He worked in the KVC. He wrote sycophantic little poems, such as:
Ми прості радянські люди –
Є в нас правило своє:
Як ми кажем, так і буде,
Як хотіли, так і є...
A peasant from the Brest region named Havro was very ironic about this poem. “Just as we wanted, so it is!” he would often repeat.
Dobryi Den—a peasant. A quarter of a century later, in the village of Arkhangelske, near Ocheretyne in the Donetsk region, I happened to meet his nephew from the Luhansk region, who worked as a deputy head of studies at Vocational School No. 11.
Pokryshka—an intellectual from Krasnodon. He was the first to tell me about the “Young Guards”: “They were messing around with the Germans, then they got caught stealing, and the Germans shot them.”
Vasyl Drozd—a young man from Lemkivshchyna, and Varganych from Transcarpathia. Both died in Antibes.
Mykola Radchenko—was the elder of the semi-inpatient ward. A choirmaster, he led the camp choir.
Stefanyshyn—a former USS [Ukrainian Sich Rifleman], worked as an accountant.
(Published in the collection “Zona,” Kyiv, 1994, No. 7, pp. 212-215)
KENGIR AND DZHEZKAZGAN
Kengir. At that time, it was just a special camp in the steppes of Dzhezkazgan; now it is a settlement, part of the city of Dzhezkazgan. The camp itself occupied a large, not yet fully developed territory and was divided into three zones: the largest for men, a slightly smaller one for women, and the smallest for economic and production purposes.
The latter was connected by gates only to the male zone, and only men worked there.
If in Antibes Ukrainians made up about half of the prisoners, here we were the absolute majority, and among us was a very large percentage of young people, former UPA fighters, “Banderites’ cubs,” as a hard-labor prisoner from Mariupol named Kolesnyk called them. The vast majority of them were Ukrainian patriots, but there was no shortage of indifferent, accidental people. And there were no such bright personalities as Prof. Galagan here.
Here I met several boys from the village of Koniukhiv, with whom I had studied, though in different classes, at the “Ridna Shkola” in Stryi. Our schoolmate Emma Voitsekhovych was also imprisoned in the female zone, and in the male zone—her father and several other men from Koniukhiv.
Not far from the camp, a mobile power station operated, serviced by civilian employees. And the prisoners worked on new construction sites: the “sotsgorod” [socialist city] of Dzhezkazgan, the thermal power plant (TEC), the copper-enriching factory, the motor pool, and the reservoir, the dam of which was built by female prisoners, also mostly Ukrainian. I had to work on all four sites in a wide variety of construction jobs.
Once, while working on the construction of the “sotsgorod,” I, naively hoping that someone would one day read it and think, placed a sheet of paper with the following text behind the wooden paneling of a cottage veranda, not knowing for sure the author or the exact wording of the quoted lines:
За що мене в пута скували,
За що в мене волю відняли,
Кому я і чим завинив.
Чи там, що народ свій любив?
Бажав я для скованих волі,
Для скривджених кращої долі
І рівного права для всіх –
Це весь і єдиний мій гріх.
And maybe, after all these years, someone found that piece of paper, read it, and thought about it?
Here, in Kengir, I came across a handwritten “Short History of the OUN” in a school notebook, from M. Mikhnovskyi to the 1940s. Later, in Dzhezkazgan, I compiled a similar small “History of Ukraine. The Princely Era” in the same kind of school notebook and let it “circulate among the people.” I never saw it again, and its subsequent fate is unknown to me.
It was here that I first became acquainted with the “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” previously unknown to me, and their journal “The Watchtower,” and in Ukrainian at that. Until then, I had only known Baptists, a representative of whom I met back in 1945 in the temporary detention cell of the Third Shock Army in Germany. He was a young man from the Zaporizhzhia region named Zhuk, who was arrested for refusing to take up arms.
Several murders occurred in Kengir, which were one of the reasons for the later famous Kengir Uprising. One of the murders I know of happened at the construction site of the “sotsgorod” of Dzhezkazgan. A prisoner approached a guard tower (“vyshka”) and asked the guard for a smoke. The guard took out a pack of makhorka [coarse tobacco] and threw it into the forbidden zone, saying, “Go and get it.” The man, suspecting nothing, went and was immediately shot. For an attempt to “cross the forbidden zone and kill the guard.” The second happened at the construction of the enriching factory. A prisoner from our brigade was shouting across the forbidden zone to a woman from his village in the Kursk region. The women were working on the construction of the dam. A squad of soldiers ran up, killed him, and dragged his body into the forbidden zone, placing a few stones next to him—“he wanted to kill the guard!” Another was shot on the way from work to the camp. Those who killed were not punished, but on the contrary, were given special leave as a reward for their “vigilance.”
For some time, the camp chief was a Jew from Lviv. He was distinguished by particular cruelty and a kind of pathological hatred for Ukrainians. It was rumored that during the uprising, an unenclosed driver killed him by steering a truck off a cliff into a quarry.
The Kengir camp department was part of the Steplag system, as was the Dzhezkazgan mine, where copper and copper-lead ore were extracted by mining; Baikonur, where the cosmodrome is now, which was then just being built; Ekibastuz, not far from Dzhezkazgan, where ore was also extracted, but by open-pit mining; somewhere near Lake Balkhash—the departments of Dzhezdy and Terekhty, about which I know nothing; and finally, Spassk, about which I only know that prisoners who could no longer work at all were sent there, obviously, to die.
I stayed in Kengir for about 2.5 years, then I was sent with a group of other prisoners to the mine. I stayed there until the end of my sentence, that is, until April 1955. I worked all the time at the “Pokro-Tsentralna” mine, first as a scraper operator, and then as an on-duty electrician. The latter job, though not hard, required me to go down into the mine, to a section gassed and dusty after blasting, to turn on the ventilation and fix the lighting.
The camp (“zona”) in Dzhezkazgan had existed since before the war, but its real “heyday” came in the last years of the war and especially in the post-war years. From about 1944, hard-labor prisoners were brought here. Their number can be judged by the personal numbers that were sewn on the back, one of the sleeves (I think the left), on the knee, and on the cap instead of a cockade. The number consisted of a letter of the alphabet and a serial number, for example: C-207, and so on through the entire alphabet up to 999.
When I was brought to Kengir, there were already general camp numbers. I received the number SVV-667. “S” stood for “Steplag,” and then came the serial numbers. My number meant that the entire alphabet had already been used once, and the second time it had reached the letter “V.” So it’s not hard to calculate if you multiply the number 999 by one and a half alphabets.
The Dzhezkazgan department was divided into three camp points: 1—workers of the stone quarry, 2—builders, 3—miners. The entire camp was surrounded by an adobe wall, with a one-meter high barbed wire fence on top. On the outer and inner sides of the adobe wall were “pre-zones,” which occupied a width of about ten meters. This fence was exclusively of barbed wire in three rows: high, middle, and low. Between the camp points, there was also an adobe wall and a fire zone. All the barracks in each camp point were separated by adobe walls (three barracks at a time), but without any zones. At the third (miners’) camp point, there were six barracks and a common zone, which included a dining hall, a barbershop, a bathhouse, a boiler room, a KVC with a library, a PPC [Fire Prevention Unit], a fire pool with industrial water, and a punishment cell. Wickets or gates built into the adobe walls, which were always locked and guarded by an overseer, led from the barracks to the common zone. They were opened only at specific times: for the roll call, lunch, etc.
The first significant act of protest and disobedience was the hoisting of a black mourning flag on the high wall with barbed wire during the roll call on the day of the celebration of the 300th anniversary of the “reunification” of Ukraine with Russia.
This was in February 1954, and at the end of May of the same year, Kengir went on strike. And on July 18, 1954—Dzhezkazgan. The first department of Steplag declared a strike in support of the Kengir prisoners. They went on strike in an organized manner—all on the same day! Ekibastuz followed them. All the miners!
The overseers had been warned the evening before that there would be no roll call the next day and that they should not enter the zone. In the morning, a little after the time for roll call, the overseers, pushing aside the prisoners on duty at the checkpoint, entered the camp territory, but did not get very far, as they ran into a crowd of prisoners. A signal reached the strike committee. A sturdy prisoner of Caucasian origin appeared and addressed the overseers with an ultimatum:
“You were told there would be no roll call. The camp has gone on strike. You have no right to enter the zone. Is that not clear? Leave!”
And the overseers returned to the checkpoint.
The strikers were put on starvation rations. But this did not frighten anyone; everyone demanded and awaited a commission from Moscow. Some three people arrived, but I did not see them. It was said that Khrushchev was among them. Whether this is true or not, I cannot say.
There was exemplary order in the camp, no disturbances, no provocations. The main leader of the strike was a political prisoner named Suprunov, unknown and unfamiliar to me. His fate is also unknown to me.
One day, a group of prisoners, supposedly the leaders of the Kengir uprising, was brought to the zone. They said through a loudspeaker:
“Brothers! It’s all over! They crushed us with tanks!…”
No one believed them, considering it a provocation. But the next morning, we saw that the camp was surrounded by tanks and GPU men with submachine guns and machine guns. We understood that the Kengir prisoners’ statement had not been a provocation, and the strike was called off.
I don’t know if the leader of the uprising there, Kuznetsov, was among the mentioned Kengir prisoners or not. His fate is also unknown to me. They said he was Ukrainian but was born and raised in Kazakhstan.
I don’t remember if it was in Brest or Orsha that the former editor of the “Pinsk Gazette” told me that of the Russian folk songs, only the songs about vagabonds and prison are worthy of attention. They are the ones that most accurately reflect reality. And this is so. As an example, I will cite songs about Dzhezkazgan (abbreviated):
1. Джезказґан, Джезказґан –
Бесконечные степи,
Только пыль и буран –
Твои спутники-дети.
А зимою пурга
Белым снегом все кроет.
Темной ночью й днем
На просторе твоем ветер воет...
2. По диким степям Джезказґана,
Где медь добывают в горах,
Невольников тисячи тамо
Находятся в спецлагерях.
Живут они в саманных бараках,
На нарах двойных они спят.
Бараки стеной обнесены,
На вышках дозоры стоят.
На вахту идут все толпою.
На каждом по тысяче лат –
Спецовка оборвана, грязна,
К тому же уся в номерах...
One could not say it more accurately. Both songs were created to the melodies of older songs. And they were created by a rather old vagabond with a political charge, whom I accidentally met in Kengir. I have now completely forgotten his name. But his portrait, that of a red-haired, small-bearded, typical Russian muzhik, and his songs have not been erased from my memory. Just as Kengir and the Dzhezkazgan mine have not been erased.
P.S. As V. Kolesnyk from Mariupol writes in one of his letters, “of the first settlers-hard-labor prisoners in 1944, numbering seven and a half thousand, only about 300 remained alive after about a year. These were mainly camp service personnel, foremen. The others, exhausted by terrible hunger and very hard labor in the mines, lie in the old cemetery near mine No. 44... In each grave, a full truckload of zeks is buried. They were taken out every other day. Those who were still breathing a little but could not move were finished off by the overseers... The dead were not trusted either, and each had their skull pierced with a hammer... Later, this check was done differently: the veins on the legs of the dead were cut.”
V. Kolesnyk, himself a hard-labor prisoner sentenced to death, was released after the strike on April 29, 1955.
(Published in the newspapers “Ukrainske Slovo,” Kyiv, 1998, No. 29, 1999, No. 33; “Molod Ukrainy,” Kyiv, 1999, No. 42).
IN THE CIRCLE OF FRIENDS
While in the camps, in Antibes, I actually had no close friends. Recalling those times now, I have come to the conclusion that the reason for this was that among the youth, there were none who were close to me in spirit, and the older ones simply could not be my friends due to a rather significant age difference. Those highly respected men, although they treated me very well, were to me, if not grandfathers, then fathers.
True, somewhere towards the end of my work as an orderly in the semi-inpatient ward, I befriended a boy, a little older than me, Yatsenko from Bataysk on the Don. He was a very decent boy, but seriously ill—with an open form of tuberculosis, which, however, could not hinder our friendship. But it did not last long. I was transferred to a construction brigade, and then sent to Steplag, and I do not know what his subsequent fate was.
In Kengir, I befriended Vasyl Fesyk from Volhynia, a participant in the UPA’s struggle against the occupiers. He was a boy strong in body and spirit, a cheerful person, a joker, and a lover of anecdotes. This friendship also turned out to be short-lived, as I was transferred to Dzhezkazgan.
In Kengir, I worked as a general laborer on the construction of the enriching factory and the thermal power plant. A guard shot a prisoner, a native of somewhere in the Kursk region, from our very brigade. It happened like this. We were working at the “obahatylivka” [enriching plant]. A women’s brigade was working on another site. This man somehow found out that there was a woman from his village there. At the end of the shift, when we had already begun to gather at the checkpoint, he approached the forbidden zone and threw a letter to the women. The guard fired and killed the poor man. Other soldiers, led by the convoy chief, ran to the sound of the shot. They dragged the dead man into the forbidden zone and left him there, as if he had been trying to escape, but the guard had shown vigilance. For this, he received special leave.
Several other murders occurred in Kengir, all with a similar scenario and similar results: the guard received special leave for “vigilance.”
In Dzhezkazgan, I worked all the time at the Pokro-Tsentralna mine, first as a scraper operator, and then as an on-duty electrician. It was here that I found a wider circle of friends. They were Semen Kostiuk from near Zalishchyky, Bohdan Horokhivskyi from the Ternopil region, Petro Shal—also from Ternopil, Vasyl Hrytsiv from near Kalush, and Omelian Silchuk from Volhynian Polissia. The first three, like me, worked at Pokro-Tsentralna, while Vasyl and Omelian worked at other mines.
Semen Kostiuk—a modest young man, worked as a scraper operator in the mine. In the summer of 1954, he was first unenclosed, and then released. After his release, he went to his parents, who had been exiled somewhere in Birobidzhan. Our contacts were broken for a long time after that.
Bohdan Horokhivskyi—a young man who ended up behind bars straight from secondary school; he worked as a driller in the mine. He drew quite well. He often liked to discuss philosophical topics. He left behind a beloved girl at home, who was faithful to him and came for a visit to Dzhezkazgan in 1954. Soon he was released and he went to his native Ternopil region.
Petro Shal, about ten years older than me, was modest, polite, and good-natured. He ended up in the camp from Kakhovka, where he worked as an excavator operator. At home, in the Ternopil region, he left a wife and a small child, whom he loved very much and often showed us their photographs. He was a good tailor and in his free time sewed for many who had the opportunity to get some fabric. Someone got him an album of men’s clothing sketches with German text. I translated the text into Ukrainian, and Shal sewed me a nice cap, a flat cap, and two shirts, for which I was very grateful to him. After all, I “went out into freedom” in them. After our release, the contacts between us were broken.
Vasyl Hrytsiv—a thoughtful young man who, according to him, performed miracles during the struggle. He worked as a driller, but at another mine, and lived in another barrack. Despite this, we often spent our leisure time together. We read a lot and always discussed all the books we read to one degree or another. Not light fiction (although we read that too), but rather serious scholarly works, primarily on history and philosophy. We actually discovered for ourselves the works of I. Franko and P. Kulish. We read the works of Marx and Engels; their philosophy captivated us with its, as it seemed to us, simplicity and clarity. We were able to free ourselves from it only after being released from the camps... In ideological and political terms, we stood firmly on the positions of Ukrainian nationalism. We understood well that Russia, whether white or red, is an imperial, anti-Ukrainian force, an irreconcilable enemy of Ukrainian statehood.
I was released in April 1955 after completing a ten-year sentence. I went to my parents, who by that time had moved to the Donetsk region. Although I was arrested and tried in April 1945, and I only turned 18 in September, I did not fall under the Decree of the Supreme Soviet of April 10, 1954, on the release of underage “criminals.” To repeated inquiries to the prosecutor’s office, I received a short answer: “not subject.” And why “not subject,” they never explained. I still do not know the reason for this, because even after my release, the answer was the same.
Soon after me, Vasyl Hrytsiv was released, having served almost half of his term. He went to the mines of the Kryvyi Rih region, and then returned to Kalush, where he also worked in a mine. Our friendship continued until about 1981. We actively corresponded, exchanged books, and visited each other. I was studying at the university, and Vasyl helped me with literature. All that time we were under the close surveillance of the KGB, and repeatedly had troubles. The most difficult year was 1981. The covert surveillance of us turned into overt surveillance with all its consequences—searches, constant summons to the KGB, visits, conversations, threats, censorship and confiscation of mail, etc., etc. And such open persecution continued until 1989, when they were already persecuting for organizing the UGS and participating in its work.
Vasyl Hrytsiv could not bear it and poisoned himself right on the steps of the KGB building in Kalush. They revived him, but after that, he became a physical and mental invalid. He appealed for help and protection to various institutions, official and unofficial: to the Verkhovna Rada of the Ukrainian SSR, then to Sakharov, and Chornovil. There was no answer from Sakharov, and Chornovil simply refused to see him. This affected Vasyl very much and led to great disillusionment and pessimism, and an even greater mental breakdown. In the end, he stopped believing anyone. He lives in great poverty. All alone, forgotten and abandoned by everyone.
Omelian Silchuk at one time completed the first training course for UPA officers. He worked as a driller at one of the mines and lived in another barrack. I met him by chance, and we met quite rarely. He was primarily interested in world literary classics. After his release, he went to his mother in the Kuzbas. It is now that our relations have intensified through correspondence. Silchuk turned out to be a practical person. Having earned good money in the Kuzbas mines, he moved to Sudak (Crimea), where he bought a house and still lives there with the family of his adopted son. He visited me several times. Once I also visited him in Sudak, after which our relations were broken for a good two decades. And only this year did he send word of himself.
(Published in the collection “Zona,” Kyiv, 1994, No. 8, p. 74)