OPRYSHOK. An interview with Hryhoriy Andriyovych HERCHAK on June 12 and 16, 2003. Last reviewed - 09/27/2013.
Vasyl Ovsienko: On June 12, 2003, in the city of Kyiv, we are recording the story of Mr. Hryhoriy Herchak. Hryhoriy Andriyovych Herchak.
Hryhoriy Herchak: I was born on December 10, 1931, in Ternopil Oblast, Zalishchyky Raion, in the village of Solone, but we pronounced it with the stress on the letter “e”. My parents were poor. I don’t remember my father because, as my mother said, he had served in the Ukrainian Galician Army, and later the Poles wanted to arrest him, so he somehow made his way abroad through Czechoslovakia and ended up in Argentina, in Buenos Aires. After that, he returned in 1930 things had quieted down, and they had forgotten about that arrest, I suppose. I was born. I was about four years old when my father went back to Argentina to work.
V.O.: What was your father’s name?
H.H.: Andriy Herchak. My mother was Anna Herchak, maiden name Shevchuk.
V.O.: And how long did your mother live?
H.H.: My mother lived to be 52. She was partially paralyzed—the Muscovites beat her during an interrogation because of me, after I had joined the underground. She was bedridden for a long time and couldn’t walk.
We were poor. We mostly had a four-grade education, but my mother knew a little German because she had attended five grades in an Austrian school. She was such a patriot, a member of the “Prosvita” society she attended some homemaking courses and would take me, just a little boy, with her. She taught me to read before I even started school. At the time, a series of books for the patriotic upbringing of children was published, I believe, in Kraków by the “Svit Dytyny” (Child’s World) publishing house—she subscribed to them for me. In Zhovkva, there was a monastery that published a church magazine called “Misionar” (The Missionary). It contained educational, patriotic stories and articles. So she subscribed me to “Misionar” and “Dzinochok” (The Little Bell), and I read them and was raised that way. My mother was a member of the library at the reading hall. She kept a diary, not writing in it every day, but she did write.
V.O.: And which school did you attend?
H.H.: I started school under Polish rule. I went earlier than most. In school, there was the Polish language and the Ruthenian language, meaning Ukrainian. And when the Soviets came in 1939, I was supposed to start second grade. Just then, cavalry came breaking through the border. There was this teacher, Tsviakhova, a Ukrainian, despite her name. It turns out she was a Ukrainian patriot, but she didn’t yet know what the Soviets were, whereas most of our people did. When the Red Army was “liberating” us from the Polish yoke, she called out, “Children, everyone!...” A paved road—a highway, or as we called it, a *hostynets*—ran past our village. And we all lined up there. A commander rides up on a dark bay horse, with a star on his cap. Many of them spoke Ukrainian—we weren’t far from the Zbruch River, about forty kilometers. They stopped and greeted us. And the teacher said, “Children, the Red Army has come to us! Rejoice—Ukraine is free! Clap your hands!” But I already knew there had been a famine in Ukraine because people would visit my mother and tell stories about it. Most people didn’t know that, though, and some perceived this as a liberation.
The commander dismounted his bay horse and presented Mrs. Tsviakhova with a red star, pinning it to her chest. He greeted the children, and they rode on. A few days later, Tsviakhova was gone. When the arrests began, they arrested her too, because they were arresting the intelligentsia. Maybe it wasn’t a few days, but a few weeks later. First, they arrested all the intelligentsia, and then more and more people. They even arrested the head of the Ukrainian reading hall, a relative of ours. Because Poles also lived among us. In Ternopil Oblast, over forty percent of the population was Polish. Along the Zbruch River, there were special settlements from the *komasacja* [land consolidation]. They were like farms: a house with a field around it. For Ukrainians, the fields were scattered in little patches, like carpets. But the Poles had farms like in the West. The Polish state, which emerged after the First World War, gave land to those who had fought for a free Poland. Later, I read the memoirs of an officer, Cebulski, called *Czerwone noce* (Red Nights). He writes about how the Poles fought against the Banderites even under the Germans. Because the Germans fought against the Poles, against the Banderites, and against the Soviet partisans in Volyn. He writes very interestingly—do you understand Polish?
V.O.: I can read a little.
H.H.: I’ll write it down for you—*Czerwone noce*. The provocations they staged! They would dress up as partisans with tridents and shoot at Germans, and in retaliation, the Germans would burn down Ukrainian villages. He writes this himself Poles specifically gave me that book here in Kyiv after I was released. It has a very interesting foreword about how they settled the area from the Zbruch with these military colonists. They had a lot of weapons. They had the “Strzelcy” (Riflemen), similar to our “Sich” and “Plast” societies. But we weren’t allowed to have weapons, while the Poles had small-caliber rifles, called Flauberts. And we had “Plast” to defend ourselves from the Red invasion.
That was the problem when I was born. Forty-three percent of the population in our oblast was Polish, and fifty-seven percent in Lviv Oblast. I read that in a Soviet encyclopedia, by the way. So there would have been big problems if what happened hadnt happened.
V.O.: These arrests of the Ukrainian intelligentsia—did they happen as early as September?
H.H.: Those were the first, main arrests, but after that, they continued constantly the NKVD took more and more people, I remember.
V.O.: There’s a man named Vasyl Pirus, who also served 25 years…
H.H.: I know him.
V.O.: He lives in Kherson Oblast now I visited him. He says that Hitler saved Western Ukraine. Because, he says, if the Bolsheviks had run things for another couple of years, there would have been no one left, no OUN, no UPA could have emerged, because they would have arrested and exterminated everyone.
H.H.: They already knew someone was informing on us. There was the KPZU—the Communist Party of Western Ukraine—so of course, there were informants there… Later, people became disillusioned with the KPZU. There were some who joined the KPZU, saw what it was, got disillusioned, and switched to the OUN. Shumuk wasn’t the only one like that. (Shumuk, Danylo Lavrentiyovych, b. 1914. As a member of the KPZU, he spent 5 years in Polish prisons. The “liberators” did not trust him and mobilized him into a penal battalion. Unarmed, he was captured by the Germans, escaped, and joined the UPA. In 1944, he was sentenced to death released in 1969. Imprisoned again from 1972-1988. In total, 42 years, 6 months, and 7 days of captivity, including 5 years of exile. Member of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Lived in Canada, and from 2002, in the Donetsk region with his daughter. Died on May 21, 2004, in Krasnoarmiisk. - V.O.).
I was in school, and when the Soviets came, they considered the Polish school to be weaker, so they put us back in the first grade of the Soviet school.
V.O.: And that teacher, Tsviakhova, was she gone by then?
H.H.: The teacher who said we were free was already gone. With her red star, poor woman… She was a good woman, a young widow. I don’t know where she ended up, poor thing. That’s what happened. I started going to a Soviet school. I remember, in the classroom, there was a portrait of Stalin. And one of the boys shot a wad of paper at Stalin with a slingshot. The teacher came in. My God, he ran off, and they took all those students away. The teachers knew who did it, but they kept quiet. They hung up a new portrait. People didn’t yet realize what a strict government had arrived.
And then the second liberators came. Many people welcomed them.
V.O.: That’s interesting, how were the Germans received?
H.H.: Well at first. They declared an independent Ukraine in Lviv. A biplane used to fly to Chernivtsi (and Chernivtsi is close to us, about 40 kilometers away), and it had blue and yellow stripes on its wings. I was so happy… All this lasted for about two months, and then they arrested everyone.
V.O.: Those the Soviets didn’t arrest, the Germans took away.
H.H.: They started with the government, but then they kept taking people. There was a Ukrainian police force, but then it turned against the Germans. The UPA was created—and that police force fled to the UPA with their weapons. In our area, there was only the underground, but then some UPA units appeared here too. There was also trouble with the Poles, all sorts of provocations the Germans even burned down part of the village. The Germans did everything very cruelly, it was terrifying. The Russians had a good network of agents here, and they first took the activists, and then others. But the Germans would either shoot every tenth person or do something similar.
V.O.: They didn’t have enough information, so they just did a “cleansing.”
H.H.: We children were terrified when the Germans came on their raids. These Germans with Gestapo plates on their chests—about ten motorcycles with sidecars, MG machine guns. And we’d be grazing cows by the road. The older boys would be with us. We’d lie down because we were afraid of them, but the older ones would say, “Don’t lie down, or they’ll think… Act like you’re not afraid.” We were so scared of those Germans!
Then they created the SS Division “Galicia.” The Banderites were against the “Galicia” division, but two of my relatives joined it for some reason. One was my uncle Mykhailo Shevchuk, and the other was my uncle’s eldest son, also a Shevchuk, but I don’t know his first name. And this uncle was a good blacksmith. He joined the division, and then, when it was all over, he studied somewhere in Germany. For some reason, they were traveling to Chernivtsi, and two of them went on leave. The Banderites didn’t shoot those who came on leave, but they did disarm them. My uncle was walking from the city with his carbine, and they disarmed him all he had left was his gas mask. So he came to the village but didn’t sleep at home, so the Banderites wouldn’t beat him up. I remember my uncle telling me he was disillusioned: the Germans wanted to send them on punitive expeditions against Polish partisans, but the division didnt want to go. I heard that as a young boy. My uncle disappeared without a trace somewhere.
V.O.: An uncle—that’s your mother’s brother?
H.H.: Yes, on my mother’s side.
V.O.: And on your father’s side, it’s a *stryi*?
H.H.: A *stryiko*, yes. When the second Soviet liberators came, the liberation movement was already strong. We lived in an area with few forests, just small woods, but even we had small partisan groups. That’s when the trouble started, because the NKVD followed right behind the front lines. They had some information. There was a mobilization for the front. They gave you little training, just here and there, and then to the front lines, especially Ukrainians. Later, in the camps, they told me there was an order: train Ukrainians lightly and send them “forward” against German pillboxes—as cannon fodder. My uncle Vasyl Shevchuk and my uncle’s son didn’t want to join the Soviet Army and went to the UPA—they packed some salo, onions, and dried bread and went to the Tsyhanskyi Forest, where the forests were bigger, north of us. They were supposed to gather there. Those boys were walking, and Vasyl Shevchuk said to my mother, “Auntie (we didnt say ‘tiotko’), I’m saying goodbye!” He kissed her and said, “I’m gone, I’m no longer here!” He said that and left, poor man, but the NKVD were already waiting for them there. On the road, where they had their meeting point, about a third of them were killed, because someone had informed on them. So very few made it to the UPA, but Vasylko managed to escape. He threw away his weapon and joined the Soviet Army, but he died there too.
After that, the front moved on, but a fierce struggle continued here the UPA was large by then.
V.O.: When did the front pass through your area?
H.H.: It passed in the spring of ‘44. The Germans were surrounded in our area they were breaking through towards the Dniester, and then there were paratroop landings, fighting was going on, and the front stopped there on the hills. We were evacuated to another village, but that’s a long story… And all those arrests—it was a complete nightmare. I remember, as soon as the front passed, those rear-echelon troops came through, and some Ukrainian officer (they had shoulder boards the second time they came, the first time they didnt), probably a captain or a major, could speak Ukrainian. It was the first time my mother saw those arrests. She was a member of “Prosvita,” so she had a small certificate under glass, with something written on it, angels holding a book, painted in yellow and blue colors. It hung on the wall, showing she was awarded it as a member of “Prosvita.” He looked at it for a long time, then said to my mother, “Take this down and hide it, burn it, or you’ll be in trouble for it!” But she didn’t know this—a trident is hanging in the house, so what? We were starting to understand the Soviet regime.
We had a big problem with the UPA partisans—war, arrests, burnings, NKVD everywhere. And then the Poles—they were militarized. When the Polish Army retreated in 1939 toward the Romanian border—the Romanian border on the Dniester was 20 or 25 kilometers from us, because Bukovyna was not yet part of Ukraine—they left weapons in those Polish colonies, stockpiled them, hoping for an uprising. All the Poles were militarized because these were colonists who were former soldiers. The youth were in a sports-military society, “Strzelcy” (Riflemen), where they were taught to shoot. We had “Luh” and “Plast,” but we weren’t allowed uniforms it was just a sports society. We did exercises with sticks there, boys and girls. This was in every village. There were sports teams, volleyball, football. So when the Soviets came the second time, the Poles came out of their underground. They were even allowed to have weapons, and they walked around in *rogatywkas*—caps with four corners. The Soviets weren’t stupid—the NKVD thought: let them fight among themselves. In the villages, the Poles went with the Soviets against the UPA those extermination battalions were mostly made up of Poles. The Soviets werent stupid: let them fight among themselves. The Germans did the same thing. The Poles and Ukrainians couldn’t come to an agreement, because it was clear that they had settled and taken our lands.
And all of us young boys were ready to fight, gathering and hiding weapons, explosives after the war, burying carbines somewhere, filling hollows in willow trees with those German grenades. We learned all about those grenades with long handles. I came from a family of craftsmen—one uncle was a blacksmith, the other a carpenter and a locksmith, and I had a knack for it, so we stockpiled all that.
One day, a neighbor and I were standing around, it was drizzling, and there was a raid on the village. But we didn’t know about the raid. We were sitting by a split willow tree with a semi-hollow trunk, trading ammunition, cartridges. And suddenly, three Polish militiamen in *rogatywkas* walk up. I immediately threw everything into the hollow. It was a Sunday, I remember. And one of them asks, “What are you whispering about?” He asks in Ukrainian, because many Poles knew Ukrainian, having served in Ukraine. “Nothing,” I say. They just stood there. If he had looked into that hollow, he would have found everything. It was morning, and I was wearing an embroidered shirt. He looked at me and slapped me in the face, and I didn’t know what to say. One of my grandmothers had married a Pole—Wawro Potapiński. So I say, “Why are you hitting me, I’m one of the Poles!” They had three sons and a daughter. The daughter wore an embroidered shirt, but all the sons were like Poles. And the family held together like that. It happened often, because Poles had lived here for hundreds of years. Wawro’s sons were also in the “yastrebky” [extermination battalions]. He asks me, “What’s your last name?” “Herchak.” It didnt sound Ukrainian. “And where is your mother?” We went to my mother. It was Sunday, and my mother treated them to varenyky. He apologized to me, and that’s how we got out of it.
That’s the kind of trouble we had. And after that, the Poles were deported there was a bit of fighting, Polish civilians suffered, and so did our civilians. That whole slaughter… I don’t like it, but that’s how it was. This was in ‘45, ‘46.
V.O.: How were those clashes justified? What did people say about them?
H.H.: I can tell you this. The Poles were in the extermination battalions, so they gave the Ukrainians a lot of grief. And before that, some Poles sided with the Germans they specifically joined the German police and other agencies to fight against Ukrainians. And the Ukrainians were very nationally conscious, so the Germans persecuted them.
We had an incident. A man named Skalatskyi was traveling—I don’t know what his role in the OUN was—to the town of Tovste, near our village. A lot of Poles and Jews lived there. In our village, about 25% of the population was Polish there was a Polish Catholic church. But there were villages where they were more than half, even purely Polish villages—like Chervonyi Obrut. So, I want to tell you about that Skalatskyi. He was on his way to a contact point he had two guards with carbines. He was a civilian but was educated in some way. They are writing about him now—they say they found him in the archives. And they set up an ambush for him. We thought it was the Germans, but it was the Poles who did it—they found out he was going somewhere to the village of Sadky or the town of Grzybowice. We have a large burial mound there, about four hundred meters above sea level—this is already the Precarpathian region, the hills there are quite high, a couple of hundred meters. They were traveling on a sleigh, trying to escape. They killed one of them about a hundred meters away. The Germans took the bodies, and the others escaped.
The next day, my friends and I went there to see. We saw where the ambush was set up near the mound—the Poles had spread straw for themselves because it was cold to lie on the ground. We followed the tracks of those who fled. An expanding bullet had hit one of them in the head—the body was taken, but the top part of the skull with reddish hair was left behind, one of ours. We even found a few shell casings from Polish weapons. But we thought it was the Germans. It later turned out that the Poles had set up the ambush, and the Germans only collected the bodies.
They gave us so much grief that it led to that slaughter. The Poles then organized such outposts in the villages. A few kilometers from us were the Turkish fortresses—Khotyn, Kamianets-Podilskyi. The Turks had a line there. These huge fortresses, with dungeons underground, and on top, the Dzhuryn River flows. It’s a small river, with a waterfall where it descended into the valley. The village was named Chervone (Red) because on one side there was a horseshoe-shaped forest in the valley, and on the other, red granite cliffs. On that waterfall, there was a power station even back in Polish times. Electricity ran through our village the center of the village was electrified, the reading hall was electrified. In that village, back in the Middle Ages, after the Turks were driven out, there was a Polish monastery, some Kapitan Czerwenskego Grodu, everything there was built of stone, a *klasztor*, as they called it. The village was small, Polish, rich, located in a valley. It was almost a resort. I don’t know how many houses were there—maybe a few hundred. But the buildings were large, so Poles from other villages fled there, brought their weapons, and the NKVD armed them even more. They fenced the top with barbed wire, and there were posts below to keep anyone out. And if they had just stayed there, it wouldnt have been so bad. But what did they do? They needed to eat, and although they had some food, they needed more and more. And they needed to drink—so they would ride through the villages on sleighs, on horseback, taking pigs, calves, slaughtering them, not eating, but gorging. The place was full of them, because so many had gathered there. But the Soviets were not stupid either—they stationed a garrison of thirty men there, with a female doctor and a radio station, and they lived separately in those fortresses. To see what the Poles were up to, you have to have your own agents. But they turned a blind eye to the looting, or maybe they got a cut from it. It was that kind of time. People complained, but we didn’t have enough insurgents to defeat such a force—there were many military men among the Poles. And the district center was not that far—about 4 km to our village, about 8 to the district center. Because the district center then wasn’t Zalishchyky. They made the districts denser to have more garrisons, to make it easier to cast a net—to go on raids.
V.O.: What was the district center then?
H.H.: The town of Tovste, in Polish, *miasto Tłuste*. There were very many Jews and Poles there. True, after the Germans, there were almost no Jews left. So, people complained and complained. Finally, some units came from the Precarpathian region. When I was already in the camp, I met a man who took part in that battle. I didn’t want to ask too many questions, and he didn’t really want to talk about how it was, because, you know, maybe he had his case closed in a way that he didn’t have to admit his participation in that battle.
V.O.: So there was a battle for that village?
H.H.: Chervone, or as the Poles called it, Czerwonogród. It was the winter of 1945-46. The war was already over. I remember it was at night. We were ice-skating and on *narty*—that’s what we call skis. So, our small units, together with those who came from the Carpathians, surrounded them one night. They were in white camouflage, they even had a few mortars, because I myself heard mortars firing—whether from the Polish side or ours, I dont know, but people said the insurgents had a few mortars. I asked that man in the camp, “How did you get in—it was fenced off, wasn’t it? You have to go down, and there were posts up top.” It turns out, on the mountain slopes, water had carved out ravines. They were covered with snow. That night there was fog, a drizzle. One group—about 10-15 men—dressed in Polish clothes. They knew Polish (many of our boys knew Polish back then). They crawled under the wires where they could get through—I dont know if there was an alarm system or not—they got into the village and walked around in Polish clothes, with submachine guns. And when a flare was fired from outside—the signal to start the battle—the Poles went into combat, and those inside started shooting from within. A terrible panic broke out. The Poles thought there were who knows how many partisans there. The Chekists—there were about 30 or 31 of them—immediately broke through to the forest they managed to escape. Of course, they had a radio station, and the shooting could be heard in the district center.
This happened in the evening. We were still skiing near the highway. We saw some men in white camouflage arrive on sleighs and take positions in ruined houses (the people had been deported to Siberia). Some were digging holes in the snow and laying mines under the road. This was to stop any help that might come after hearing the shooting (it was about 8-10 km away), or after learning about it from the radio station. We didnt know who they were, but we were street-smart boys, we knew our weapons—so we figured they were ours. Then they came up to us: “Home, everyone go home immediately!” But we didnt run home we hid behind a fence and watched what was happening. They covered the mines with snow and took cover behind the ruined walls.
When the battle started, my mother and I were sitting by the window, with the lights off. The sky was red. We could hear mortar fire. It was terrifying. And a fire. No one went to help—let them fight among themselves! A lot of Polish civilians died there. We went there about five days later, and there were bullet-riddled featherbeds, pillows, blood on the walls. The bodies had already been removed.
That was some battle. It was around 1946-47, in the winter. I was studying in a Soviet school then. I lost another grade during the war. Under the German authorities, I think I only finished one grade. Under the second Soviet rule, I went into the third grade, then the fourth, and then I quit school and grazed cows. I grazed the neighbors’ cows for seven years, helping my mom a little, because life was very hard. They didn’t start collective farms in our area because the insurgents wouldn’t allow it—if you joined a collective farm, they’d bash your head in, and sometimes they even hanged people, if they were informers and snitches. They were strict about that, because insurgent revolutionary movements were always strict. There were village council heads who were given weapons, and they often paid with their lives for it, because the Banderite underground security service would get them.
OPRYSHKY
We strongly supported that movement and resistance, because I had already read all sorts of patriotic books about the Cossack era, about the Ukrainian Galician Army, about Petliura’s army, I had read about Makhno. And what spurred us to resist even more was the fact that in our region, in the Carpathians, there had always been *opryshky* and rebels. The last one in our area, even under Poland before the war, was a man named Lubynetskyi. Legends and rumors circulated about him. My grandmother was taking a goat to sell—under Poland, you had to pay a tax on goats and sheep. The path from the village went through the forest. And he asks her, “Grandma, how are things in the village? Where are you taking the goat?” “Well, I want to sell it, because I have no money to pay the taxes.” “Sell the goat, and buy yourself a cow.” “But with what?” “Here’s some money for you.” My grandmother used to sing ballads about the *opryshky*, about Dovbush: *“Oy po hayu zelenenkim khodyt Dovbush molodenkyi, na nizhku nalyahaye, na topir si pidpyraye.”* [“Oh, through the green grove walks young Dovbush, he limps on one leg, leaning on his axe.”] And I would listen and think that one day I would also be…
V.O.: An *opryshok*?
H.H.: Yes, yes. By the way, one of my uncles, Ivan Hirchak, was a rebel he used to set fire to Poles’ property because they had taken our land. They gave us the worst land, and the Polish lords took the best. So that rebellion was a natural consequence. Some *ksenzhna*, a princess, would arrive, already on crutches. I had the heart of an *opryshok*, and I would watch her arrive. She didn’t live among us, but somewhere else, and her lands were managed not even by Poles, but by Jews, because the Poles were off somewhere in Paris that Polish gentry was lazy… A large orchard, fields stretching toward the Dniester—it was all Polish. The orchards here are good, the climate in the valley is very good here, by the Dniester, cherries ripen as early as May. There’s sun, a microclimate. All the Poles knew that Zalishchyky was where the cherries and tomatoes came from, that’s what Warsaw ate. You could trade here, people made a living from it. I watch her get out on crutches, with her security, and go to the *soltys* (like the head of the village council), and the people worked like semi-slaves—they were called *fornali*—on the *filvarok* for that lord. A latifundia, a *legenshaft*, a *folwark* in Polish. It was terrible—the little houses were like barracks, and the land for gardens was divided into tiny, tiny plots. People worked there for half the price. That’s why many of the *fornali* went over to the communists. When the first Soviets came—I’m going back again—these *fornali* pinned red stars on themselves. And I sympathize with them—what did they know, poor and uneducated? The liberators came: the land is yours. That happened.
I remember it like it was yesterday, there was a Jew named Chmelyk in our village. We had about four Jewish families in our village, very poor Jews. We got along well with them, (unintelligible short, rapid phrase), we went to school with them. We called them “zhydy.” Today, it sounds like an insult. I can tell you how Jews in Canada view the term “yevrey.” A Jew named Joseph Stukler served in the UPA. They told me, “You should go and meet him.” Because I had connections with the underground. He had been in some German camp, the prisoners were about to be shot, but a UPA unit raided the camp. There was a small group of Jews there, about ten men. The elderly ones were let go, and the rest were told that anyone who wanted to join the UPA could. So Stukler joined the UPA because he was a doctor, I think, from Warsaw. I met him in Toronto. When a new émigré from Lviv was introducing me to him, I walked over thinking, how should I say it—*zhyd* or *yevrey*? Because for me, the word *zhyd* was already associated with Russian hatred, so I called him a *yevrey*: “I was imprisoned with *yevreyim*.” He really laid into me: “I am not a *yevrey*! That’s what Russians call us—I’m a *zhyd*! You remember that!” “I’m sorry,” I said, “I thought I would offend you if I said that.” He served as a doctor in the UPA, told me many stories, but thats another topic.
So, this poor Jew Chmelyk, how did he make a living? He was a rag-and-bone man—you wouldnt remember that…
V.O.: I remember—after the war we also had “onushnyky,” who collected “onuchi”—rags, that is.
H.H.: He would ride around, one miserable horse, a cart… We call that useless junk *katran*. “Housewives-s-s, rags, give me your ra-a-ags!” He would ride and ride, people would bring things out, and he would give them some matches, this and that. And the poor man made a living from it. Clearly, life was hard.
V.O.: They also brought needles, pins. And clay whistle-roosters.
V.O.: Yes, they brought things for the children too. That Chmelyk, when the Soviet government came, he pinned on a star—and now he was a “Soviet man.” In that *folwark*, in that Polish latifundia, there was a large garrison of NKVD soldiers. We children loved to watch what kind of soldiers had come to us, to look at their weapons. It was a Saturday, I remember, and one Jewish butcher and this Chmelyk, the one who traded in rags, were slaughtering cows for the garrison’s meat. Or maybe they were heifers, I don’t remember anymore. Dogs were running around… In our village, the Jews were very religious. And the elders said, “Chmelyk, what are you doing—it’s the Sabbath today?” “I sold my Sabbath for five kopecks,” he said in Russian, I remember.
V.O.: Because he had become a communist?
H.H.: He was a communist. And the communists also arrested rich Jews—the Zionists, the Jewish patriots. That’s why they started helping the insurgents, the UPA.
When there were raids, the insurgents would send us: go! Because children could get through. “Count how many of them there are, how many weapons, and listen to where they’re going—maybe you’ll overhear something.” We would go, getting used to that kind of reconnaissance. I want to emphasize, even now I can’t believe how patriotic people were, how honest. We would drive the cows out to pasture behind the village, and the boys would say, “The partisans are quartering at my place.” And he’d say for how many days. And as we drove the cattle from the pasture, we’d glance at those yards: the sun is shining, the partisans are stripped to the waist. We drive the cattle home for lunch—they’ve already slept and are cleaning their weapons, their machine guns. Does that mean they trusted people? We live near the town, near a railway station, and all the stations are guarded by garrisons—you could just go and report them… The patriotism was that strong! Looking at the population today, I can hardly believe it. It was so easy to wage a struggle with the support of the population that’s what our people were like.
V.O.: Practically the entire population supported the UPA.
H.H.: It seems so. It was only later, when the population broke down, in the fifties, heading into the sixties, that things changed. They used to drill us, the young ones—the older people had separate lectures from Banderite instructors.
I have to digress again… There was a garrison at the railway station. It guarded military depots, explosives there were also German weapons in those buildings. And the head of security was from Kyiv, a Ukrainian, I think a senior lieutenant or a captain, no higher, a slender young man, [unintelligible] after the war ended. By then, almost all the Poles had been deported from those homesteads, and Lemkos from Poland were settled there instead. One Lemko man had four daughters. Because Lemkos had many children—eight, ten, they had large families, but in Galicia, not anymore—one, two, three, some had four. My uncle, the one from the division, had four. Not far from the railway station, Lemkos lived in little houses near a small forest, near the former lord’s orchard. That officer used to visit the Lemkos and fell in love with a Lemko girl. And these Lemkos had contact with the insurgents because they lived near the forest. So he would come during the day, and at night the insurgents would come—for reconnaissance, for a bite to eat, to have their laundry done. And one day they said about the officer, “He’s a good man.” And the officer knew Ukrainian he was from Kyiv. The partisans decided to get to know him. They disguised themselves as border guards. We had border guards because the Romanian border was 60 km away—the border control zone was 60 km. With them was a man named Solovey, also an officer, from Eastern Ukraine, who had defected from the Red Army to the underground. He knew how to act, he knew Russian. So, they put on border guard uniforms, and they all kept quiet while Solovey did the talking. The officer came to the Lemkos’ house, set down his submachine gun, his pistol still on him, and sat at the table while they served him. And the partisans came out of the woods: “Hello, who are you? Your documents? Hands up!” He shows his documents. They take his submachine gun, his pistol too: “Come with us!” They took him into the forest and talked with him. They gave him literature. And he defected—it’s unbelievable!—to the underground after the war. And it later turned out that someone in his family had been arrested. If I knew his last name, I would gladly tell his story, because he later became my instructor. The security service vetted him—how they did it, I don’t know, but he was trusted and died a very heroic death. They gave him the pseudonym Novy (New), and later, when I was in the underground, I took his pseudonym. He shot himself when he was wounded—a very heroic death.
They gave us lectures—separately for the young ones and separately for the older ones. They would cover the windows, post guards, and give a lecture. This was once a week—lectures on the history of Ukraine. They gave us literature. The educational work was very good. They told us, I remember it like it was yesterday, about the famine in Ukraine—and we had already heard about the famine. They said that some 4-5 million had died. To be honest, I thought they were exaggerating to make us have a greater hatred for the Muscovites, for the Soviets. When they talked about the Kremlin, about Stalin, about the debauchery, the cruelty, that you could walk into a cabinet and never walk out, I didn’t believe it, we didn’t believe it—I thought it was an exaggeration to make us have greater hatred. But when I ended up in Vorkuta in 1954, in the North, in a camp, and we were sitting on the bunks during a huge blizzard, there were also “real communists” there, Kremlin workers, who told stories—and I, just a young boy, listened and thought: My God, the Banderites back then didnt even know about these crimes—these were colossal crimes! And we didn’t believe it…
I can also tell you how they raised us. This was already the beginning of 1947. I loved to sing, and everyone in our village loved to sing. And I sang pretty well. The older people would gather to sing carols, and the children would sing shchedrivky—we have very rich Christmas traditions, very picturesque—all mixed up with pagan times. We would gather, those who sang well, into groups and go around. But after the war, the Soviets allowed it—brew moonshine, and no one would touch you. Many people had permanent moonshine stills. And people began to learn to drink from the Russians. Because under Poland, we drank from tiny little glasses. They could make half a liter last half a day. True, under Poland, there was a temperance society, run by the nationalists. Members of the society didn’t drink or smoke at all. [End of track]. The boys were being prepared for the struggle. But here, drunkenness began to take root—and it takes root quickly.
V.O.: Yes, yes, Vasyl Dolishniy from the Ivano-Frankivsk region used to sing a *kolomyika* in Mordovia: “Thank God, thank God, the Soviets have come: now our eyes will be bleary from vodka.”
H.H.: This *kolomyika* says it all. Christmas. We prepared and went to sing *shchedrivky*. The whole village is singing. And everyone treats you to vodka. I’m returning home, I open the door to the entryway—and I smell a strange scent. You know, you can smell that military scent from soldiers. Not of *makhorka* tobacco, because in the UPA you could smoke by then, some did, but all the young guys didnt. Later, when I was with the UPA men, none of us smoked, only one old man, Dnipro—he smoked in the forest. It wasn’t allowed. And I didn’t smoke or drink. I started doing sports. Although my mother was a smoker and didn’t forbid me from smoking. Under Poland, she made a living by growing tobacco—and under Poland, not just anyone could grow tobacco, because tobacco was a “monopoly.” My mother was a specialist, she took a course, grew that wretched tobacco (and we had little land), knew how to dry it, packed it in boxes, into those bunches. Not far away, about 10 kilometers, there was a tobacco factory. She lived off that, she had a metal plaque: “Anna Herczak, plantator tytoniu” (Anna Herchak, Tobacco Planter). So she learned how, they buried all sorts of [unintelligible] in the ground, she dried it, smoked it, and guests would come to her for it.
But I want to talk about something else. Opening the entryway door, I smell that someone is in the house. I open the door—and there are four or five of them sitting there, the windows are covered, my mother is treating them to something, and they are waiting for me. And its already after midnight. My instructor, Novy—remember, that insurgent from Eastern Ukraine—comes up to me: “Well now, my dear boy, take a breath.” I blew. He hugged me: “My God, what a boy, not a has touched his lips. Even if you had drunk a little, I would have…” And he started kissing me. But my mother says: “Don’t praise him so much, he doesn’t want to go to church, he’s always messing with those bullets, he has some grenades, and once I found cartridges in his pocket.” “Don’t keep them like that. It’s good, it’s good, but hide them.” My mother: “What are you teaching him?” That’s how strict the discipline was, that’s how they raised us. So, I was raised like that and got raised all the way to the camps. (Laughs).
I must say that before this, I had a scandal with the Ukrainian insurgents. A lot of people were being arrested, deported to Siberia. They were already starting to resettle Lemkos in our area. This was around 1946, probably at the end of the year. We created a group and called it the “Opryshky.” It wasnt an organization. I was involved, along with Pavlo Bezvushko from our village and others. We sought revenge. We were like folk avengers. Some did more, some did less… If the village council head fined a woman for carrying firewood from the forest or for something else—we would either break his windows at night or hit him over the head from behind. He’s still alive. Sometimes we’d leave a note: “The Opryshky.” We would sign that we were the *opryshky*. There were some who mistreated people. Those foresters. To stop people from taking wood from the forest… Once, we stole a large boar, quartered it, and gave it to poor old women. We wrote: “The Opryshky.” Then we stopped, because rumors started spreading that there were such avengers and that they were being directed by older people. But that wasnt true.
One was studying at the university they called him Lemko. Maybe he was from the Lemko region. He had a certain accent. He was in one of the senior years. They came and arrested him. The police arrested him, because it was often the police, not the NKVD, who came to make arrests. They put him in an open truck and drove him away. And when the truck stopped at a red light in Chernivtsi, he jumped off, and the guards couldn’t shoot because there were too many people. He knew the area well and escaped. Sometime later, he came home and saw—it was winter then—an empty, desolate house, windows and doors broken, snow blown into the entryway, his relatives deported. A while later—his friends told me this later—word came that his sister and grandmother had died on the way in those freight cars. And he dedicated himself—so they said—to fighting them to the death, to taking revenge. He may have been the one leading these *opryshky*.
Some *opryshky* didn’t even know each other. I know that a man named Yosyp Hevchuk worked with us he was also arrested later. He only worked with me he didn’t know that I also worked with others. One time, they decided to blow up an NKVD or Red Army club. After the war, there were such clubs. I don’t know in which small town it was. And I was involved with weapons, stockpiling them, shooting in the fields.
Since I mentioned shooting, I’ll tell you that we set up a firing range for ourselves in the valley. And since gunshots can be heard from far away in the forest, we knew how to escape. For example, we found a Degtyaryov machine gun—it needed to be tested there was plenty of ammunition. We’d set up a newspaper about 100 meters away, draw a circle on it, and aim—doo-doo-doo-doo. And the shots could be heard far away. We’d practice for a bit in some ravine—and then quickly flee, so the Bolsheviks wouldn’t come. It wasn’t far from the town. About two kilometers from our village, about four from the town.
Once we were testing a submachine gun. A good submachine gun, I cleaned it, hid it, everything was quiet. In the village, some supply men were quartered—these were armed underground members who didn’t go on actions or contact missions, but just organized logistical things—food, clothing. By the way, the UPA was short on bandages—they called them *bandazhi*. If you bought too many of them in our area, it would immediately raise a signal. They would either start watching you or arrest you. It didnt matter who bought them—a woman, a child… I’ll digress again—I’ll be digressing until the end—they would send us to buy them at the Zhmerynka station near Vinnytsia, a major railway hub. There, in Vinnytsia, someone would get medical supplies from a hospital or a warehouse. So they would send us, little boys and a couple of girls, to bring them back. And one or two older women would go with us. We would get off in Zhmerynka, someone would meet us, pack everything for us, to make it look like we had been shopping. On the way there, they taught us: don’t say “pane” [sir], don’t say “Slava Isusu Khrystu” [Glory to Jesus Christ], but “dobryi den” [good day], so as not to arouse suspicion. I made several such trips. The rest we made from rags. We made cloth not from flax, but from hemp. We had more hemp. In the north, they sowed flax… Old clothing is soft. They would boil it—even my mother boiled it, and my aunt, in these big pots, in cauldrons. They would cover it, and it would simmer for a long time. Then they would iron it with a hot iron, and gently roll it up, after washing their hands. That’s how they made bandages. It was a tragedy. And the Chekists said that planes were dropping medical supplies and weapons to the Banderites. So I collaborated with the Banderites in this.
Besides the supply men, there were boys in the village who were on duty, helping the partisans, carrying out some tasks. They didnt have such strong connections or a command structure, so they were called by the slightly contemptuous term *okolotnyky*. An *okolot* is a threshed sheaf of straw. So these were the ones who hide in the straw, in the *okoloty*. They were a bit chubby, not tanned. Because those in the forest were so worn out, exhausted, tanned by the wind, because they had to walk and carry everything. But these guys got varenyky, and they liked to go and hang out with the girls. They didnt drink, though—maybe secretly, I dont know about that, I never heard.
When we tested that submachine gun, two *okolotnyky* were quartered at the edge of the village, not far from our “firing range.” It was just before evening. There was a wedding, one of them changed into civilian clothes and went to dance with the girls. The other had an illness—scabies. So he was soaking in some herbal brew in a tub, treating the scabies, in a barn. And suddenly, there’s shooting. He has to change out of his wedding clothes and tremble, thinking there’s a raid or something. Then someone informed on them, and the two boys who were shooting were caught. One was named Peruniak, I forgot his first name. They caught him, interrogated him, and he confessed that Hryts has a submachine gun, that Hryts often shoots.
I didn’t know anything, I was sleeping in the evening, my mother was still doing something in the kitchen. There was a knock on the door, my mother opened it. In comes Vedmid [Bear]—that was his pseudonym, a rather plump guy, with a ten-shooter—we called the automatic Russian carbine a “ten-shooter.” He comes in and says, “Get up!”—so sharply. The insurgents had never been like that with me before… And I knew him, because sometimes they quartered with us. “Get dressed!” I’m getting dressed, and he hits me with a cleaning rod—whack! I’m thinking, “What is this?” “Quickly!” I got dressed, he took me across the road to a neighbor’s, an old woman, she lived alone. They sent her to a neighbor’s house. I went in, the windows were covered, a guard was standing there, and a tearful Peruniak was sitting there, poor guy. He had confessed during the interrogation. And a little shepherdess was sleeping there—there were two daughters, I think, Natalka Stakhera, younger than me—on the stove, and they hadn’t seen her sleeping. She hid and listened to everything, so she was a witness, we’ll get to that later. “Did you shoot?” I say, “No.” He punches me in the face. And that guy says, “Confess, because I already confessed.” I say, “I was shooting.” “Give me the weapon!” And twenty-five strokes with the cleaning rod for shooting. I say, “I don’t have a weapon.” “Then what were you shooting with? Confess.” “I already told you, with a submachine gun.” “Where is it?” “Someone stole it.” “What other weapons do you have?” “None.” He wrote down another twenty-five and turned to me: “Give me the weapons!” I say, “I have a *vtynok* (that’s a sawed-off shotgun) and two German grenades.” The kind with a long handle, like an egg. He leads me away, I already want to run, but I think, I wont yet, he wont beat me anymore. He’s angry with me, he has this little belly, he hides in those straw stacks. I’m carrying these grenades. A guard is standing on duty. We get to the house. Then he says, “Give me more weapons, you have more?” “I don’t know.” I don’t confess. He gives me five more strokes with the cleaning rod. “Get on your knees, ask for forgiveness!” “I won’t get on my knees.” I don’t know what came over me… He hits me on the head with the cleaning rod. True, he wrote it down later. “On your knees!” I knelt down. But I did sports and was learning holds back then. And I wanted to use a hold on him that would leave him on the ground. On my knees, it would be easy for me to strike him in a certain spot—and he would be down. But it’s a good thing that didn’t happen. (Laughs). I was a quick boy. In short, he recorded 72 blows—he hit me twice with the cleaning rod.
I didn’t ask for forgiveness, and the cleaning rod even bent.
He screwed the cleaning rod back into his “ten-shooter”: “Go!” I went outside, in the cold he hit me again with the butt of his rifle, and he didn’t record that one: “Go on, you bastard!” I didn’t know the word “svoloch” [bastard]—maybe we said “navoloch” somewhere, we didn’t have such a word. I was walking home and, I honestly admit, I thought about going to the NKVD right then, it wasn’t far from us. I’d go to the garrison, maybe a kilometer away, to the railway station. I’d go and call the NKVD. I had a rough idea of where they were quartered and where their *kryivka* [bunker] was. The NKVD would set up an ambush and get them. And I wouldn’t give anyone else up. That was my thought. But by the time I got home, though it wasn’t far, another thought came to me—I have a machine gun, I have a German MP submachine gun, I have Russian ones, I know how to shoot, I’ll set up an ambush myself with two submachine guns, so if one jams, I’ll use the other. The other one, the skinny one who walks with him, I won’t touch him—but this one, I’ll shoot him, riddle him with bullets! I thought that, and I felt better.
I came home. My mother asked what happened. “Nothing happened.” I went to bed, slept a little, in the morning I gathered the cows and took them to pasture. And Natalka Stakhera went to my mother and told her everything. My mother’s sister was a liaison—Kaziuk Anna, I think. No, my mother was Anna, the liaison was Ksenia. Unaware of anything, I come home and see Aunt Ksenia and my mother. I liked to sunbathe topless. But how can you sunbathe when you’re all black and blue, beaten? I came home, ate, and they were waiting. A third woman came too—I knew her, she collaborated with the Banderites in the forest. “Hrytsiuniu, why aren’t you sunbathing?” “Oh, I’m not feeling so well today.” “I hear, I hear it in your voice—come over here, take off your shirt!” “I don’t want to, Mom, I don’t want to!” She pulled the shirt off me—and my back was blue! That third woman immediately gets on a horse—women rode horses in our parts—and rides to the village of Nyrkiv. My relative, an SB [Security Service] man, was there. She went to the real insurgents and told them everything. And I know nothing, days have passed, I’m already preparing my action. It’s a good thing they hurried.
One evening I brought the cattle home from the pasture, my mother milked them, and I lay down to rest a bit. And we, the *opryshky*, had something to do, something to transport, to exchange some Tokarev machine gun—they used to mount Tokarev machine guns on tanks, they weren’t very good. I had made legs for it, because in a tank it’s on a mount, without legs. I had tools. My uncle was a blacksmith, so I could make anything. I made aluminum legs. When a plane was shot down once, that was our trophy. I found some aluminum tubes there, they were slightly oval. I made these light legs, with little feet so they wouldn’t sink into the ground. We tested all that weaponry we had a whole arsenal. I was getting ready to go there, having rested a bit—I had eaten, drunk some milk. The moon was already shining, it was summer. Suddenly I see—in the moonlight, a weapon glints, they’re surrounding the house. But they aren’t surrounding the house itself, but from the house. They’re surrounding the yard, from behind the fence, behind the wall, setting up machine guns, other weapons. I think: what is this, my God, Muscovites! But why are they setting up on top—Muscovites should be coming to the house. I went into the house—nothing. Strangers to my mother: “Good evening! Do you have a son?” “Yes, I do.” My heart is pounding—I see they are insurgents, but dressed as Muscovites. “Come on outside.” There’s a place where they chop wood. A chopping block. He’s sitting on the block holding my stick, the one I use to herd cows—it’s a thick stick, with a knob on the end so your hand doesn’t slip. We used to fight with the town boys—there were émigrés from the eastern oblasts and Russian-speakers. They were already in the Komsomol. The older Komsomol members would graze horses, and we’d beat them for grazing on our pasture. We had these wars, that’s why I had such a stick. He’s sitting there: “Oh, my dear boy, we’ve heard about you. Is this the kind of stick you use for herding?” “Oh, the cows are unruly, you need to…” “Uh-huh, we’ve heard what kind of cows—you fight over there.” “Well, yes, we fight with the town boys, because the Komsomol members graze their cows there on Sundays.” “You shouldn’t fight, even if they are Komsomol members. We’ve heard about you. You mustn’t.” And I’m thinking: my God, what awaits me now? And he says: “And how are you living? No grudges against anyone? We heard someone beat you up?” “No, nobody beat me.” “And you don’t hold a grudge in your heart?” “No, nothing happened.” I see that they already know that Vedmid beat me, and I think: My God, are they going to put me on this block now and beat me with that stick? That’s worse than a cleaning rod! I didn’t know what would happen. And he says: “Do you have a weapon?” “No, I don’t.” “We know you do. Hide it—the weapon will come in handy. You’re a good shot. Take care of the weapon. We know you know how to hide weapons. You took a beating—don’t hold a grudge in your heart. He has already been punished.” That’s what he said. And he didn’t order me to hand over the weapon, nothing. He tells me: “The Organization has punished him, and on its behalf, the Organization asks for your forgiveness.” I stood up and thought: My God, and I was planning an action! He talked to me like that, didn’t demand any weapons…
V.O.: And how old were you then?
H.H.: About seventeen… It’s hard to say. That’s what happened. We said our goodbyes, and they left.
After that, they started to trust me, they started taking me on missions—if I didnt confess to them, I wouldn’t confess so easily to the Bolsheviks either.
I told you how we wanted to blow up the Red Army club, didnt I? I started to tell you and got sidetracked. But that needed to be said because it happened before this.
In short, we were looking at what kind of mine was needed. I had a Bickford fuse, and we also had mines that could be detonated with a wire from a battery. But it turned out you couldn’t run a fuse wire there because they inspected the area before the movie showing. The explosives could be placed. The place wasn’t fully repaired, there was a small park, and from the park, there were shutters, boarded up. In front of that little club, there was a lot of old furniture, some barrels, and it was easy to place a mine there—the boys had already checked. They told me that and even drew me a rough plan. By the way, I was already drawing back then, so I could visualize it. So, even though the Bickford fuse is green, if you run it through the grass in the park in the summer, children play there and would notice it. And it was impossible to run the Bickford fuse right before the movie because it was guarded. So a radio-controlled or a time-delay mine was needed.
We didnt have one, so I went to learn watchmaking from Hryhoriy Chynych. By the way, he was living almost illegally in our village because his two brothers and sister were in the underground, and his mother was hiding in Vyviz (?). And he was a choir conductor and a church cantor—he had studied in Czechoslovakia. And for the underground, he was a specialist who repaired their radios and typewriters. And the underground printers worked on typewriters back then. And he also repaired weapons. He saw that I was a clever boy. By the way, after I was beaten, he kept in touch with me—I helped him move the typewriters. He trusted me, and I was pleased to be let in on such secrets. And then I met him in a camp in Vorkuta. They wanted to arrest him, he escaped from [unintelligible], and was wounded. I have a portrait I made of him—a very interesting family, but that’s another topic. And with one boy, his brother Yosypko, whose pseudonym was Bohdan, I was surrounded the last time, when they killed that operative Bohdanov—they killed him, and I managed to escape with his brother. But that’s another topic.
So, I was learning to be a watchmaker, and he knew me and was familiar with the underground. I was very happy about that—everyone was getting their watches fixed after the war because you couldn’t buy them anywhere. We learned how to take them apart, I learned how to clean them. I started by learning with an alarm clock, and then I moved on to wristwatches. And I needed an alarm clock to set up a contact in a mine. We had batteries that could be used for detonation. But that had to be placed near the mine. So, I learned what I needed, and that was enough for me. I didnt go to learn anymore. They brought me an alarm clock, and I already knew what to do. We tested it with a lightbulb, and then I took a small detonator and went into a cave (we have many caves), and wound it up. The two of us are sitting there, the clock is ticking, and then it goes off. The detonator worked—so the explosive would work too. We had hidden hundreds of kilograms of explosives—from mortars, from large mines, from infantry mines. There were minefields, we demined them and collected whole stockpiles, hid them in caves, stashed them everywhere. There were plenty of explosives.
Everything was ready. One night, two men come: “Get ready.” I got ready, everything was in order, and they lead me to the forester’s lodge. There was a house there where, I think, no one lived anymore—foresters used to live there, but they were deported. I go in—there’s a kerosene lamp, the walls are peeling, windows are covered, and there are many guards. As they were leading me, many guards stopped us and checked the password: “Halt, who goes there?” The password. I think, something serious is going on here. I go in, and a few *opryshky* are sitting there, some are already sad, some have bruises. And on the table, my mechanism is sitting on a white cloth. A man in civilian clothes, an older man: “Sit down, my boy.” I said, “Glory to Ukraine.” They answered. I sat down and was already trembling. That SB man shouts—it’s not just the NKVD who are fierce, all intelligence services are like that, partisan ones too: “Is this yours? Did you make it?” I don’t say that someone helped me, I just say yes. “We know everything—you even studied to be a watchmaker, maybe you [unintelligible] figured out that [unintelligible] those contacts.” Because he wasn’t stupid, Hryhoriy the watchmaker, but I don’t know who informed on him. And he keeps at me: “So you wanted to blow up the club?” And I say, “Yes.” “And do you know, you fool, that there could have been women and children there?” “But it’s for the NKVD, no one else is allowed in there.” “That’s not allowed! It has to be only the NKVD, women and children must not be harmed.”
By the way, I still think about it now: My God, and they called them bandits! But all revolutionaries blow up civilians—what are the Basques doing, what are the Chechens doing? So now I know—everyone does, right? But for them, you see, it wasnt allowed…
I’m just sitting there, and they are already interrogating the others. They had already been beaten, apparently. I sit and think—those from that village, those from this village have already died in Siberia. I’m holding up six fingers like this, he’s saying something to me, and I say to him: “You say it like this: women and children. But look: when they were deported, how many women and children died on the way? They are allowed to do that—but we are not?” So he comes up to me: “You snot-nosed kid, are you going to lecture me?..” And he pulls my ears like this, and then flicks me on the forehead. They didn’t beat me, by the way. I sat down then, and the one in civilian clothes, the old leader, comes up, all pale: “My boy, how old are you?” I told him how old I was—either seventeen or late sixteen. “Oh, my boy, you have golden hands! Don’t do that—study, learn about weapons, explosives, demolition, but don’t do this. The time will come—you will do it.” The others stopped shouting. Maybe they would have beaten me too—I don’t know, but they didn’t beat me. But those *opryshky* apparently didn’t give everyone up, because that Lemko wasn’t there—the boys must not have confessed. I didn’t even know all those *opryshky*. “Don’t do anything! Whoever wants to act—do it with us, but nothing on your own!”
And so we, the *opryshky*, disbanded. Bezruchko and I still did a few things, but I had already started working with the underground. And gradually, this Novy from Eastern Ukraine became my instructor, and I reported to them, although we still did a few things secretly. The *opryshky*, by the way, even had a couple of killings. Maybe that shouldn’t have been done. There was one man in our village who serviced the railway station, his last name was Leshchyshyn. They took an MP submachine gun from me. And when he became the secretary of the Komsomol organization at the railway station, our guys shot him. I already knew they were going to shoot him, I was against it. I won’t name names, so they won’t be prosecuted, they have families in the village now, so I still don’t talk about it. I was very worried when I was released—God forbid they find out I was involved in that, because the submachine gun was mine and I knew about it but didn’t confess during interrogation. And they have families now, they, thank God, were not in the camps… I was walking in the morning, and he was already lying there. He was in his railway uniform, that padded jacket or *telogreika*. It seems they shot him from the front—he was lying there, he had this railway lantern. It looks like they gave him a burst—a lot of cotton batting was torn out. They killed two or three people. This, obviously, shouldn’t have been done, but it was such a cruel time—what was done to us, our *opryshky* did back. That’s how it was.
They set up an ambush for one NKVD man, an officer of the internal troops, but he wore civilian clothes he was the “plenipotentiary” for our village, Kavukov. They also took a submachine gun and a carbine from me. I happened to be sick at home then, I remember, so I didnt go. But I would have hit him, of course. There were two of them riding, and he turned out to be a good soldier. A driver was taking him in a carriage, and near the district center, they shot from behind a concrete tomb and wounded Kavukov in the leg, in the thigh. About six months later, he was already coming to the village with a cane. But the other guy jumped out, ran away, and fired long, accurate bursts. Those boys fled, and one, as he was firing his submachine gun, you know how it recoils, a branch got caught in it and jammed his gun. And they escaped. That was another action.
COLLABORATION WITH THE UNDERGROUND
After that, I began to collaborate with the underground. I carried out rather difficult tasks—I even went to Chernivtsi for an operation, even stole documents. I could already open a window without breaking the glass, I could break glass so that it wouldn’t be heard. I took up sports. If someone with a revolver needed to be taken from a house for interrogation, I would tear through the thatch, the roof tiles, from the garden, climb into the attic when everyone was asleep, especially when they were drunk after a party… Or if something else needed to be done, I would just jump—I had slippers, like *postoly*, with a special sole so as not to be pierced by nails and not to make a sound, without heels, everything tied down, a mask on my eyes, a small flashlight. I would jump with a submachine gun. And if I needed to get back on the attic, I would jump up, lift myself, and I was already in the attic. I was such an agile boy. I carried out various actions, progressively more complex. The partisans were surprised that such a boy…
To tell the truth, I was driven not so much by patriotism, although my mother was a patriot, and my father, whom I don’t remember, everyone in our family was a patriot, we had that kind of upbringing, we were raised in the reading hall—but what drove me to that struggle in the post-war years was not so much for an independent Ukraine, but simply that I couldn’t stand to see that injustice. I couldn’t stand to see that cruelty—and I still can’t, by the way.
V.O.: You’re telling us you carried out so many actions—were you officially a partisan then?
H.H.: No, no, I lived legally.
V.O.: These were separate operations?
H.H.: Yes. I’ll also say that one day this wounded Kavukov went to my aunt (my uncle’s wife)—the one whose husband was in the “Galicia” division, who was a blacksmith, and the smithy was still there. There was some other blacksmith, and I was learning a bit of blacksmithing because it develops muscles, and I loved crafts. And the blacksmith was a Galician German, with one leg—like there are Russian Germans, Ukrainian Germans here. He knew German—and that was it. There was a German colony there, they spoke German, had their own school under Poland—that was allowed. He fought against the Germans, lost a leg, and returned from the front. A good blacksmith, but since his entire German village had been deported, and the Russians had nothing against him, he lived with his two daughters in the house of deported Poles at the end of our village. He had one leg and needed an apprentice, or as we say, a *cheliadnyk*, so I went to learn. I remember how funny it sounded in German: to strike with a hammer was “trouch.” And you had to know how to strike. He would strike with a small hammer…
V.O.: Indicating where to strike?
H.H.: Yes, yes, he with the small one, and I with the big one, and it was like music, such a rhythm. “Halt!” meant “stop.” “Get the drill” was “Durch Borch,” “drill through,” “Sing Borch” was “on the head,” “Schrubstak” was a “vise.” I learned everything in German—how to heat the forge, how to hammer. That’s what I did, but then I got so involved with the underground that there was no need for craftsmanship anymore.
IN THE FZU IN DONBAS
Kavukov kept coming to this blacksmith. He was very suspicious of me because I did sports, and in the village, they knew I was a nimble guy: “What are you doing here… twiddling your thumbs? Go study in Ternopil or Donbas, in an FZU!”—those were the factory-vocational schools at the time. There were raids, and boys were forcibly taken to the FZU. But I was still a minor—up to what age were you considered a minor?
V.O.: Probably until eighteen.
H.H.: So I was a minor, they had no right to take me by force. But there was a raid at night, and they took me. At the transit point in Ternopil, there were two older, skinny boys from my village—and they put me with them. And when there was a commission, they assigned me to a technical school in Ternopil. But then someone came up—and I was sent to Donbas again. I didn’t know it then and only later understood that they had taken me specifically to tear me away from the underground, to remove its influence. I arrived in Donbas—and again they dont accept me.
V.O.: What year was this?
H.H.: It was early forty-eight.
V.O.: And how did they transport you—under guard?
H.H.: Under guard, but the guard was probably unarmed.
V.O.: You weren’t transported alone, were you?
H.H.: Oh, many of us! At the transit point, they waited specifically… What a transit point—it was some hall, because Ternopil was heavily damaged, German prisoners were still repairing it.
V.O.: Where in Donbas did they take you?
H.H.: I’ll tell you in a moment. We were also waiting in Dnipropetrovsk, near a factory—they took boys from there too, added some from Chernivtsi Oblast and even from Eastern Ukraine—they had rounded up some thieves at train stations and sent them there too. They brought us to the city of Chystiakove in Donetsk Oblast, to the Lutuhin Mine, and again they put me with the older boys. They don’t accept me there either. I only figured out later why—I was well-developed physically, just looked young in the face. I even have a photograph from Donbas somewhere.
By the way, in Donbas I met someone from our district who was also caught—a guy named Mytsko. He was a Komsomol member, and I had beaten him up once for being a Komsomol member. There were older guys with him in the village, we beat them up too, because they were Komsomol members. And he was about three or four years older than me. And we even slept in the same room. There were about eight of us sleeping in the dormitory. They dressed us in uniforms, we did military drills, they taught us, I think, for three months to be a gas-meter reader—to measure gas. It’s not hard work in the mine—measuring gas. They give us lectures, we march to and from the dining hall. There were even some from Moldavia. [Unintelligible, special terms about fires, gas-measuring devices]. So we studied that, but I won’t talk about it at length.
Later, they came for me again, wanted to take me to a military school—some Suvorov school or something, I don’t know, all the way near Moscow. And again, they wouldnt let me go. They wanted to take me there because I had shown myself well in sports competitions: I did many pull-ups, jumped well, because we did sports there. We had leave, we could go into town in uniform. I remember picking apricots in a windbreak forest. Near the towns of Snizhne, Ilovaisk, and many others.
V.O.: Chystiakove—that’s Torez now, it was renamed.
H.H.: Oh, our dear city. Why did I start talking about that Chystiakove?.. Ah, I escaped from there. It was very difficult to escape, because when we went into town, older men in civilian clothes, guards, went with us. But there were escapes. By the way, when we were working, that is, doing our practical training, there were still German prisoners, and somewhere in the second half of 1948 they started deporting them. There were some agreements about the Germans, Slovaks, Hungarians. It’s very interesting: it was hot in the summer, and there was a lumber yard with timber for mine supports—back then they used wood to support the mines. It struck me, as an *opryshok*, that they were cutting down the Carpathian forest and bringing it for supports. And some of it was brought from the taiga. I thought: My God, why not bring it all from the taiga, why are they cutting down our native Carpathians? The Carpathians are already so deforested—that was the *opryshok* spirit speaking.
The Germans worked honestly. The Hungarians, in the summer, would go behind that lumber yard to sunbathe—they were lazy. But the Germans had such discipline that they even worked honestly for the enemy. They marched in formation, in ranks, they had officers or someone—with armbands, their own people escorted them, but without weapons. They were fed well, not like us—they had a military ration.
One day I decided to escape. How to escape? You could run away at night—go out to the toilet. It was a four-story dormitory, and there were no toilets inside the building, you had to go outside. The yard was lit, and two guards sat in front of the door. And there were guards on every floor. You can’t run away naked—in your long underwear and a shirt? So I took my clothes and work uniform, rolled them up, and threw them out the window into the park. I lived on the third or fourth floor. I threw them, and everyone was asleep, because they were tired. I go out as if to the toilet. And in the toilet, I had already scouted out how I could pry off a board and get into the park, run around, grab my things, and escape. The guards are sitting there, they don’t say anything to me, I went to the toilet, and then quickly, in my underwear, I went under the bushes, behind the building, grabbed my things, and left. And there were many small parks there, I got changed. And as a boy would fantasize: I had a bandage, I put my arm in a sling—since I had no civilian clothes—and started walking. I walked at night past some camps, orienting myself by the stars, by the North Star. And in Donbas, there are no clouds. When I got past Ilovaisk, I forgot where… [End of cassette 1]
V.O.: This is Mr. Herchak, cassette two, we continue.
H.H.: There was some small town there. I walked, by the way, past camps of German prisoners, they were lit up, dogs guarded them, I had to go far around them at night—it was hard walking. And then, hopping on some freight train, I made it all the way to Verkhivtseve—that’s across the Dnieper, somewhere in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast. There were all sorts of adventures, but that’s a long story. And so I made my way home.
NEAR HOME
They prosecuted people for escaping, though not for long, just a few months, but since I was a minor, they didn’t prosecute me. I hid right away, thinking they would prosecute me. But then they passed a message to my mother that they wouldn’t. I hid for a few months, and then, so to speak, I legalized myself and worked. I worked and continued to work with the insurgents, carrying out tasks. It got to the point where I had a Degtyaryov light machine gun, a couple of disk magazines, or as we called them, ammo—it was hidden in a rubber bag in the garden among the potatoes, properly greased. Why was this—because the insurgents went on operations, they had to be very mobile in the final years, and carrying such a weapon is heavy. So when they were doing some operation, I would stand by the road with the machine gun, and they would carry out the operation, and if any threat arose from the road, if the Bolsheviks were coming, I would have fired the machine gun to stop anyone from passing.
I’m getting ahead of myself. One day my neighbor had a contact—he broke, he lives in the village now, so I won’t name him—Ivan, he’s about two years older than me. They arrested him, and during interrogation, he confessed and said that I had a weapon. He probably also said it was hidden in the garden. And I was on a mission, we had crossed the Dniester somewhere, then waded through some river, I was wet in the cold water at night and fell asleep on the rocks at night, exhausted. I fell asleep towards morning and then fell ill with pneumonia. It wore me out terribly, there was nothing to treat the pneumonia with, I barely recovered. I was still walking around the yard like that, and the doctors told me not to sunbathe, not to walk around without a shirt, to wear even two shirts so as not to catch a chill. I was waiting to recover so I could go back to herding cows and helping my mother with work.
V.O.: Wait, how long were you in Donbas?
H.H.: You only had to study there for a little over three months, and I was there for about…
V.O.: And what time of year was it?
H.H.: It was the season when we were stealing apricots. And when I returned home, there were already early apples. It was 1948. I remember, I came home during the day—I know all the ins and outs at home, I came through the orchards to the house, climbed into the house through a window—there was a little window into the garden, we have a big garden. I climbed into the house, and there were a lot of apples lying there—apples, early pears. I remember it like it was yesterday, I came in, peeled an apple, ate it, left the peelings, climbed out of the house, and went to sleep in the neighbor’s yard on the hay, where there was an empty barn and house—they had all been deported to Siberia. I was afraid to be at home because I thought they would be after me. And my mother later told me that she came home, looked—oh, my son is here! Because I had peeled an apple and entered the house without keys. The harvest had just begun, I think. I remember how it was for me in that Donbas—the gases, the swearing, how coarse everything was! I came home as if to paradise—I swear, that was the impression.
Then, when that Ivan gave up the machine gun, one day after lunch, when I had recovered a bit, they surround my yard, conduct a search, and bring that machine gun from the garden. And then they arrest me. They arrested me and are leading me away.
V.O.: Do you remember the date?
H.H.: Oh, that’s difficult. It was the autumn of 1948, there was a frost, I remember.
They had just started digging potatoes. No, it was 1949, because I was already working with the partisans, going on various missions, and I had the machine gun. I went on all sorts of more complex missions, and we transported literature. They trusted me with that. I remember, many times we would carry something heavy, and I would think, what’s inside? But you’re not allowed to know. So when everyone was asleep, I’d stick my hand in, and there were books, and this was printing type. I was such a boy—curious and inquisitive…
So, they arrested me and are leading me away. And they bring me out onto the street. And I knew every little path there. I’m walking, they told me to keep my hands behind my back, they surrounded me. There was no dog. We get closer to the village council. There are several cars and trucks standing there, officers are standing on the road talking about something. And I’m thinking to myself: “How do I escape? Will they shoot me here?” And then I calculate that the road is hard, if they shoot, the bullet will ricochet towards [unintelligible]—no, they won’t shoot. I, a boy, am thinking this. I’m walking and I veer off a little. A widow lived there, there was supposed to be a fence, but a couple of boards were torn off, just hanging on the top nails, there were holes there. And then I—darted through that hole. They were shooting, but I slipped through—and immediately to the right. They couldn’t see me behind the fence, and they were shooting at that hole. I went right, and the bullets went straight. If I had run straight, they might have hit me. I knew those orchards—I escaped. I was barefoot, because people go barefoot in the village. In the evening, I went outside the village, because there was a raid in the village, they were looking for someone else. You couldn’t get near the village, I had to spend the night in the fields. And in our fields—it was already autumn—they would spread manure, you know, in piles. We didn’t have a collective farm yet, because the Banderites didn’t allow them to be created. The collective farms started late—1950-1952—depending on the village. And thank God, people had private farms. It just goes to show what nervous excitement, what stress can do, that I didn’t get sick. I slept through that frost, buried in manure, with only my head showing. I was only wearing a shirt… I spent the day outside the village. The sun was out during the day. And at night, when the Bolsheviks were gone, I made it to the village. Not to my own house, but to other people’s, I asked for some clothes.
Then I started to hide. The partisans, of course, didn’t take people into the underground then. I didn’t even have any urgent contacts. They would warn me themselves, when necessary, to come here and there, gave me some assignments. I hid and hid, and there were such raids for the Banderites that I fled to Moldavia. That’s when I started learning Moldovan, Romanian. I hid here and there, there were many such places. And closer to winter, I went to a friend’s house—Yosyp Helchuk—in my village, and stayed with him until winter. I already wanted to contact the partisans and go into the underground.
V.O.: Did you go outside or did you stay in the house?
H.H.: No, no, no, I stayed in the house, I only went out somewhere at night. We had weapons in the hollows of trees, we would check on them. And he also belonged to the *opryshky*, but he didn’t know about all those explosions, he was two years younger than me, such a boy, lived only with his mother, they were poor, he really disliked the Soviets, I remember. I was at his place, and his mother knew I was there. I was warm there, I sat, he brought me books to read, I remember reading Gogol.
ON LEGAL STATUS
From 1949 to 1950, things eased up a bit. The Bolsheviks wrote a proclamation to surrender. From January first—it was written in Russian and Ukrainian—come out and surrender, you will be pardoned. Very few insurgents in our area surrendered. In Poland, a great many surrendered, almost all of them, in 1947 and later.
V.O.: Who, the Ukrainian insurgents?
H.H.: No, no, the Polish ones. They surrendered, but ours fought on. Well, what do I know—I’m afraid to surrender. But there was this Hroholskyi, the secretary of the village council, who had connections with the insurgents. Apparently, the insurgents told him that the boy shouldn’t hide, he should surrender. They were afraid to take me in, because it was already the end of the underground. I think it was the insurgents who said it. I knew he had a connection with them, so I believed him. And later he confirmed to me that the underground had passed the message. And Yosyp says that someone told his mother that I should surrender. I say, “No.” “Hroholskyi himself will take you, and one other, so they can’t say they caught you and get a reward for you. So there will be two witnesses.” They take me to the garrison. There was a garrison in the village—yastrebky and a couple of those operational groups. They brought me in, they asked me some questions and immediately let me go. I was surprised.
Then there were a few more interrogations, they tried to persuade me to go study in Russia. And my mother too, an apartment right away, everything. They were very surprised that I didn’t want to go, that I was staying.
I went to the district, to Tovste (?), to the machine and tractor station to learn to be a tractor driver. I studied there, no one bothered me, no one called me in, no one tried to recruit me as a snitch—I don’t know about others who surrendered, but no one approached me. I finished all those courses, worked a little on a stationary engine that supplied power from the local power station at the MTS. And then I was a bit on an KhTZ-NATI tractor, plowing on the night shift. It’s harder to plow at night, and the older guys slept at night and plowed during the day. When there were some days off, I would come home to my mother.
One day I came home, and my mother had a *gryps*, a clandestine note, passed on by the insurgents, that I should go to a meeting. I went to the meeting, they gave me some task, not a very important one, but I had connections with the insurgents again. And in April 1951, they call me in again… No, they told me to quit that job, to pretend I was sick, because there would be some task. So I was waiting for them, I don’t know how long, at home pretending I was sick. Every village had a medic, and this one was one of ours, so she wrote that I was sick. I was at home, waiting for them, I remember I was doing a lot of gymnastics.
One day a whole group of underground members comes, about five of them. By then, they tried not to walk in groups of five—in threes, in twos—so that not so many would be killed, because the actions against them were very intense by then. This is 1951, and in our district, there are few forests. They give me the task of carrying out an assassination of an armed man. I don’t know if he knows military affairs, he walks around in civilian clothes. And since I had studied at the MTS, and he often came to the MTS, to the head of the fuel depot in this town, near the town, I knew him. Now I can name that head—Petro Motychko. It turns out, he had a *kryivka* right next to the MGB in town—who would have known that a party member had a *kryivka*. His wife was a party member, and so was he. I remember everything, how he walked around. We would whisper among ourselves, the boys, during a break somewhere on the side, and he would walk by with some other officials: “What are you Banderites whispering about? You’ll whisper yourselves into trouble with me.” I thought: “Oh, you bastard, you scum!” And he has the regional command’s *kryivka* in his house, they print literature there, the kind I used to transport! I knew it was somewhere, but I didn’t think it was in the district center, maybe somewhere in the district. But that it was at the home of party members, next door to the MGB—I would never have thought that! His wife, Maria Motychko, was a party member.
I remember an incident. She wrote in the Ternopil newspaper (their daughter, by the way, worked as the editor of the district newspaper—there were district newspapers then): “Follow the call of Maria Motychko!” She was calling for people to join the collective farm—it was something that really angered me. I don’t know if the Banderites would do anything to her, so I decided with another guy to beat her up. And we were already prepared to do it. When they were going to the cinema—we’d beat her over the head from behind. You could even kill a person that way, so that the scum wouldnt write such things anymore. I thought: why are the Banderites tolerating this! But, thank God, one of the Banderites knew that I had such intentions. [unintelligible], and they ask: “How are you living? What, you’re not doing any actions now?” I don’t confess again. “But we heard you’re preparing something against some party woman, what’s her name?” “Ah, Maria Motychko,” I say. “Oh, we’re preparing something, we’re going to beat her up.” They can’t say directly why it shouldn’t be done. “Don’t do it, boy, our people would have done it long ago. Let her be, she does her business, we do ours.” And then they say: “We’re warning you: if you want to do something, do it, but always with our permission.” It was only later that I understood that they had a *kryivka* there, otherwise I would have smashed her head in. That’s what happened.
THE ASSASSINATION
So, they summon me for that action, for the assassination. About five of them came and said, this is what needs to be done, you’ve seen him? I say: “I’ve seen him.” I won’t name him, he’s from the Soviet Army, his brother led an operational group, he was very capable. He needs to be eliminated. But he knows an assassination is being prepared for him, so be careful. “Do you agree?” There’s no order, it’s all a lie that they give an order to eliminate someone. “We’re giving you four days to think it over.” Because sometimes a person can change their mind, they’re afraid, so there are no recriminations. I say: “No, I’m ready right away.” So they gave me something, I don’t remember, two days. They come, and I’m already preparing. They give me a Nagant revolver, apparently, a Nagant is the best for this. In short, I [unintelligible], but I managed to eliminate him. The expert examination later showed that the bullet passed 4 centimeters below the heart, upwards. It was near the garrison, they got on their horses, almost caught me, but luckily, I was a good shot, so I hit him, and I managed to escape.
I escaped, but I was compromised. While I was waiting for him, children were playing volleyball there. One of them used to herd cows in the village. I see that it looks like that boy who herded cows. And he said that Hrytsko had been sitting here for several days. I was disguised as a tractor driver, my face smeared with grease, all sorts of wrenches in my hands. I did it, didn’t go home to sleep, and they didn’t come to arrest me, apparently, they were watching. His brother said—they told me later—that they had sent an operational group in civilian clothes, and when they went to take the perpetrator, they would first shoot him in both knees. I learned that later.
One day I came home, I don’t know how much time had passed. In the spring, there were always raids for insurgents. I was still carrying the Nagant. I came to the house like that, through a little window from our garden, I climbed in, got some food. I had a padded jacket thrown over me, buttoned with one button at the top, and I held the revolver behind my back, just in case. I want to go out onto the street, but I see some barefoot old man walking—people went barefoot in the village. But his feet were so white, and his face was somehow not rural, and with him was that boy who herded cows—I recognized him—from there, from that village near the town. They’re walking and walking, and I’m watching from behind the fence. They passed me, I want to go out, but I see some woman walking, very old, bent over, a bag on her shoulder, and her hand tucked into her padded jacket. Barefoot, but her legs under her skirt were so thin, not like a woman’s. And next door to me lived an old woman, her husband was away, her daughter was at work somewhere. They were settlers from Poland, Ukrainians, but they spoke Ukrainian poorly. He asks her: “Grandma, give me some water to drink.” “There’s nobody at home… My old man is at work, Yanychka is at work.” But he doesn’t listen and goes into the house. Whether he confused it with my house, or thought I was at the neighbors’, I don’t know. And this was his brother in disguise, the head of the operational group, the one who wanted to shoot my knees. Something was suspicious. I quickly go out, holding my Nagant behind me, and if he had just turned around—it was only ten meters, close—he would have been dead. But he didn’t turn around, he went behind the house. I look—Bolsheviks are already coming down the street, about five to seven meters away. I went to the neighbors’, through the gardens, and escaped.
After that, there were no more meetings because the raids were very intense. Finally, a meeting was arranged through a safe house. This was just before the harvest of 1951. And I had been hiding since April. I didn’t know where to go anymore. I was going to the meeting, and the grain fields already smelled fragrant. Two of them came to the meeting, gave the password, I gave the password. It was on the Holdy hills, mica hills, not very big. I remember it like it was yesterday: I’m sitting in old trenches, thinking maybe it’s a provocation, so just in case I climbed higher, and they were walking towards a spring in the forest. I look—they’re coming, the moon is shining, two or three figures. They came to the spring where I was supposed to wait and give the password, and I answer from above with a bird call, and they—our birds. They then: “Oh!”
They brought me to the village of Tsapivtsi, now it’s called Podillia, there we [unintelligible]. And an old man was waiting for us there, apparently a leader. I told him everything about the action in detail. He tells me: “We are not taking anyone into the underground anymore, because that will be the end of the underground. You don’t know the whole situation… We will make you false documents, and you will go either to Siberia, or to Zeleny Klyn (the Green Wedge), or to ‘Syria,’ that is, Kazakhstan, you will be among our people. There they will make you documents with a false name. You’ll go as a Moldovan, you have that dark complexion.” I don’t know what the further plans were, I say: “I don’t want to go anywhere, I’ll stay here.” “Oh, you will regret it if you join the underground. You will regret it, and regret is a step toward betrayal.” And I’m so confident: “I won’t regret it!” “Well, alright, you’ll walk around for a bit, you’ll see, we’ll give it a try.”
I spoke briefly with the underground, and we said our goodbyes. I remember it like it was yesterday: we were walking, they gave me someone’s submachine gun, someone else was carrying something. They sent me ahead. The rye and wheat were already tall—the harvest would be starting any day now. We were approaching the forest on a small country path, and they decided to test me: they had rigged the submachine gun so the rounds wouldn’t feed. I was walking point, and they were a few meters behind me. The point man has the most responsibility he keeps watch. If the point man crouches, everyone has to crouch. If the point man shoots, everyone else crouches too. One of them rolled up his poncho and rustled it against the rye. They did it on purpose to see how I would react, whether I’d run or not. I immediately dropped to my right knee and was about to fire… but the gun wouldn’t shoot. And he immediately whispered to me: “Shh, friend!”
We approached the forest, where we quartered for a while, and at night, we moved on. We heard: “Heh-heh, heh-heh”—it was a fox. I asked: “What’s that, a fox?” But the older one, Korin, who had been wounded many times and had probably fought against the Germans, said: “No, that’s a wolf.” And I said: “You’re lying, there are no wolves here.” Then one of them came up to me from behind: “You, friend, are Novyi…” They had given me the pseudonym, the moniker of the slain Novyi, my mentor, who was from Eastern Ukraine. I respected him very much. So he says: “Friend, don’t say ‘you’re lying,’ it’s not nice. Say ‘that’s not true,’ or something else,” he explained to me. In a word, one shouldn’t use vulgar language.
IN THE BUNKER
I can’t briefly tell you when I began to feel remorse. One time we were walking… Well, you always had to carry something, because there was no way to transport things. I was young, so they loaded me up more. Korin had a wound that still hadn’t healed. One time we were walking on a beautiful moonlit night along the Dniester, through the fields, and Korin’s wound started to hurt it felt like it was opening up, or something. I heard them whispering that we needed to get to a bunker where there was a medic who could re-dress it for him.
When you’re taken to a bunker, they always blindfold strangers so they don’t know the location. They blindfolded me. They led me on, and I listened, somewhere down an embankment, lower and lower. “Easy, friend, don’t fall, quieter, quieter, this way.” I think [unintelligible]. Then I hear: “Cock-a-doodle-doo!!!”—roosters. Then I go even lower—and I can smell hay, orchards apples and pears had begun to give off their scent. We walk further, I smell manure—we were passing someone’s stable—the collective farms hadn’t been established yet. I think to myself: oh, this isn’t helping, they should have plugged my ears too! I hear some kind of water mill not far away. It must have been near the Dniester because you could feel the heavy moisture, and further on, it seemed there was the sound of more water. They led me to some woman’s house and knocked with a coded signal. She opened the door, and we went in. There was a female doctor there. They boiled some water and treated Korin.
It was a Saturday, as I recall now, because it was such an event that everything stuck in my memory. It was evening, I was quite tired, and everyone was tired we lay down to sleep, as the next day was Sunday. I was in civilian clothes, of course. It was warm the sun must have been out during the day because the night was moonlit. Suddenly, in the morning—and I don’t understand a thing—knock-knock-knock, knock-knock-knock. They say: “Get up, the Bolsheviks are coming down this street.” Apparently, it was a very small street. Well, if they’re coming, they’re coming, I’m still lying there, but the others were already up. Again: knock-knock-knock, knock-knock-knock. A certain rhythm, like Morse code, signaling that the Bolsheviks were approaching. There was no third knock. And in a bunker, you can hear knocking very clearly. Then, in the yard: thud-thud-thud, thud-thud-thud, thud-thud-thud… I hear them talking, and I’m listening. “Do you remember, we got caught in an ambush here once. This bunker should have been abandoned, it might already be compromised.” And that someone had recently been ambushed. “Maybe they’ve already figured it out.” In a word, we didn’t know. They get dressed quickly. And I got so scared, thinking: “My God, in a bunker…” They put on their belts, their pistol belts the woman gets dressed, pistols at her side. She also had an icon, and next to the icon, a typewriter, because the medics not only treated people but also had to type, doing two jobs. And she even smoothed her hair. I’m thinking: “What for?” Meanwhile, there’s knocking, then we hear shouting: “Gde bunker?” They’re shouting somewhere near the hatch, near the entrance. I can’t hear what the landlady answered. “Where is the bunker, where is the kryivka?”—they called it a “bunker.” I got so scared, I thought: “My God, today is Sunday, and my mother is all alone, they’ll kill me, I can’t even shoot back, they’ll crush us like mice!”—such thoughts raced through my mind. I stood up, took that German MP submachine gun, you know, the one with the handle and that kind of magazine, and went over there. The entrance was a zigzag, with stairs leading up to the exit, because you can hear best right under the entrance. I went there. The reason they make it a zigzag is so that if a grenade is thrown in, it won’t kill your own men, to give them time to do something. But it’s still curtains in a bunker. And I hear it, oh my Go-o-od! They’re up there asking: “Are there Banderites here? We know for sure.” The woman is silent, she doesn’t admit anything. It was very strange to me: they’re just sitting there—I even drew a picture of them later: the woman, Tyrsa, sits by the icon, holding a six-shot pistol to shoot herself, an oil lamp burning. The wounded Korin is sitting, and the commander, Myron, is sitting. They sit there holding their pistols, ready to shoot themselves. Tyrsa turns to Korin: “Friend Korin, will you shoot me?” Because she had such a tiny pistol. Korin just nodded his head, as if to say, yes. I understood that she was afraid to shoot herself and needed someone else to do it. I thought: “My God!…”
And the vents that circulated the air—one at the top, one at the bottom—had been closed off. There were special plugs for them, to prevent sleeping gas from being pumped in, or sleeping grenades, or regular grenades. All the literature and documents were gathered here stood kerosene, there a primus stove, gasoline, so that in an instant—it could all be burned. But I doubt it would have burned, because we were already running out of air to breathe the kerosene lamp was barely lit. And the commander says to me: “You, friend Novyi, get dressed. It won’t look good for you to be lying there in your long johns and shirt.” You know, they take the dead to the district center and leave them in front of the MGB headquarters for days—for intimidation and identification. They sprinkle them with chloramine. “My God, I’m an only child, my mother will come…”—and for the first time, I began to feel remorse. “Why did I go? I should have taken those documents and left,”—I remembered that old commander, you see? I only put on my pants, and I was already furious with them—I’m being honest. I thought: “My God, have you all become hardened fanatics? They’re about to kill us, and you’re still getting dressed?” But they were such heroes, sitting there so bravely, I swear. I don’t know, maybe he was afraid on the inside, but you couldn’t see it on him, whereas you could probably see it on me. I climbed up the zigzag stairs again, toward the exit, to the hatch, to listen, and I could hear my heart—thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump-thump—I was so scared. I’d been in battles, in firefights—that’s completely different, it’s almost not scary there. You’re shooting, and he, the bastard, is shooting back he’s not trying to catch a bullet either, he’s also afraid.
I hear it, cracking, getting closer and closer. My God! I had a dishonest thought: I could open the hatch with my head, throw a grenade, and start shooting, just for an easier death. That was the thought. I can’t stand it anymore—that’s how terrifying it is. You can’t imagine this fear: waiting for death with a weapon in your hands, like a mouse! I imagine how on a holy Sunday, girls and boys go to church in their embroidered shirts, and I didn’t even have a girlfriend, nothing, and so my whole life is passing by…
I come down and say: “Friend commander,”—I began, wanting to say that I was about to open the hatch and throw a grenade, at least fire a burst. And just as I was about to say it, there was a crack—and dirt sifted down from behind the planking. You can hear it so clearly from underground—I never knew. I had been in a bunker before, but this was different… And do you know what happened? It turns out there was a wall near the bunker I didn’t know that. And there was an abandoned house there—the family had been sent somewhere in Siberia. And they thought the entrance was there, or maybe a vent came out of the wall, so they were knocking the wall down. Thank God, the stones fell on the entrance. They were prodding with long spikes you could hear it. I fell silent—it became so quiet. The thudding continued, further and further away. Quiet. My heart is beating so fast, and we’re running out of air to breathe, the oil lamp is already going out. They opened the vent a little—air came in, my ears are ringing a bit. We hear them leave. So they opened the vents, and more air rushed in. The woman gave some kind of coded signal that they had gone. So that’s what a hero I was. But what kind of people were they! And I wasn’t such a coward. But who *were* they!?
IN THE UNDERGROUND
We left that bunker and once again walked through backwoods, fields, and forests. I secretly listened to their conversations and saw that it was now a hopeless fight. But they continued to do their work calmly. I still knew little about the situation in the underground—the threat, its condition. You listen to a conversation now and then, catch a whispered word—that’s how I gained experience. And so I entered the behind-the-scenes life of the underground and had a wealth of information.
I remember one time we went to a meeting near the Zbruch River I don’t know which district they were from. We crossed the Seret River, a long walk. It was an unusual kind of meeting there were five of us. The commander walks toward the meeting point and says: “Ready your weapons, and at the slightest shout or shot or anything—shoot me and everyone else.” I had never seen anything like that before. Previously, when we went to a meeting, some would take cover while two or three went forward, and two or three would come from the other side, and they’d greet each other, “Glory”—“Glory,” and then everyone would approach one another. What was this? It turned out there were now provocateur groups. They had caught some insurgents alive, using sleeping agents. By the way, before, they never surrendered alive, unless they were wounded or something. But now, among those captured alive, there were some who broke under all kinds of psychological and physical pressure and cooperated to avoid being put on trial. There were special training schools for NKVD agents from the task forces, who dressed up as insurgents Ukrainians or Russians were taught the language, even the Galician dialect if needed, and they would go around. And an underground fighter doesnt always know all the other fighters, and so they would be rounded up at these meetings, taken alive. I learned about this gradually.
I watched all of this, learned more and more, and thought that I had to flee abroad. I had thought about it before, but now I started thinking about it very seriously. Knowing a little Romanian, I thought—to Romania. I had already gone to the Romanian border before, waited there for a contact for several months. I would take binoculars, go past Chernivtsi, past Hlyboka, up into the mountains, and watch from up close, from a few hundred meters away on a cliff, how the border guards changed shifts, how they stood guard. So I learned how to cross. I knew a little Romanian, enough to get by, so I wouldnt starve to death and wouldnt have to go begging for food. I also knew how to get into a house and take some salt so that no one would hear. I knew all that I was in good physical shape. I got a German map that showed every Romanian village. I thought I’d go along the Carpathians, then to Yugoslavia, and from Yugoslavia to Trieste or somewhere. It was easy to get into Yugoslavia back then, by the way they werent looking for people.
Oh, I want to add something. When I ended up in the camps, there was a Belarusian named Hryhoriy Labyshchevich imprisoned for being in the UPA. It turns out the UPA had entered the southern territory of Belarus, and there were organizations there they distributed leaflets, brochures in Belarusian, and there were even some armed units. One Belarusian, Oleynik, said he was also in for the UPA. And Labyshchevich—he’s a friend of mine, he served his time, maybe he’s still alive, he’s about two years older than me. That Oleynik says: “We had a unit, but we had a dispute.” They had crossed Belarus, all of Ukraine, a successful crossing. A small group, 4 or 8 men. The rest refused and ended up in the camps. Two were killed, and the rest were imprisoned. But the others were already in West Germany, letters had already reached their relatives. Then I met two Russians who had been sent in by submarines to the Baltics. They went as spies and ended up in a camp. They were trained in Sweden or Norway. Many people knew those guys. They had also crossed the Romanian border and agreed to go to a spy school in Germany. I’m tearing my hair out: why didn’t I go, knowing how to get around, knowing enough Romanian that I could ask for something if I needed to. That’s the kind of stuff that happened.
I think, I’ll tell commander Myron my idea, because the commander treated me very well. He wasn’t even a commander yet when he knew there was a kid like me. Once we were quartered in the forest and there was an opportunity he came up to me, so I tell him everything. He listens, and I explain in detail how we’ll cross over there, how if we need food, I’ll milk a cow at night and bring you milk, I’ll get everything from the gardens if needed, and I’ll get salt because I can sneak into a house and no one will hear. He listened and said: “My friend, I see you’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Don’t tell anyone.” By the way, in the underground, if someone starts thinking like that, they might run away or surrender, because they’re already disillusioned with the fight. And the Security Service might even punish such a person, even with death anything could happen. “Don’t tell anyone. I won’t tell anyone, but you don’t tell anyone else either.” Well, I kept quiet. And they acted as if nothing was wrong—they quarter in the forest, one group meets with another, district meets with district. They’d meet, spend the night, a guard stands watch, the sentries—they called it “on listening duty,” because you can’t see anything in the forest at night. In the morning they get up, wash, eat, and study their notes: history, geography, the history of Ukrainian nationalism. And they give them to me, but I can’t read, because I’m already eavesdropping on their conversations, how they whispered: where, who. In Zolotyi Potik, the neighboring district, four or five guys aren’t making contact with anyone because they’re afraid of a provocation. I’m thinking: “My God, what reading?!” I was surprised that people in such a situation were reading—it’s terrifying! People of such strong will.
One day they send me—it was already the end of November 1951—with Bohdan… He was that boy from Sadky. Maybe it’s worth saying something about his family. His brother was a specialist who repaired typewriters, radios, watches, and weapons for the insurgents, Hryhoriy Chymych, from whom I’d learned watchmaking when I was with the opryshky. By the way, they arrested him, he escaped from their custody, and he was wounded in the head. I met him when I was already imprisoned in Rubid (?). And his other two brothers and his sister were in the underground. One time, something happened. Romko, one of the older brothers, had already fallen, and Yosypko, the younger one, was still left. The sister was in some group, I don’t know if she was a doctor or what. The sister shot herself when she was surrounded in the village of Sadky. They caught their mother, who was hiding from being sent to Siberia. They put the sister’s body on a sleigh—it was winter—and were taking it to the district center to be displayed in front of the MVD. They told the mother to sit on her daughter and ride like that through the villages to the district center. The mother refused, of course, so they beat her. Then they tied her to her daughter, and she rode to the district center lying on top of her.
So they sent me with that Yosypko, I mean his name was Bohdan Chymych, and his pseudonym was Yosyp. And there, of course, they don’t tell you where you’re going, only the person who needs to know. And if we get separated, there’s a meeting point—a first, a second, a third, where we can meet up. They sent us somewhere, we walked through the forest, spent the day there, meaning we slept over. The autumn was very warm this was the second half of November. We came to the Dzhuryn River and stopped above a cliff. In some pit or small cave, he moved aside some stones and pulls out two heavy backpacks, and repacks something else in there. I see books, and they need to be carried somewhere. I put one on my shoulders, he puts one on his, he goes first, I follow. I’m walking, terribly tired, thinking: “My God, they’re killing you off, and you’re still carrying books.” (From here, H. Herchak reads from his manuscript. - V.O.). And the road was long. Bohdan walked ahead, I followed him. We walked on back roads, avoiding villages and main roads, and we also had to go around plowed and sown fields so as not to leave tracks. It was very difficult to walk without a path. We trudged on, the black night fields stretching out before us.
[End of track]
H.H.: It seemed there was no end to them. As I walked, I thought angrily: “You’re strange, you guys. They’re finishing off the last of you, but you’re still hauling this. What do you even need it for anymore?” And the load was getting heavier and heavier. At last, we reached the village of Burativka, which lay in a ravine, on both sides of the Dzhuryn River. Then we descended a steep slope and entered a house that clung to the very slope of the mountain. There was a bunker in that house. The owners—they were resettlers from Poland, Lemkos, a father and two daughters—welcomed us very warmly and offered us food. Bohdan asked if there were any Bolsheviks in the village. The older daughter, Hanna, said that the village was quiet, but recently a young man named Paranych, who worked as the head of the club, had taken a liking to her and started courting her. So we had to be careful not to be seen by him. We spent the night in the attic, and during the day I inspected the house and the yard. The house stood apart from the neighbors’ buildings it was two stories and built right next to the mountain. The first floor, which had a cellar and a fairly large room containing all sorts of farm equipment, was dug into the mountainside and its back wall rested against the mountain. You could enter the cellar from the yard through the room on the first floor, and you could also enter it from the second floor. Stairs led from the yard to the second floor. In front of the house was a rather large, unfenced yard, which on one side, in front of the road, turned into a small steep cliff.
While the girls were preparing lunch, we climbed into the attic and sorted the books. Suddenly: “Boys, be quiet, Paranych is coming!” one of the girls said in a hushed voice. He entered the house without even knocking. He didn’t stay long. The entrance to the attic wasn’t closed, and I watched him out of the corner of my eye. As he passed through the entryway to the exit, he raised his head and furtively glanced at the attic entrance. This alarmed me, and I told Bohdan that something wasn’t right here. I don’t remember what Bohdan replied, but I didn’t notice any concern in him he continued to calmly sort the books into piles. His composure calmed me down a bit.
The next day, December 2, 1951, the weather was beautiful, a lovely sunny day, and it was quite warm. We came down from the attic into the room and were talking. Someone looked out the window and shouted anxiously: “The Muscovites are coming!” We rushed to the window and looked: from the opposite slope of the ravine, soldiers were heading toward our homestead, moving through the trees toward the river. In a moment they’ll cross the river and come up the slope about 200 meters—and there’s our house. I’m prone to panic, but in this situation, there was no time for reflection or waiting something had to be done immediately. “Let’s run,” I said to Bohdan, “while they’re crossing the river and getting here, we can escape through the orchards along the mountain and out of the village.” But Bohdan said: “Calm down, friend, don’t worry, let’s grab our things and hurry to the cellar.” We quickly gathered our things and took them to the pantry, opened the entrance to the cellar, and threw our things inside. Meanwhile, sharp commands could already be heard from outside: the Bolsheviks were surrounding the property. Bohdan stood by the entrance to the pantry, and he told me to get into the cellar, and from there, through a small door, into the room on the first floor and to bolt the main door. I got into the cellar, leaned my rifle against the wall, and opened the small door and entered the room. I glanced, and the door to the yard was half open. I went to the door. “What are you doing walking around here?” I heard a voice behind me. I turned around—several soldiers were standing behind me in the darkness among all the farm equipment. They obviously thought I was some village kid—in civilian clothes, barefoot, without a hat, not at all like an insurgent. “I’m going out to the yard,” I answered calmly. For show, I grabbed a shovel and went out into the yard. But it was impossible to get out of the property—soldiers had surrounded it. No one touched me, but I understood that I couldn’t break through. So I stood there for a minute, bewildered, with a shovel in my hand. “Hey, kid, come here,” someone called from the side. I looked around: an officer with a pistol in his hand was standing on the stairs leading to the second floor, with a soldier next to him. It was the head of the task force, Senior Lieutenant Bogdanov. I dropped the shovel and, smiling, boldly approached him. “Come with me,” he said and led me into the house. In the room were the owners and three or four soldiers holding submachine guns. The officer stood in the middle, and I stood next to him. He eyed me carefully and asked: “Are you Herchak?” I replied that I was. “Is there a bunker here?” And at that moment, through the crack of the slightly ajar door, a flash of fire shone and a submachine gun cracked sharply. The lieutenant grabbed his side, and the soldiers let loose with bursts from their submachine guns at the door—splinters flew, and in an instant, they scattered. One hid behind the stove, others in the corners. The room was full of smoke, my ears were ringing. No one came to help they were afraid. They couldn’t shoot into the house: their own men were there, and the lieutenant gave no orders, standing as if petrified and staring at the door with wide eyes. I didn’t know what to do, just stood there, rooted to the spot. But one of the soldiers didn’t lose his head he grabbed a chair and smashed the window frame. The lieutenant, as if scalded, jumped out the window. Without thinking, I followed him. I landed well it was the second floor. I didn’t even fall, just crouched, but the lieutenant hit the ground hard and lay there. He tried to get up, but couldn’t. I scanned the yard: from all around, from behind the cliff, soldiers’ heads were visible, and the barrels of their submachine guns were sticking out. The yard was under fire, and the soldiers were afraid to approach and carry the lieutenant out. What was I to do? But one of the soldiers shouted: “Drag the lieutenant, quick!” The lieutenant lay there looking at me with a pleading gaze. I, looking around, thought: “Where can I drag him?” The yard was surrounded, but in one spot, there was no one. I dragged the lieutenant there the cliff was higher, and they couldn’t get a foothold, so there was no one there. I dragged the lieutenant there and pulled him down behind the cliff. I looked around and thought: where to run? On both sides of me, at a distance of 5-6 meters, soldiers were hiding, aiming their submachine guns at the house. The nearest property across the street was about 15 meters away—I wouldn’t make it, they’d cut me down with their guns. Suddenly, a submachine gun chattered from the house. The soldiers opened up on the house with everything they had, as if a whole platoon was attacking them. I glanced around: the soldiers were busy shooting. The lieutenant, holding a pistol, was lying down, and I was crouched a meter away from him, hiding from the bullets. But the lieutenant noticed something about me I saw fierce hatred in his eyes. He began to aim his pistol at me. There was no time to think, it happened so fast that the action preceded the thought—I only began to think it all through later—the instinct for self-preservation took over. My will, my muscles tensed, and with lightning speed and all my strength, I kicked him with my bare foot, with my heel, in the head, I think in the temple, and took off running. Someone fired a burst from a submachine gun after me, but I had already managed to run into a yard, and then I ran down through the orchards, crossed a small river, and through the vegetable gardens, came out onto the next street. Then, so as not to attract attention, I started walking slowly. For some time, shots could be heard in the distance, but they soon fell silent. I left the village and headed across the fields toward the forest, where I rested for a bit.
I got some shoes, went to my village, got a sawed-off rifle from a partisan I knew (we won’t go into that, it would take too much time), then went to my village, got some grenades, and headed to the village of Ustechko right on the Dniester. In that bunker were the medic, the fighter Korin, and the commander Myron, and I knew they were there. That’s how I escaped from the battle.
I couldn’t enter Ustechko right away I had to spend the night, to wait out the day. It was cold at dawn, and then evening came, and I hadn’t managed to get there. I walked and walked quickly, and I felt so sad, I was thinking it over: “My God, what is happening!” And I thought most about how, when I was standing next to the operative Bogdanov, according to the laws of conspiracy, Bohdan should have shot me, since I’d been caught, because I knew where the insurgents were. That’s the law. I didn’t give them up under torture, but Bohdan didn’t shoot me—that was very strange to me. So I was thinking it all over, and it was very hard for me. And then these dark clouds were moving in low—it was autumn, but there was no snow yet. I’m walking, I’ve already reached the Dniester canyon—it’s so dark, like descending into a grave, and in the forests, some bird is crying out. And it’s so hard for me—my God, they killed him! I moved very lightly over the rocks so as not to dislodge any stones, so they wouldn’t scatter, went on, found the house (I managed to find it), asked the landlady, she came, gave the signal, they opened the hatch, and I went down into the bunker. Astonished looks pierced me: “You’re alive? Where did you come from? By what miracle?”—questions poured out: “We heard the Bolsheviks surrounded you in the house and shot you all. People said they only saw one person escape from the house—a bald civilian man. They said he was barefoot, running at first, and then, apparently tired, he walked slowly.” “Oh, that bald man—that was me, and I really was barefoot. And as for being bald—see for yourself!” I took off my hat and showed them my shaved head—I had shaved my head. And people, watching from a distance, thought out of fear that he was bald. I told them in order, how it all really happened.
During the day, they brought us news: Bohdan was killed, and so was the head of the task force.
I was very tired and thought I would finally get some rest. But no—a march was planned for the next evening. Before the snow fell, we had to go to some village and pick up medicine from a safe house, and then, on the way back, we had to stop at a hamlet and pick something else up. Myron and Korin discussed at length which way was best to go so that no one would see us and we wouldn’t walk into an ambush. Myron and I were to go. We prepared our backpacks Myron took a submachine gun, and Korin gave me his “ten-shooter”—a ten-round semi-automatic carbine. We agreed on a meeting place in case we got separated.
As soon as it got dark, we set out. We successfully reached a village, I think it was Hyntivtsi, picked up the medicine, I loaded the medicine onto my back, and we moved on, to get to that other village quickly and make it to the bunker. Soon, the silhouettes of houses appeared—I don’t know if it was a hamlet or some outlying settlement, but as we approached, we heard dogs. Someone was walking at night. We lay down, waited for a long time, and it became quiet. We went to the last house, which stood by the road. No one lived in it the house was in ruins—someone must have been deported to Siberia or something. And we passed through there, took up a position, and listened. Not far from that house, about a hundred meters away, stood a pair of houses—the commander pointed them out. So, we set off—the commander ahead, and I ten meters behind him. We walked parallel to the road, a couple of dozen meters away. The commander was supposed to go into the house, and I was to wait. He had to get something there. We went. On the opposite side, across the road, stood a small house enclosed by a fence. Suddenly, a voice came from there: “Stop! Who goes there?” We hit the ground instantly. The commander ran back a few steps and lay down, while I dove back toward the village, fell to the ground on the road, and quickly crawled into a ditch that ran alongside it. Shots rang out, and a flare shot into the sky with a hiss. I crawled along the ditch. Bullets whistled and chewed up the ground above me, but I kept crawling further and further.
Reaching the property from which we had started, I got behind a half-ruined wall or rampart, from where I could see everything clearly. In that time, Myron had already crawled quite far away and was lying in a small depression in an open field. About forty meters from him grew a thick thicket, but the commander couldn’t get up and run because flares were illuminating the ground. He only fired occasionally, to scare off the enemy, to keep the Bolsheviks from running after him. They directed all their fire at Myron no one was chasing me. Small task forces followed the rule: don’t chase two rabbits at once. Suddenly they stopped launching flares, it became dark, and at that moment I barely noticed, because the road was lighter, how several soldiers, crouching, ran across the road and lay down on the plowed field—obviously, they wanted to crawl around and approach the commander in the darkness. Oh, it’s a good thing I have the long-range “ten-shooter”! Now I’ll show you—I thought, hidden behind the stone wall. Too bad it’s dark. Taking careful aim at the spot where the soldiers should have been lying on the plowed field, I fired short bursts. Another flare went up, and bullets rained down in my direction like thick hail. A frantic scream rang out: “The flare! Stop the flare!” It was the soldiers on the plowed field shouting. The flare went out, and after the bright light, it became completely dark. The soldiers were no longer visible on the black field, but the road was light, and I noticed some shadows on it—it was the soldiers crawling back to the property. I fired a burst, and they turned back to the plowed field. Taking aim, I fired another burst at the fence from behind which the soldiers were shooting. The shot was apparently accurate, because the Bolsheviks took cover, and the flashes from their submachine gun barrels were no longer blinking over the fence, but down below, through the cracks. After each shot, I changed my position so the Bolsheviks wouldn’t hit me. Later, the soldiers said that “several bandits were shooting.”
I didn’t shoot anymore, saving my ammunition, and so that I wouldn’t be attacked from the rear, I quickly went to the meeting place. “Is the commander alive?” I wondered. “Maybe he’s wounded and needs help?” I thought as I walked, hurrying even faster. When I reached the designated spot, I heard the signal given by the commander. “You’re not wounded?” “No. And you?” “Me neither.” The commander thanked me for the accurate shots that prevented the Bolsheviks from giving chase, and Myron, taking advantage of the moment when there were no flares, had run to the bushes and hidden.
We rested for a bit and then quickly set off again to make it to the bunker before daylight. After reaching the bunker, we rested. Snow had fallen—now we couldn’t go anywhere. Once it was possible, but in these times, no, you had to wait—conspiracy. This was in the same village as the bunker. The commander would go out to the landlady, they would talk about something, some news—I don’t know what, they didn’t tell me, but I learned a lot from listening to them. At night I’d be sleeping, and suddenly the commander would be whispering with Korin. From fragments of their conversation, I gathered that something was wrong in the Leadership, that Kuk… By the way, Dumka—he was a chief liaison from the Leadership—was already cooperating with the Bolsheviks, and anyone who came to a meeting, supposedly summoned to the Leadership, would be arrested there. I overheard this, and I became very wary—I thought, I should have fled abroad.
And then the commander would visit that landlady, because I heard a woman’s voice, and he would bring back news that we had to leave the bunker in the winter—which meant there would be tracks. The bunker had a library and everything, and we were leaving it all behind, even a lot of medicine. He had heard something… One night we set out in white camouflage suits, walking. We passed by my village, and my heart skipped a beat—my God, my mother is sitting somewhere waiting for her son to come home, and her son is passing by his warm house and heading into the black darkness, not knowing where.
We walk and walk, and I see—we’re heading toward a town, to the district center, there’s electric light everywhere. Where are they taking me—could it be to surrender? I know that Myron is a reliable man, but anything can happen. We get there, wait to cross the road. The town ends there, and private houses begin. We entered, walked onto some property, a house, a coded knock—the door opens for us. We go in, and I see—a sewing machine on the table, patterns, a young woman, a man looking very dejected and glancing suspiciously—I already had a trained eye for that. And on the wall, I see, a military coat and a submachine gun—where have we ended up? My God, I’m silent and sitting on pins and needles. They offer us food, I know nothing. The windows are covered. We ate, and we go out—there’s a small barn-like shed, a little hay, no straw. The town is on a river, there’s an orchard. We went in there, opened the hatch from that room, and there was a bunker.
V.O.: What does “opened the hatch” mean?
H.H.: The “pachka”—that’s the entrance to the bunker. It’s a long story to explain what a “pachka” is—it’s a very camouflaged, cleverly-made entrance that you could walk over and never see.
They went to sleep, and they left me on guard, on listening duty—because I couldn’t see anything sitting there. I was supposed to identify things by sound and shoot if necessary. They didn’t close the entrance because the bunker was damp—it turns out no one had lived in it, so they were letting it dry. They went to sleep. They gave us some blankets. I’m sitting on listening duty and thinking: My God, it turns out there’s a bunker here—how is that possible? I had never known anything like it. Although, I recall, there was a printing press at a party member’s house.
V.O.: And what town was this?
H.H.: It was the district center of Tovste—the districts were small back then. His name was Ilko, but I’ve forgotten his last name. I have a desire to meet him and help that man. But listen to what happened next.
Towards morning, as it was getting light, when it became visible, they came to relieve me. Both of them came out, wanting something, only Tyrsa remained—she was an underground member. I came, lay down, and fell asleep immediately, because I was terribly tired—I fell as if into a pit and heard nothing. In short, it was already noon or one o’clock. They brought some food they had cooked. The woman came, and this Ilko—the head of that destroyer battalion. They had eaten, and then Ilko says to them: “Forgive me, but the MGB already knows about the bunker, and I agreed to put a sleeping drug in your food. I was going to do it, but my wife refused: come what may—don’t do it.” He acted honestly, didn’t he? It’s strange, and hard to believe something like that could happen. It would be worth visiting him, right? He says we have to leave. The guys got scared then. Ilko came to me: “Friend Novyi, get up!” “What is it?” “Come upstairs!” And I, like a drunk, come out, my mouth is dry, I’m almost deaf, and they are sitting alert, holding their pistols at the ready. A rich lunch for me is still on some small table. I stood there like a fool—what is this? The commander tells me everything and says that there might be a sleeping drug in it. “So, here is my pistol (it was a ‘Vist,’ made by Arabs)—take the pistol, and if we start to fall asleep, shoot us immediately. As for yourself—it’s on your conscience, you can surrender. And this—is an order from the organization.” That’s what he said.
I took that pistol, sat down at a distance, about four meters away, and watched. How could I shoot them, especially the commander? He was a man of colossal kindness. There were situations where I was breaking down, and he treated me well, he stood up for me. And Tyrsa, holding her pistol, is watching me, sizing me up—head, legs, head. She must have thought: and will this kid shoot us? But I—I’ll confess honestly now—I don’t know if I would have shot them. Although it would have been a great crime. I don’t know, honestly, if I would have had it in me to shoot them. That’s how it was. (Sighs). And after that in prison and during interrogations—they, truly, went through a lot, because Stalin died by then, and after those later interrogations, maybe some would have been pardoned—but that’s how it was, and my conscience still gnaws at me, whether I would have shot them—honestly, I don’t know. Both thoughts came to me, but it didn’t last long. It was already getting dark, because the day is short and the night is long. I don’t remember when it was—snow had already fallen, it was obviously not Christmas yet, but it was winter.
Ilko came in with a submachine gun and said: “I will lead you out of town in case there are ambushes—maybe they’ve surrounded us, although I already, he says, went to check if anyone was there.” But they didn’t know yet that we were here—he hadn’t told them we had come, but they could have been watching and known. The commander whispers to me—still not trusting: “Friend, take my submachine gun, you shoot well, and walk at a distance behind everyone. If Ilko gets scared and starts shooting at us—shoot him and us!”
We walked in a single file so as not to leave many tracks. I walked as ordered. We went—no one, the night was so dark, we were in white camouflage, and Ilko was not. We walked I don’t know how far out of town, said goodbye to Ilko, and went on, where—I don’t know. And in general, there was almost nowhere for anyone to go. We’re walking, tired, sleep-deprived, my God, such an emotional upheaval, we’re walking through these backwoods. And then during a rest stop, we’re heading to a village—Tsapivtsi, it’s now called Podillia. We’re heading in that direction, but during the rest stop the commander already speaks openly, because there was no reason to be afraid of me: “There’s a two-man bunker, but one will have to sleep on the bunk, and two on the ground, because we have to get through the winter somehow. So we’ll go, we’ll stop at some barn or shed now, you’ll stay there with Tyrsa, and we’ll go on reconnaissance and ask if we can go to that bunker. A small bunker at some homeowners’, old and neglected.” We arrived, tried to enter one shed—but there’s a lock on it, damn it, you can’t get in. He wants to try another—a dog is barking there. We went to some shed. I immediately dozed off, Tyrsa—I don’t know. It became warm. I’m dozing and wondering why they aren’t back. Suddenly I hear a dog barking. There’s a knock, they’ve come: “Let’s run, they’re after us!” They must have run into something… They had already been there, by the way, in that bunker, but something was compromised or what—we couldn’t go there, in short, there was an ambush, and they were being followed.
Where to run? We walk to the edge of the village along the road, so there are no tracks. I have a diagram somewhere in my memoirs—the village is ending, and on the left side there’s a forest, I forgot its name, I think Snyatyn. A small forest, it stretches to the highway that goes to the district center. We quickly headed for that forest. We couldn’t be seen because we were in white camouflage, but coming from the village, they saw the tracks and even counted how many of us there were, because they were good trackers. We see them standing not far away, but they don’t see us. We entered the forest, there was some path there. The forest wasn’t long, we came out to the highway and walked as if in the direction of the city. And I recommended that they turn back, because we couldn’t quarter in the forest—they would surround it, that forest is small—and we should return at night along the highway, so there are no tracks, back to the village of Tsapivtsi and stay illegally in a stable or a shed, because there was nowhere else to go.
We indeed went onto the highway at night no cars were driving, there were no tracks. Some car drove by, and we lay down in the field to the side, covering our weapons with our white coats so the black wouldn’t be visible. We entered the village, also searched for a shed for a long time. We found a shed belonging to some poor people, but it had a lot of hay and straw, and we quartered there. Hungry, thirsty for water.
Day broke. We hear the voice of some girl and some women. Evening came, it was time to leave, and we hear—they keep coming and coming. It turned out that the daughter, apparently, was having a birthday party. We want to leave, but the windows are lit up and full of young people. This shed is in front of the windows, and the door is right here—there’s no way to get out because the entryway is lit. We don’t want to leave because it will compromise us—informants have even appeared among the population now, they’ll report us and there will be raids. We covered our tracks so well that they thought we went to the village of Anhelivka, that from the village where the raids were, we went there.
We want to leave—and we can’t. Only after a while did the guests start drinking and singing. Some were sitting by the window, but with their backs to us, and they were already cheerful. We still had to leave that house, so we went past the shed, crouching, and headed across the road. There were the fields of another village, I don’t know how many hundreds of meters, and large forests that stretch all the way to the Dniester. We went there. We entered the forest. It even seemed warmer to us in the forest, cozy. We went to the river so there would be no tracks. Snow had already fallen, we could barely walk. We take a short rest, and the commander, no longer hiding it, says that we are going to the village of Nyrkiv. Nyrkiv is a village on the canyon of the Dzhuryn River, which flows into the Dniester. The village is very large, there were over a thousand households there, on such slopes, with stone walls, a lot of stone, forests all around.
We entered the edge of the village and listened for barking dogs. Indeed, a couple of hundred meters away they were barking, but that was further on. We went into a woodshed, where they chop wood—we call a woodshed a “shopa.” We went under that woodshed it was also cozier there. The commander to me: “Let’s go together.” He went, knocked on the window. The knock was a code. The owner came out at once, throwing a sheepskin coat over himself, though they were already asleep. I’m standing to the side, but I can hear him talking. The owner says it’s not possible. Obviously, we can’t quarter there because he has a guest from Ternopil, sleeping. So it’s clear we can’t. The commander understood that something was wrong and turns back. And I’m also waiting and thinking that first of all I’ll drink some water, we’ll warm up, then have a little food. But it turns out we have to go on. Where to go? We arrive, and another piece of sad news awaits us—Korin is already worn out, he can’t go on, he’s exhausted. He’s wounded, older—he probably fought against the Germans, I don’t remember. We divided his things, and we go back into the forest from where we came, along the river, so there are no tracks. Towards morning, it began to snow. We have nowhere to go, we have to stop somewhere in the forest. We weren’t in a dense forest, but entered a small pine grove where the forest had been cut.
While we were still walking, on the edge of the forest, the commander says: “Let’s go out and take a look.” We look—it’s almost dawn, and there are some horsemen here and there. And now it was so that when they did a raid, they would ride around and check if anyone had entered the village at night, if there were tracks from the forest, or if anyone had gone into the forest. We think they are checking for tracks. There are no tracks, because we had just left the village for the forest on a path. So we didn’t go far, because it was already impossible. It was a small spruce-pine forest, young, the trees were six to seven meters tall, but so dense that there was no snow under the trees. We went in, sweeping the snow behind us. The snow began to fall warm and in large flakes. We went in there, covered ourselves, and lay down to sleep. I don’t know who was on listening duty (we called it “on watch,” because there was no one to watch for there). I’m dozing, dozing. Tyrsa is sitting next to me, and she was devout, she even had an icon in the bunker. I look—Tyrsa has knelt down, she’s sitting and praying, making the sign of the cross over everyone, and then she cries. I fell into the abyss again, fell asleep. It was already day.
Suddenly I hear cracking, shouting, something—the Bolsheviks are coming! And closer, closer, closer. And in my head, there is such indifference, such hopelessness, that I think, let them kill me already—I’m not afraid of anything anymore, I have no fear, no panic, like before. I’m a hero now. And the commander, I see, heard them earlier, because they are both already sitting and don’t want to disturb me. I then also got up they are all walking past us, but it’s good that so much snow had fallen that they couldn’t be seen, and the branches were all tangled. They passed us by.
The next evening, we went out and headed to my village—the village of Solone. We set out, we’re walking to our village, and there’s one street there, it’s already the end of the village, and houses are only on one side—sometimes two or three together, sometimes with a gap of fifty meters. We go to the Perunyaks—there was a son and a daughter, a father and a mother. I would never have thought they had a bunker—never, they seemed so neutral. They had a bunker, but it was very old. And when a bunker is 4-5 years old, it’s already considered compromised, because someone knows, someone will see. It’s time to abandon it. And there was a large library there, the walls were already polished smooth by shoulders—but it was there! We came to the house, they gave us water to drink, fed us a little. But I’m already falling—I want to sleep. Then we went into the woodshed, where they chop wood, a small shed, with wood stacked in piles. A log is moved aside, and behind it is the entrance, a camouflaged hatch. They opened it, we climbed into the bunker, she gave us kerosene, we lit the lamp and slept.
We slept for I don’t know how long, stayed there and rested. I look, and the insurgents are at it again—a large library, they sit and read and give me a book: “Read.” I couldn’t read—I was so disappointed. Sitting cross-legged, I look at the book, turn the pages, but I’m thinking: My God, when spring comes—I’ll run away from you. I admit it, it’s not nice, but I admit it. I’ll run away and cross the border. It’s pointless—to walk and walk, and this is compromised, and that is such a… So I’m just turning the pages. And Tyrsa was watching: “Friend commander, friend Novyi isn’t reading—he’s thinking about something, just turning the pages.” But the guys didn’t want to scold me, they changed the subject: “Why are you looking at friend Novyi? Ha-ha-ha!” I then threw the book down in anger and just sat there like a yogi. And they continued to study and read. I overheard many conversations. How one time Levko (that’s a pseudonym) brought meat to this property, and then Levko got caught and was walking around with a task force. And I’m thinking: My God, and we’re sitting here?
So what—should I keep talking? Because it’s getting to be a lot…
V.O.: Talk, of course. You’re only 20 years old here…
H.H.: We sat and sat, I heard a lot of conversations. March had already arrived, it was quite warm, but snow was still on the ground.
One day the owner came down into the bunker. We’re eating—there’s food, there’s something to drink with water. And he says: “There was an ambush in the neighbors’ shed—both the neighbors and we saw it.” And after that, they saw tracks, that someone at night—and we even heard it—that someone seemed to be walking in the yard and in this woodshed. He asks if it was us. “No, not us.” There are tracks, someone was looking in the shed, climbed into the loft above the shed—clearly, they were checking something. And I’m already thinking that they’re watching us. But all that passed.
I don’t know what day of March it was, but the snow hadn’t melted yet, and I had the thought of leaving this bunker and better spending the winter somewhere in the forest. We were used to sleeping anywhere, dear God, rather than waiting for death in that pit—that was my thought. But what could I do? I would have even run away from there, but I can’t open the hatch because there’s a log on it—it takes two or three people to move that log so it doesn’t fall. And if I start doing that, they’ll hear, and then they have the right to shoot me—because maybe I’m going to surrender. That was my thought. Someone else might not have said it, but I will.
We have to go somewhere, somewhere we have to go—to visit some people and someone else. I don’t know anything, I take Korin’s “ten-shooter,” Korin is sick and not going, and I go with the commander. We went past one house, to a second, we’re returning, but we can’t return, we won’t make it back here. We quarter with some people in my village. We weren’t in the house, but in the shed, because it was already quite warm—though there was snow, it was very warm. I don’t know what day of March it was, somewhere in the middle. In our area, it happened that in the second half of March they would be plowing, we have that kind of microclimate. In Ternopil, there’s still snow, but we’re plowing. But that year the snow held on.
I was “on watch,” then the commander. We took turns, and just before evening, when it was getting a little dark, the commander lay down to sleep before we were supposed to leave. He lay down to sleep, I put the “ten-shooter” next to him, took two grenades with me, left what we were carrying, glanced at him lightly, said goodbye like that, and deserted, because I ran away. (From here, H. Herchak continues narrating, not reading.).
“ON MY OWN”
I ran away, I left. I couldn’t get to my acquaintance, so I spent the night, that is, the day, in a shed belonging to some good people, but I didn’t show myself to them. There was a little hay there. But I had to go hungry. I stayed there for a whole day. At least I got a good sleep. It was cold, but in those moments, a man doesn’t get sick. And after that, at night, I went to my friend, Yosyp Hevchuk, who had been compromised for having contact with the partisans, and they were trying to recruit him as an agent—they said: “If you don’t cooperate with us, we’ll arrest you.” The term wouldn’t be long—clearly, even ten years is a lot, because he had only seen the insurgents somewhere and had once been with the opryshky.
Yosyp Hevchuk lived near the garrison. So poor. I used to hide at his place once when I came back from Moldavia after turning myself in. I got to his place, he took me in right away—and up to the attic. I tell him: “Now you tell them that you saw insurgents at a meeting: one was coughing lightly, an older man, the second was Herchak, that’s me, and another one like…”—I described him, that is, Myron. The coughing one—that’s Korin coughing, because he has lung problems. State that a meeting was set—even the KGB knows this—for April 10th, when there’s no snow, and then in five days on the 15th, 20th, and 25th. As if we had set up a meeting with him for the 10th. I did this specifically so the Chekists would believe he was ready to betray us. As in: “You tell them this, and they’ll recruit you as an agent, you say ‘okay’—then we can sit tight, and in the spring we’ll flee abroad.” Because he was also facing arrest, as he didn’t want to work for them. I don’t tell him anything, because that’s also conspiracy: I can’t tell him about the guys, where the bunker is. I only told him that there was no point in staying with the guys anymore, because it was a crisis, everyone was betraying everyone else. And he already knew a little about that himself.
He’s not back in the evening, I’m waiting. He gave me a “six-shooter”—a small six-shot pistol that could only kill from a few meters away, otherwise just yourself. There weren’t even six rounds in it, only five. I’m sitting in the attic. And there was this operative, Kurkov, I forgot his first name, a young lieutenant. I was very worried that he might betray me—they were such aces there that anyone could confess. When Yosyp went there, I told him: “When you come back, don’t climb into the attic, so it doesn’t look suspicious. Stomp your feet to get the snow off for a long time and sing a cheerful little song.” I wait and wait, it’s already midnight—he’s not there! Suddenly he’s coming—stomp-stomp-stomp—he’s stomping. He closes the door and only then starts singing kolomyikas next to his mother. I think: “Thank God.” I fell asleep. During the day he comes, brings me food and says: “I went to Kurkov at the garrison and told him.” He immediately got on the phone, went into another room, here and there. He says: “And you, couldn’t you have met me? Or called some soldier?” They locked me, he says, in an office so no one would see. They came from the city by car, promised him everything: “You’ll move to the city, you’ll study…”
[End of tape 2]
V.O.: Tape three, Mr. Herchak continues.
H.H.: So I rested more calmly at his place. We waited for the snows to melt, and then we would go into the forests to prepare to cross the border. We’re planning. I got a Romanian phrasebook somewhere—a small one, not all the pages were there. I’m enriching my vocabulary.
It got warmer, and we left. Terrible raids at his mother’s place. They thought there had been a meeting and that the insurgents had killed him. They gave his mother hay for her cow, fixed up her house.
One time we were staked out near the club we had to watch a certain person. There was a fence, a wide dirt road, lit by lightbulbs, and we were in a dark garden, and we were sitting behind a small fence and watching that person through the cracks. Someone was walking through the garden behind us toward the fence we didn’t know who and had to jump over the fence, ran out onto that road, and fled. It turns out it was some “strebok”—he was unarmed, but he wanted to take a shortcut through the fence to the club. We escaped, but some people recognized Yosypko Hevchuk, but not me. Then talk started that Yosyp was alive. They then latched onto his mother again, that he was alive.
There was another very interesting action. Once we went to some people in my village to ask around, and people complain to me: “What are you doing walking around the forests, while the strebki here are tormenting us!” Kostyuk—he’s from our village, he served in the army, and now he was the head of the destroyer battalion. They say: “What the yastrebki are doing! Especially Kostyuk, the head of the destroyer battalion. The yastrebki catch people carrying firewood from the forest, old grandmothers! And they lead them all the way to the village council—they carry that firewood on their backs, and then they scare them there. That’s just torment! Or they harass them over straw.” And so on. I couldn’t stand it anymore and thought: whether I flee abroad or not, I have to get revenge. That was the opryshok spirit.
We chose a time when a movie would be showing—and the movie club was about five hundred meters from the garrison. The usual guard and Kostyuk remained in the garrison, while part of the strebki went to the movie. And then I see—Kostyuk is also coming from the movie. He didn’t stay till the end. Why—I don’t know, maybe he was checking if the yastrebki were sleeping. He’s walking down the road, weapon on his shoulder, clearing his throat and talking to himself. The road is lit, you can see. It’s warm already, things were already green. And we were hiding where there was an orchard, long and old. The orchard was surrounded by a ditch, and the ditch was overgrown with weeds. We hid in those weeds in the dark of night, because there was a contrast: the road was lit by lamps, and we couldn’t be seen. I had some light slippers, like postoly, so I couldn’t be heard. I took a stone in my right hand and wrapped it. As soon as he appeared, I grabbed him by the gun barrel and held on, so that if anything happened, I could hit him on the head with the stone. “Stop! Don’t move! You’re at gunpoint!” And he thought there were dozens of us here. And out of fear—you can’t write this—just plop-plop-plop—and it started to stink. He got that scared. He was so self-confident, because there were almost no insurgents left. He recognized me. And I don’t take his weapon, just hold it. I say: “People are complaining about the straw, they’re not stealing—they’re taking what’s theirs. If I hear one more complaint—your children will be left orphans with their mother.” His mother was disabled, almost blind, she would peel potatoes right up close to her eyes. And he says: “I-won’t-do-it! I-won’t-do-it!” He couldn’t even speak. “Go!” He left.
I was already in a special-regime camp—this was already 1963-64, in Mordovia, with recidivists and death-row inmates. My mother comes for a visit. And she was already walking very poorly, because the Bolsheviks had beaten her once because of me. After that, she could hardly walk at all. She arrives and tells me (they’re listening to all of this, of course, but that’s okay), that Kostyuk helps her a lot. Now he’s no longer working, because he has little education—where would he go in the KGB. But they gave him a position too—he’s a brigade leader, they give him all sorts of handouts. She says: “To plow the garden—I don’t dig, he sends people and they plow it for me. He’s become so kind, he drove me to the station, asked me to send his regards to Hryts.” I say: “I know why he’s kind!” The man remembered all that.
I return to those times. Walking around with Yosypko. And there was another guy hiding there, Stepan Stadnyk, from the village of Tsapivtsi, now it’s Podillia. He’s still around, he was a fellow inmate of mine in the camp, and we were at the interrogation together. They wanted to arrest him for helping the insurgents, and he ran away. I don’t know how he ran away. He went into hiding where our people had been deported—some were sent to Crimea and Zaporizhzhia, to those German villages. He was hiding there. And I went to his mother to take him abroad with us too, but his mother wouldn’t give me the address. I remember, one time his mother went to church, and I secretly climbed in through the attic, looking for letters. But the conspiracy was good—there were no letters. Apparently, she burned them.
One time there was an incident in a neighboring village. They say: “There was such a raid in our village, they were looking for bunkers at the Perunyaks’, they searched all day.” And that’s the bunker I left. I think, of course, there’s no one there anymore, but I run—what if the commander and Korin were sitting there and they found them—they’ll think it was I who betrayed them, because I ran away. I hurry there. I don’t tell Yosypko that there’s a bunker there. I go to some distant neighbors, I ask—yes, they searched, they didn’t find anything, and those insurgents are probably not there. Somewhere, it seems, on the second or third day we heard again that they had found a bunker at the Perunyaks’, but there was no one in it. I thought: “Thank you, God.”
And one time we were walking past our village. There’s a logged-out forest there and a very dense cherry thicket has grown. We were walking past those cherry trees, there’s a spring, we stopped to drink some water, and suddenly I see—two figures! We hit the ground—and they hit the ground. Well, two—that’s not the Bolsheviks, but who could it be? And it turns out to be Korin and Myron. They know that we walk around together. “Friend Hrytsko! Yosypko! Come here, don’t shoot, it’s us!” And we had sawed-off rifles. I felt somewhat ashamed to go there, I say: “Yosypko, you go.” Yosyp went to them, he’s gone for a while, comes back and says that they’ve set up a meeting, they really want to meet with me, they need my help and his. I thought, well, I should help. I don’t know how many days later—ten or fifteen—we came to the meeting, again in that thicket of cherry trees. We arrived—Tyrsa and Korin were already there, but they were so sad. I ask where Myron is—they are silent. And Korin tells me that they were walking near the village of Tsapky, by the Dzhuryn River, above the canyon, crossing a small stream that flows into the Dzhuryn, and when they went up—suddenly a burst of fire, shooting, Korin runs away, and Myron was probably killed. But his body is not in town. I say: “If there’s no body, then maybe he’s lying there, why didn’t you look?” We then asked how it happened, approximately where they were crossing. We agreed on a meeting and immediately go to the forest to make it before nightfall. We arrived towards morning, rested a bit, and began the search. But where to search in the forest? No, we still managed to get to that village of Sadky, to the houses close to the forest. When there’s shooting in the forest, you can hear it terribly, especially at night. We ask people we know if there were any shots. One says: “I didn’t hear anything.” We ask others—“There was something at night—either hunters or not, but there was something.”
We then waited for morning—and started searching. We found nothing, just a dead roe deer in the forest, no tracks. We left, poor souls, we didn’t want to search anymore. And we should have, by the way, as it later turned out. And in my head, the thought: how could it be—you, an old fighter, how could you not check if he was there, maybe he was wounded or something. And suspicion gnaws at my head, but I don’t know anything.
We had to walk a lot, so while Stepan from Zaporizhzhia is not yet here, we raided a store, took the money. That was in Berestok near the garrison. It was lit up, and it turned out the store was made of adobe, of mudbrick. Nearby was a smithy. I got to that smithy, took some planes and chisels, we’re digging a hole and climbing into the store at night. The sentries are standing here, and we dug through, took something to eat, took some clothes, sold them at half price at the market, but in Chortkiv, so they wouldn’t catch us. We already had money. And I had an idea. I got a fairly detailed map—to go to the Caucasus, to do reconnaissance directly on the Turkish border. I didn’t know it was so heavily fortified. And first—to do reconnaissance, to organize some money. In winter there, in Tuapse and Sukhumi, it’s warm. To spend the winter in the rocks—no one is looking for partisans there. We’ll buy ourselves food, spend the winter, there’s no snow there. We’ll come back in the spring, when there’s no snow. We’ll spend two months there and return to Ukraine in the spring.
We went to Ternopil—in civilian clothes, we have a compass, money. We walked and walked around Ternopil, went beyond Ternopil, there’s some freight station and nearby some miserable workers’ canteen. There’s a bridge over the road, a railway on the bridge, and below a highway and some small houses. We went into the canteen. There was a custom of sitting: one looks that way, one this way, I glance over there, he glances over there. And there was a coded signal, if something was wrong, watch out for that, or suddenly something. He looks that way, and I this way, toward the door. And Yosyp was studying in high school. And the teacher—Zina Lymar from Vinnytsia or Zhytomyr region. She was the Komsomol secretary… Suddenly Yosyp gave the signal that there was danger, and even said: “Zina Lymar.” And she’s looking right at us, sitting at a table about six meters away. And various workers are having lunch there. How did she end up there? She clearly recognized him. Lightly, not waiting for the food, we go out into the yard. I go first, I don’t need to run, and Yosyp goes from the opposite side of the road behind, the traffic is light. We’re heading toward the freight station. How did she report it? Obviously, by phone, no one could have run there yet. Some officer, I don’t know of what troops, is following Yosypko. I then quickly turn toward the freight station. I don’t know how Yosyp is doing… I turn—he’s on that side of the road—and I run between the wagons. We had an agreed-upon place: the first stop east of Ternopil. I didn’t know what the first stop was, because on the map there was only Velyki Birky. I didn’t know there was a small stop called Detsky. I’m running, and they have already, it turns out, given the signal. I’m walking between the freight cars, climbed over the track, I look, there’s some square, I see an officer coming toward me: “Hands up!” I raise my hands, and he then says: “Turn around!” And as I’m turning, one of my legs is like this, I hit him with my leg—bam. He sags a bit, I hit him in the jaw—bam—and then quickly, I even split my head open, under the freight cars here and there—I escaped. There was some small forest there, some swamps, I stayed there somewhere until evening, some village called Hai—it turns out Germans used to live there. There are no wells there, but pumps. Through Hai, there are groves.
I’m walking, I look: oh, there’s a small stop in the middle of a field. When I got closer, I see—Detsky. We were supposed to have our first meeting there. Yosypko isn’t there. I didn’t get close, I think, if he got caught, so he wouldn’t betray me under torture. He’s not there. In the evening I approached—not there. I think, maybe he’s in Velyki Birky? I went there—and he’s not at the station there either.
I got to the Caucasus by myself, looked everything over. Beautiful places. I had conflicts with the police, already in the Kuban region. A junction station right after Rostov-on-Don, Tikhoretsk. I changed trains there, maybe there was some suspicion. I was walking through the freight station, and either there was blood on me, or someone reported me—an unarmed policeman attacked me, and he suffered for it. They were already, apparently, watching me. And in Tuapse I had an adventure, but I escaped. Then I went into the mountains. The Caucasians treated me well. One even says: “Where is the young man emigrating to?” And they gave me brynza cheese in the mountains. More than once a hunter with a dog would pass, the dog would come to me, and he would see that I was suspicious, but he would stop it. They are good people. You can spend the winter there.
I returned. On my way back, I got a little sick… So I’m telling this briefly… Autumn is coming. No, I wasn’t sick then… I dug myself a bunker in the forest.
V.O.: Where was this?
H.H.: Near the village of Nyrkiv. Nyrkiv. There was a young forest there, now it’s not like that. By the way, I didn’t give up my bunker, so it’s still there. I took a typewriter there—someone gave it to me, an alarm clock. There was, by the way, an incident in the bunker, but you can’t talk about all of that. I dug it, but I hadn’t made the ventilator, the air vent yet. It’s so warm in a bunker: you’re walking somewhere in the forest, and you have something like a home. Because otherwise you’re walking around like a homeless person, where to spend the night? But then you’re going as if to your own home. One time I went in—the night was a bit cold, I think, I’ll sleep it off. I went in, wound the clock, lit a match—so the matches wouldn’t get damp, I tucked them into my shirt and lay down to sleep on the bunk. there was no air vent, and I didn’t know that oxygen gets used up so quickly. I closed the bunker’s hatch behind me. It was a small bunker, for two people maybe, and so low, you couldn’t even stand up, because I couldn’t dig a big one by myself. Suddenly at night, I feel that I’m too warm. At night you can hear the clock very clearly as it ticks, but now it was tick-tick-tick—something was suspicious. What is it? I don’t know what. I wanted to light a match to see what time it was. I strike one match—it goes out, a second—it goes out. I remembered that there wasn’t enough oxygen. I want to go to the exit, but there is no exit, I’m already falling, it’s a living grave! I found the exit, quickly hit it with my head, knocked out the hatch, and immediately breathed in the cold air. I was so scared of that living grave! I think, my God! That was an incident I had.
When I returned from the Caucasus, Korin had already been killed, and Tyrsa had shot herself. No, not herself. She broke out of an encirclement, took that “six-shooter” and, running at the Muscovites, was shooting… When we were sitting in the bunker under siege—I forgot to say, as she was treating Korin, she sat with that little pistol—I heard her turn to Korin: “Friend Korin, will you shoot me?” Because it was such a tiny pistol. Korin just nodded his head, as if to say, yes. I understood that she was afraid to shoot herself, that she needed someone else to do it…
Apparently, they shot Korin as they were firing back from the house, and she ran out into the yard and started shooting. Well, who was there to shoot at, when you could only see heads, lying behind fences and walls? And they, the fools, took her and cut her down with a submachine gun, they got scared of a woman with a “six-shooter,” and killed her too. This I heard. How hard it was for me! There was no one left, I walk alone, to familiar meeting places, I walk through the forests, my heart aches—we were here, we quartered in the forest here, spent the days here… One time it was so hard: night, the trees are rustling, so sad, autumn. Out of such oppression, I shouted: o-ve-ve, ve-ve-ve… And in those canyons: ve-ve-ve-ve-ve… I felt better, I ran away from that place. That’s what it came to.
“THE BARREL”
Once I got a little sick. I went to sleep in a haystack near the forest. I crawled there before dark because I couldn’t walk anymore, and I’m dreaming from the fever. I don’t believe in dreams, but this was the first time it happened. There was a woman in our area whom they called Martsia—that’s Maria. From the “Order of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,” though they were Greek Catholics. She was a widow or maybe she had never been married. The insurgents trusted her very much you could rely on her. I dream that white doves are circling over this Martsia’s homestead and dropping some cards, either leaflets or letters. I don’t know how long I slept, I woke up and thought: “Maybe I should go, maybe someone really did leave some letters for her,”—such a thought came to my mind. I quickly go to her. It’s about four kilometers—for a young man, what’s that. I come to her, she says: “Stepan Stadnyk was here, looking for you.” That’s the one I’m looking for, the one who was hiding in the Zaporizhzhia region. She gave me an address to go to him. Because I didn’t know those people. I think: “My God, what a dream!”
That very night I managed to run through the backwoods to Tsapivtsi (now the name of that village is Podillia). I knocked—and he was staying with a young married couple. They let me wash—I remember, I was washing, and they were pouring water on me. We had visited him with the insurgents, so he knew who I was. Stepan (????) says: “I’ve just arrived, and my cousin, pseudonym ‘Marusia,’ who works as a typist in the supra-district leadership, is looking for me, and the insurgents. She wants to make contact with ‘Zolotyi Potik.’ The guys there aren’t making contact, they’re afraid of everyone. There are six or five of them.” I say: “Okay, we have to help people.” I’m planning to go abroad, but I think, I’ll help them. A whole bunch of them came to the meeting, “Marusia” was there too. She said goodbye to us and went on. She had a pistol. They left four with us and there were two of us—six. It turns out they wanted to take control of our district, which was without leadership, to get it active again. And to dig a bunker. I think to myself, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to dig one and spend the winter with them, and then in the spring, run away—again, that same thought of my own.
One time we’re walking past a village, a light rain is falling. The village is long, through the gardens, and here is the forest. I, suspecting nothing, am leading as the terrain guide, because I know the area, I’ve walked here with partisans, I say: “We’ll quarter in the pine grove, there’s less rain there.” “Why? To the village!” And this seemed strange to me: insurgents never said that, it’s a breach of conspiracy. They went into a village only as a last resort, and it’s warm. I didn’t let them, but Stepan says: “I have acquaintances here.” We went, we quartered.
With insurgents, it was never a matter of cook this or cook that—whatever there is, we’re thankful for it. I was still young, now I know everything… There’s some girl sitting there, the daughter, so he’s over to the daughter, joking: “Oh, tomorrow we’ll eat our fill of pyrohy.” That’s a hint to cook pyrohy. And pyrohy are cooked on Sunday. That is, varenyky. Because one of the neighbors might ask, who are they for? And so many pyrohy. You understand? Something again enters my foolish head: something’s not right here. But, nothing. And I ate my fill of those pyrohy, to tell the truth. We move on.
V.O.: Pyrohy—that’s varenyky, right?
H.H.: Yes, yes. We’re walking. A wedge of land, the forest is in the shape of an “L.” We can go to the village through the forest, or we can go straight across the fields, which is closer, but there will be tracks, because in autumn some fields are plowed, some are not yet. Leading them to the village they need to get to, I logically say that we will go through the forest to the river. There are always ambushes on the edge of the forest, and I’m going straight across. But they suggest going through the fields. They’re walking, and some fool—what kind of partisan are you, you didn’t know that when you walk, you look ahead, not at your feet. My God, he falls—thud! A small guy, he had some kind of Volhynian accent, he would say “zbozha” for “zbizhzhia” [grain]. I think, he’s from Volhynia, but there are few partisans from there. He falls—and that Soviet submachine gun opens up. The bolt came out and a plastic shock absorber popped out somewhere. First, they looked for the bolt. They want to use a light, but I object. So they covered themselves with their ponchos so the light wouldn’t be visible, but they never found the shock absorber. And when he fell, he cursed. I had never heard any cursing from the partisans… I once heard the curse “kur debela” or “chort” [damn it]. To be honest, they were very interesting people. But here I heard a curse, and again a doubt in my head.
V.O.: What kind of curse, Russian?
H.H.: No, Ukrainian. We went on, I say: “Don’t worry, the man we’re going to stay with is a shoemaker. There should be tools left there, maybe a piece of rubber, I’ll make you an even better shock absorber from rubber.” And I was a specialist at fixing everything. We got there, I found everything, made a shock absorber, sanded it with sandpaper, made a hole—and that’s it, no problem. But something was weighing on my heart.
I lead them further. I had only been to that forester’s place once. The name of the village has slipped my mind, maybe Letyache. The forester had a horse. A saddle, he had a hunting rifle. I stayed there once with the guys, they wanted something there. They knew where the guys from the Potik district were. I think, I’ll go to the forester, tell him they need something. We arrived, I didn’t know the coded signal, so at night I just knocked knock-knock-knock. “Auntie, auntie, open up, it’s the boys.” “The boys”—that’s what they called the insurgents. I see her coming out, she opens the door right away. “Oh, such a soft voice, I recognized it immediately. Is Myron here?” “Myron is gone.” That was the commander I was with, with Myron. We went in, they again ask for varenyky. The forester is getting ready to go to a place where, he knows, there is linen. Because you take a lot of linen into a bunker for the winter, to change. There’s nowhere to wash in a bunker, the dirty linen is put into a small bag. They change there once every fifteen days. But winter is not long, two months. The forester left, and those guys are ordering varenyky. I’m already fed up, it’s clear that something is fishy. The forester arrived, takes off the saddle, I’m holding the horse and I say: “The commander said not to tell anyone—that’s the order.”
We went on, started digging a bunker in the village of Tsapivtsi at the house of a woman whose husband served in the navy. She was Stepan’s acquaintance or relative. We started digging, suddenly I’m summoned to the supra-district commander’s bunker to draw, because the artist fell ill. I think: “Oh, he’ll teach me linocut, because I don’t know how, I’ll learn.” But again, I confess, the thought: in the spring I’ll escape to Romania. What bunker… They hadn’t even led me to the meeting place when a light snow began to fall. They put on white camouflage, but I don’t have any, I only have two grenades. They led me. And with us was some commander, wounded in the arm, his arm was in a sling, with a Russian submachine gun, what was it called?…
V.O.: “Degtyaryov,” “Kalashnikov”?
H.H.: No, there’s a small submachine gun with a round drum, like the German “MP.” Well, never mind. There are three of them standing there, and two who brought me. “Glory”—“Glory.” Suddenly a submachine gun turns on me and instantly hands—wham—pinioned me. “Don’t worry, friend Novyi, you have fallen into the hands of the SB police, your fate will depend on you. You killed the commander, we found his body in the forest, Myron’s. You robbed people.” I have a witness that I didn’t kill him, because we were in the forest together. But when I was hiding alone, I really did sometimes steal chickens and potatoes from gardens to survive, because I had no contact anymore. “You are compromising our Ukrainian liberation movement.” I think: “That I robbed people, that’s not so terrible, but I can’t prove my innocence regarding the commander, because Yosyp Hevchuk has already been arrested, and Korin and Tyrsa have already been killed, so they can’t say that I wasn’t with them. Oh-oh-oh, if it’s the Security Service, then I’m not going to be an artist, but, clearly, to an interrogation. Then they put handcuffs on me, but the handcuffs were old, rusty, Hungarian. Hands behind my back, and they lead me. The snow stopped, the fields are white. They lead me across the road into the Chortkiv district, there really was a supra-district there once. They led me across, then through some valley, some quarry. “Blindfold him,”—well, when they lead you to a bunker, there’s a rule to blindfold you so you don’t see. We crossed the highway, then we cross over some stones. One stayed behind. I’m thinking, now it’s just—bang—from a six-shooter. I don’t feel anything, just that one spot—the bullet will be in the back of my head any second now. No, we come out on top. And they blindfolded me with a scarf. We go up—and suddenly they shoot: tra-ta-ta-ta! “Get down! Ambush!” There’s a law: they’re supposed to shoot me and run. The underground is the underground, they won’t leave you. Especially since I know where the insurgents are digging a bunker. I hear them running away, and I’m lying there. They’re firing back, such a firefight… I don’t think for long then—true, I’m very visible because I’m in black—but I get up, I hear shots from here and from there, they are running away, and these are chasing them, so I run in a third direction. I’m running and then…
V.O.: But your eyes are blindfolded?
H.H.: I lay down and somehow quickly untied my eyes, but my hands were cuffed. I look: my God, they are already far away, firing back, probably with blanks, and these are shooting from over there and are already coming towards me. Whoa! One says: “Don’t shoot him, his hands are cuffed.” Then they surrounded me: “Who are you?” I say: “Herchak.” “Ah, Herchak, we know, we know. Where did the bandits run?” I say: “I don’t know, I was hiding myself, I ran away from them. They were taking me to be executed or something, because I stole from people. I have nothing to do with them.” “Let’s go.” We went out—another stunt. A highway, we had crossed it earlier. They supposedly wait for a car. They aren’t waiting, it’s all an act. A car drives by—“Stop!” The driver doesn’t want to, but they insist: “Stop!” He stopped. “Take us to the district center.” “I’m not taking you, I’m in a hurry to get there.” “Take us to the district center.” It’s all a stunt. I got in, they covered me so I wouldn’t be cold. And they tightened my hands so much that they’re turning blue. We’re driving, my hands are turning blue, I’m silent. We arrived at the district center, and in the district center, they can’t unlock them—they’re some kind of wrong handcuffs, “Hungarian” they said. It’s all a stunt, that these, supposedly, aren’t their handcuffs. They take me to Chortkiv. In Chortkiv they found keys for such handcuffs, unlocked them with difficulty, cursing. And then they put such heavy, thick Russian handcuffs on me. They re-cuffed my hands in front of me. “Well, better?” I say: “It’s all the same.”
INTERROGATIONS
They drove me to Ternopil before dawn, so people wouldn’t see. In Ternopil, it was already getting light. They’re conducting an interrogation somewhere, I don’t know what street it is. In the middle, a small chair is chained to the floor, so I can’t throw it. My hands are cuffed, I can’t wave my fingers, have to sit straight and look forward. I was hungry, they fed me well, but they didn’t give me water, though. I want to sleep—I hadn’t slept for four or five days.
V.O.: So this is 1952, but do you remember the day?
H.H.: December second. Just like in 1951, when I was surrounded. As if it was on purpose, you understand? So, the interrogation. “Where are those insurgents?” They’re torturing me, and I know where they’re digging the bunker. I’m thinking: “See, this is some kind of provocation. But what if it’s not a provocation?” They’re torturing me. And to this day I’m grateful to myself, I praise myself a little, that I’m not some kind of scum, that I endured such torment and didn’t betray them, where they were digging the bunker.
They take turns, at night they go to eat, they drink in front of me. I’m already collapsing, and those reflectors are shining on me. They are behind the reflectors, it’s fine for them. I’m falling, I fall in such a way that nothing hurts, I get a little sleep. I don’t want to get up, and he pours water from a carafe on me. And I licked the water and felt better. It got to the point where the window already looked like an ellipse, the walls seemed soft—my God! I still didn’t confess, I don’t know. A young one comes in, speaks Ukrainian well, handsome black mustache, relieved one of them, because he went to eat or something, I don’t know. This was during the day. He came in and just keeps looking in a little mirror, singing beautifully: “I look at the sky and think to myself, why am I not a falcon…”—he walks back and forth in front of me, slender, handsome. And the small window pane was open. “Ah, if you had wings, you’d fly out that little window—he didn’t even say ‘fortochka’—into the blue sky?”—that was so irritating to me. But one time an investigator came, Shuripov, he was from the Caucasus. He came in a fur coat… Not an investigator, but the head of the task force. I barely recognized him. “I came to look at your ugly face. You scum. How much we chased after you, how many of my boys I tormented, and he’s relaxing at resorts, traveling around the Caucasus, Chernivtsi, through the cities.” He had found out that I had traveled through cities, but he doesn’t know how I suffered in those cities. And—bam—he hits me in the face. The one who was singing: “Comrade Captain, hitting is not allowed.” [Unintelligible].
And on another occasion, someone else came, I don’t know who he was, an operative or what, but he beat me so hard that I fell. Then he wanted to kick me in the liver or the stomach, and I covered myself with my hands like this. My hands were cuffed, I turned to the side like this, so he kicked me on the arm so hard that the arm hurt for a long time. I thought he broke my wrist. And then he kicked me so hard that foam came out of my mouth. I lost consciousness. Apparently, that one stopped him. By the way, I had surgery because of those lumps, because I had seven fractures. A doctor in the camp once told me: “All this will come back to you.”
They gave me some young investigator. And they already knew that I knew where the boys were. They already brought in Stepan. They brought in Skrypnyk, a relative of Stepan from my village. They are already imprisoned, and I don’t know that they were also betrayed, that that group was a provocateur group. I suspected it, but I still defended them. That young one, apparently a trainee, doesn’t see that there’s nothing more to learn from me. He asks: “Do you know that people went abroad?” I say: “I know. There were such raiding groups, they went abroad and back.” He writes that down, already attributed sabotage to me. The others came: “Why are you writing that?” He took it and tore it up. There was another question: “Where were you hiding, with whom?” And I say: “I know places in Moldavia,”—I once hid in Moldavia. There were all sorts of things. I did one operation and ran away to Moldavia, it’s not far from us. I got on a freight train, crossed over there, hid. there was a fire in the village. “And where were you then, when that happened? Didn’t you do that?” I say: “No, I was hiding in Moldavia at that time.” “With whom?” “With no one,” I say. And there are those acacia trees, small groves. They went, checked, that I had an alibi. But it was I who did it. They also asked: “How did you get back from the Caucasus, with whom did you hide?” And I didn’t hide with anyone. I say: “I hid in the forest there and there,”—I barely knew Russian then. There were Ukrainian investigators who knew Ukrainian, but they often asked what this or that meant. Apparently, I was already so dangerous that Captain Shumilov himself interrogated me. And he interrogated commanders. He says: “Where were you?” “Hiding.” And I really was hiding in a ravine in a pine forest…
[End of track]
H.H.: Well, I went, got some potatoes somewhere, chickens. If I stole a chicken, then again, there was such honesty in the boy: I would go to the head of the collective farm or the brigade leader. They, of course, have a dog, they have fences, but I went to them anyway. I took a bucket, salt from one family, matches, because I knew how to get into a house. And I already started to recover, started doing exercises, but it was very sad. And here, at the end of the forest, a path went from the Dniester. Girls walked past the forest, I could hear them. There was a log lying there, they would sit down to rest. It was about ten meters from me, and I even heard the news. People were walking to the town straight across, where it was a shorter path, and it was often more cheerful for me. From there I could see the fields and the sky. It was better there than sitting in those thickets. “Where were you?” “I was hiding there and there.” “In what place?” I told them exactly, so they wouldn’t interrogate people, so they wouldn’t beat me. There’s a hidden bucket there, there are still some provisions left. They, apparently, went and found all that, they’re silent about it. But they say to me (such is their morality): “You’ve fattened up like a bullock,”—one was speaking in Russian, and another translates a little, and they’re laughing,—“and beautiful girls were walking to the market there, and you couldn’t drag one of them off,”—and they describe what to do with her, everyone is roaring with laughter. And I’m thinking: and it never even entered my head! I think: My God, what savages they are!
When I was already in Toronto, Vasyl Kuk came to visit, and after that came Kryvutsky, some commander from the Zakerzonnia region, which was under Poland. He had a higher education, I think in mathematics, he was imprisoned in Norilsk. He served 15 years, settled in Cherkasy, they gave him some job there. Now he’s writing his memoirs. They arranged a small meeting at a friend’s house who had studied with Kuk, he’s a professor. For some reason, they invited me there, and there were people from “Homin Ukrainy,” from editorial offices, from Lviv television or some other channel who came to film him. Even liaisons of this commander from Poland were sitting there, older women who had come. And they invited me, I sat down. From the audience, they asked how it was that Kuk wasn’t put on trial, while others were? Probably because he wrote a statement? “That’s a lie, he didn’t write one.” I stood up, showed that I wanted to speak, and the guy filming immediately turned the camera on me. And I was already on edge. I ask: “And Duzhy didn’t write one?” And he immediately says: “And how do you know?” “From those who served 25 years.” I never get involved in such conversations, but this Kryvutsky gets up and speaks about that Marichka, who supposedly crossed the border, taking partisan documents. There is such a Marichka from the insurgents. She lived in West Germany. I think they sent her with those documents. I forgot her last name. She’s in America. (See: Mariya Savchyn. A Thousand Roads. Memoirs of a Woman Participant in the Underground Liberation Struggle During and After the Second World War. - Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2003. - 546 pp. portr. About one of the thousand roads of “Marichka”. - New York: 64th Branch of the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America, 2004. - 62 pp. - V.O.). He says: “So Marichka took the archives and crossed the borders and lived in America, and she gave them the finger.” And I was sitting on pins and needles. I stand up and say: “Yes, the finger,”—and he’s no longer filming me for television. “The KGB could have shot anyone they wanted here, they shot people far more important than that. And Marichka wasn’t even hiding. What, you,” I say, “take the emigration for fools?” And he thought I was one of those who kowtow to the Banderites, that maybe they give me some benefits. They didn’t know I worked as a loader. And then I just let him have it. Some people liked that, because everyone knew how easily they could kill people in the West. And those older women attacked me: “Why are you shaming our commanders, who are you?” I say: “Nobody, I’m a shepherd, but I did 25 years, not 15, and I know a few things.” That’s how I got a jab in at that Kryvutsky.
Then we went to eat. I didn’t go to the large table but remained in this hall. I saw that some people from *Homin Ukrainy* (The Echo of Ukraine) didn’t go to that table either. We sat down at a small table here. They shook my hand—I told them many more things there. But some were very offended. Kulchytsky came up to me he apparently thought I was living so well because they were paying me here. “You, my friend,” he said, “shouldnt cast stones at others gardens take a look at your own.” I replied, “By all means, my garden is open for all to see how many stones are in it.” That’s how it was.
So, at first, I was in solitary confinement. There was a time they didnt feed me for four or five days, I don’t remember exactly. Then they would take me for interrogation during the day. Id have dinner, lie down to sleep, and just as Id drift off—knock, knock, knock—it was time for interrogation. They’d let me go by morning, but as soon as I fell asleep—interrogation again. And then they’d serve breakfast. I no longer had time to eat that breakfast. I’d come back, the breakfast would be cold, and they wouldn’t give me lunch—that’s how they tortured me.
One time, they called for me and led me somewhere. By then, I wasnt alone in the cell anymore there were a few other prisoners, as the interrogation was almost over. They brought me face-to-face with an accomplice—Skrypnyk from my village—and another time with Stepan Stadnyk. I want to talk about Stadnyk. When they brought in Stepan Stadnyk, they asked me, “Do you know him?” “I don’t,” I said. But he spoke up: “Hryts, my sister Marusia is an informant she works for the KGB.” And the guard just clapped a hand over his mouth. That was our meeting with Stepan. So, his own sister turned him in, too.
UNDER SENTENCE OF DEATH
Then I had my trial I was tried by the military tribunal of the Prykarpattia District. I was sentenced to be shot.
V.O.: And the date of that trial?
H.H.: I might have it written down somewhere. I don’t remember exactly, it was around February 26, 1953.
V.O.: That was right before Stalin’s death.
H.H.: Yes, yes, around the 26th or 24th. I was already in a general cell. One man who was in the camp awaiting retrial said, “Don’t be afraid. They’ll give you 25 years, of course, but later they’ll reduce it.” He already had that camp look, very thin.
They took me to the trial. Others had also told me I’d get 25 years. I was preparing for twenty-five. I didnt know Russian, and all the trials were conducted in Russian. I had an armed escort. There was one female witness who claimed I had eliminated her husband, carried out an assassination for the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). There was this provocateur with a weapon... She lunged at me there. They read out the charges, this and that, Herchak “is sentenced to the supreme measure”—I didnt understand a thing, just stood there bravely, my hands cuffed in front of me—“of punishment”—I still didnt understand, but there was a pause—“to be shot by a firing squad.” And it hit my head—bang, like an electric shock. And the guards immediately pointed their bayonets at me—just like that!
They took me to another small room. A secretary came in and told me in Ukrainian that I had to write a plea for clemency. I said I couldnt write in Russian, so he wrote something himself, and I signed it.
They led me away, and my mind was a mess... Young guards were transporting me, and one said, “Oh, he’s so young.” I thought, “They’re going to shoot me now.” But I didnt know where or how it was done. I knew that they had once publicly hanged two men in Chortkiv—Skazinsky and another one. They brought me to the prison, opened the iron gates, drove into the courtyard, and put me in a corner against the wall. I thought, they’re going to shoot me right here. The guards waited, but no one read anything, no one shot. They took me to a holding cell. In the cell, a thought came to me that it would be better to hang myself than to wait for the firing squad. But to hang myself, I needed some kind of cord, and what could I use? My pants... my shirt. I started tearing at them, but a guard, the bastard, was watching through the peephole or a crack and said to me, “What are you doing? We’ll cuff your hands now.” They cuffed my hands and led me to a cell. A solitary cell, with a tiny little window. I sat there for a day, then another. I paced in that cell, all sorts of thoughts in my head...
One day, the cell door opened, and they brought someone in. He looked so destroyed... It was a leader from the Shumsk district of the Ternopil region. Four of them had been captured after being drugged. A cousin had given them sleeping pills, and they were caught. I got to know them later. And it became more cheerful for me, much easier to wait. He told me who had been arrested. He knew I was a nobody in the underground, while he was a leader, an educated man. Back when the Red Army was retreating, they had disarmed the retreating soldiers. One man from Eastern Ukraine joined them, disguised as a SMERSH officer. He knew all the details. They would stop people, “Hands up,” check documents, then let them go, or shoot those they needed to. They would take their weapons.
Were going to the toilet the slop bucket has to be carried. They give us a key, we unlock the chain from the bucket. Its small—I carry it myself.
V.O.: And the slop bucket was chained up?
H.H.: Yes. I carry the bucket the next day too, because why should the older man carry it? But the guard tells me, “Put the bucket down.” I put it down. “Step back.” I stepped back. “You carry it”—he says to the leader. I say, “No, no, we’ll carry it together.” “You carry it!” And he hits me hard on the arm. I think he wanted to take his anger out on me for that, too.
Another time, this happened. We needed to have our hair cut and be taken to the bathhouse. In the death row cell, they take you to the bathhouse once every 40 days. But we were lucky to be taken right away. We sat there naked, they were cutting my hair normally, but they were deliberately pulling the leaders hair. He, so thin, endured it. Later I looked at the wounds—how those guards tortured people!
I have a dream. I am in my village, very young, running through the meadows. A yellow moon is shining, there’s a yellow fog, everything is green. I have a long hazel stick, and next to me are black grass snakes, two meters long, and thin. I take them with the stick, throw them up in the air, and run. Then I look—there’s a wire laid across the field, like a telephone line at the front. I pull and pull that wire and feed it into some hole. I ask my cellmates what it means, and one tells me, “Its some kind of road, but a road to where? To the next world?” In the evening—“Get your things ready.” This was around the fourth or fifth of March, 1953.
V.O.: March? That was the day Stalin died.
H.H.: March. I was sentenced on February 24th or 26th, and the leader a little later. Theyre leading us to the basement—its clear where. Leave your things...
I want to mention another interesting detail. I had nothing to wear, so I went to some black marketeers. The husband was a Party member he would take kirza boots and all sorts of clothes from a warehouse and give them to resellers, who would then sell them. You couldnt find such things in the stores. I found out about this, got into the house while they were asleep—I know how to get in silently through a window. I broke the window without a sound, got into the house, took a pair of kirza boots so I’d have something to wear for the winter, and took some pants. I didnt need anything else. When I got caught, they said someone had broken into their house and taken boots and pants. It must have been Herchak. They brought me in: “Whose boots are these?” I said I took them from so-and-so—what difference did it make to me. “Take them off.” I didn’t. When they were taking me to the death row cell, it was the same thing again: “Take off the stolen boots.” They only gave me some old military shirt without buttons and old breeches, probably from some insurgent who had been shot (by then they werent shooting people in Ternopil anymore the entire Prykarpattia District was executed in Lviv), patched up and torn in one place, breeches that were a bit too short for me. For footwear, they gave me a pair of womens shoes that didnt fit. They had high heels, which they ripped off. So I became very tall, my leg bare at the bottom because I had no long johns. They led me to the cellar, and I looked so ridiculous. Our hands were cuffed behind our backs.
V.O.: Were your hands cuffed the whole time in the cell?
H.H.: No, no, no, not in the cell. The guards led everyone to interrogations like that, but they always cuffed me. That’s why the guys asked, “Why do they cuff you when they take you out?” I had to confess because they suspected I was a terrorist. A legend about me was going around—the guards liked it. One time they were leading me: “We have to cuff you,” one said with a Ukrainian accent, “Yeah, we know who you are.” And I ask, “Who am I?” “Aha, and how you smacked that one...” Apparently, I had hit him so hard he needed medical treatment. The one at the train station in Ternopil, remember?
V.O.: Ah, the one you kicked in the head.
H.H.: No, the one I kicked in the head was probably finished. This was when I was at Yosyp Gevchuk’s... I told that guy, “Turn around,” and—wham—I hit his arm, and then with my elbow from above when he bent over. “Good job, he’s such a scumbag,” the guard said. They didn’t like him for some reason. So that was the legend going around.
They took me and the leader to a deep cellar, the ceiling was so high, there were tables with our case files and our records on them, some people in white coats were standing there—that’s it, they’re going to do us in now... At the end of the cellar corridor, there was another passage, more stairs, a black door. I thought, they’ll probably bump us off there. “To the wall!” We turned to face the wall, hands behind our backs—I have a drawing of this scene somewhere.
V.O.: There were two of you?
H.H.: And the leaders accomplice, Kozaryk—his pseudonym was Smeryk—he was old, wounded many times. He even peed into the slop bucket with a gurgling sound. Poor man. And two young guys my age: Yurko Hutsalo, pseudonym Yura, and Volodymyr Ostrovsky, he was a paramedic in the camps, also young. There were five of us, standing and looking at each other. I thought, “Everything’s fine.” I looked around—there were two guards next to each of us. And we were standing against the wall, about two meters apart. And those guys were by the tables on the right. I watched them gathering the files, each one walking up, looking. They threw canvas bags over our heads, like hoods, and pulled them tight so that only our eyes were visible, and no one could recognize us. They led us not into the cellar, but upstairs. When they brought us out, it was almost dusk, but still light. Into a “Black Maria.” They drove and drove and drove, then brought us somewhere—“Get out!” A train was standing on some siding—I hadnt been transported in one of those “Stolypin” cars before. They held us by the arms. I glanced back at the city, he didnt say anything. They led us into the Stolypin car, and the common criminals were watching: “They brought the death-row inmates.” The car fell silent they were so scared of the death-row prisoners. They put us in a separate Stolypin compartment, with bars, but they didn’t uncuff us. Just my hands in front, but my hands were like this and that. (How?) I was silent.
We arrived in Lviv in the morning. They drove us through the city in a “Black Maria.” We saw that the flags were lowered. The leader said, “Our guys must have taken out someone important.” We didnt yet know that Stalin had croaked—how could we have known. We arrived, and they stripped us naked. They seemed to have it in for me, and Yurko was muscular too. A shakedown, they looked everywhere, made us squat—the usual procedure. One came up to me—I was still naked—wrapped a towel around me and pulled me toward him like this. I thought he was going to strangle me, and the other guys thought so too. “You scum!” he said and let me go. What did I, poor soul, know? They took me and Yurko Hutsalo to cell number 27, the block for death-row inmates. It was at the Brygidky monastery, probably on the top floor. I should go there, if they’d let me in, to take pictures, to remember it all...
Our window looked out onto the courtyard. We could hear the common criminals singing. It was the first time I heard the song “The Long Road Ahead.” And I love to sing. I had a habit of pacing the cell was so narrow that I could touch both walls with my hands. Yurko liked to lie down, but I would walk. I dont know how long we were there. They moved Yurko to a separate cell with some guy who had been in the German police, last name Biloshchak, to cell number ten, and me to the one next door. It would be interesting to meet those guys, so I could write down those numbers accurately...
I want to tell you about those cells, how they were built. The cells face the courtyard, so here’s the courtyard, a corridor, then more cells, heres the washbasin, more cells, heres Yurko Hutsalo, and another corridor. In this corridor, the windows had no glass, just small bars. And here, again, there were windows, quite large, with double bars—large and small. So we could see the painted roofs, the antennas. If someone was singing in the street—some drunks, even Poles were singing—we could sometimes hear it in our cell. You could see the sky, and sometimes a bird would land—that was a joy. You could talk there because there were no windows—someone was taken to be shot... There were three or four such cells, and further on there were some partitions.
I end up with a man who was unshaven, with a small mustache, in military breeches, just without a belt, a nice-looking man, shorter than me. I greeted him, told him who I was. He was a leader from the Rudky (Is that right?) district, Ivan Andrukhiv, pseudonym Dorko, from the village of Zaluzhzhia or Zabuzhzhia. I asked people in Lviv—they didnt know him. If his relatives were around, I would tell them how he behaved. He had already been there for several months, his accomplices had been shot—a provocateur group had turned them in. I told him briefly: Liutyi, Ostap, and one other—I forgot his name—had already been shot they behaved very heroically. He said, “They will take you to be shot. They keep you,” he said, “for two, three, well, maybe four months.” So I was calm—not calm, but I already had the benefit of his experience. He said, “They’re keeping me, obviously, for identification purposes. Im clearly not just an ordinary person.” He sang beautifully I learned from him, you know, “The reed was my cradle”? But he knew a completely different melody, a beautiful voice (Sings): *“Очерет мені був за колиску, в болотах я родився і зріс. Я люблю свою хату поліську, я люблю свій зажурений ліс.”* I learned it from him. Now, when I perform it on the guitar, people ask where I learned it: “I learned it on death row.” He told me a lot. At night, after lights-out, after 12, at 12 o’clock they take people to be shot. They put some soft flooring in the corridor so you couldnt hear the guard approaching the peephole. Is that in all prisons, or not?
V.O.: Well, when I was in the Kyiv KGB pre-trial detention center in 1973, there was a carpet in the corridor, and the cops wore slippers on top of that.
H.H.: Oh, we didnt have that, but there was a carpet, so I thought maybe it was only there.
V.O.: There was nothing like that in the Zhytomyr prison. That was a general prison, and this was the KGB.
V.O.: So, it’s not new. Still, you could hear when someone fell, when someone was being dragged. I don’t know why they were falling, what they were doing there. Just a peek through the peephole—glance, glance, glance.
V.O.: They look in?
H.H.: Yes. One night—were about to lie down—we hear them coming. They look through our peephole. They often looked because I was so young. Click-click. I’m uneasy, but Im not expecting to be shot. We’re standing there—me here, Dorko there—they come in, an officer with a folder under his arm, looking like a Gestapo agent. Everyone is looking at me. And in the doorway, there are many heads—I even made a painting from memory—of them looking at me. I think theyre looking at me because they always looked at me, being so young. I looked very young, but I was quite sturdy. Well, theyre about to take Dorko, because its his time, hes already waiting. And I see that officer open his folder and look at me: “Last name?” I say, “Herchak, Hryhoriy.” “Year of birth?” I told him. He looked at me, then at the photograph. “Turn to your profile.” I turned—he checked the photograph again. “Get your things ready.” I roll up my thin mattress—what things were there to get. And in my head, a thought, and my mother, and everything, my God, it would have been better if I had never started this struggle—its terrifying, I can hardly breathe... I didnt beg, but Dorko calmly offers me his hand, shakes it: “Friend, dont worry, well meet again soon over there,”—they didn’t interfere, by the way—“where our young lives were given for Ukraine. Our names will be carved in golden letters in history,”—or something like that. And Im thinking, I confess honestly: “My God, what do I need this Ukraine for, I want to live,”—perhaps no one would admit this now—“I want to live, what are you telling me.” I gave him my hand, like a clay hand, a cotton hand. He squeezed it firmly—I couldnt and didnt want to squeeze back. And so, I left. I went to my death.
They led me out, not to the right, but somewhere to the left. The corridor was full of them. They’re leading me, and I’m thinking, “My God, I hope I don’t fall, I hope I don’t beg.” I walk and walk, and my heart is pounding, thud-thud-thud-thud. And then I feel myself growing numb, my heart isnt pounding so hard anymore, I start to go numb and stop feeling, just a little, and I stop being afraid—I became a hero. If someone had seen me from the side—a boy walking, not begging for anything and not falling, walking without any fear.
V.O.: You reached a certain point...
H.H.: I told this to someone, and he had a similar experience. But its interesting for psychologists. Then I look: a door is open, and they throw me in with Yurko Hutsalo. We had been in cell 27, because they had taken that policeman, Biloshchak, from his cell to be shot.
Aryeh Vudka, a Jew, interviewed me about this. Its in the book *Moskovshchyna*. (Yuriy A. Vudka. *Moskovshchyna (A Memoir-Essay)*. - London: Ukrainian Publishing , 1978. The surname is mistakenly written as “Horchak.” - pp. 111-112. - V.O.). Hutsalo tells the story of Hrytskos mock execution. He says he had never seen a person as white as chalk in his life. “Hrytsko,” he says, “stood up, took a deep breath, and his face began to turn red.” And I really did stand up like that, took a breath, felt the blood rush to my face, and I could see and hear better. Yurko thought they were taking him to be shot. That’s how it was.
Yurko Hutsalo was released and later found hanged in Kuban. His relatives from Kuban had been exiled to Siberia. He was preparing for life, wanted to have a family, children, whereas I never really prepared for life.
V.O.: And how long did he serve?
H.H.: Twenty-five years, just like me. I was released a couple of months later because they were caught a couple of months earlier. A cousin had given this group sleeping pills they fell asleep, and they were caught.
V.O.: And he was found hanged soon after his release?
H.H.: I dont know how soon, because I received a couple of letters from him. He wrote not to me, but to a religious man, Korchak. It was ostensibly to him, but it was about me.
V.O.: Was this mock execution soon after the sentencing? How much time had passed since Stalins death?
H.H.: We knew nothing on death row. We didnt know that Stalin had died. Do you know how we found out? After I was moved to Yurkos cell, a woman was distributing food, clearly a Galician, maybe from Lviv. The common criminals with short sentences served the prison—cooked food, distributed it. A guard stood next to her, but she always gave more to all the death-row inmates, or maybe just to us because we were young. She often wiped the doors, but I dont know if it was her or another woman who swept—the guard got distracted somewhere—and she said, “Boys, dont you worry, Stalin is dead, Beria has been arrested—maybe youll be pardoned too.” And she went on with her work. She wanted to say something else—but the guard was coming: “What are you whispering about there?” She said, “Nothing.” He didnt suspect a thing. That gave us a spark of hope, but many months had already passed by then.
V.O.: Beria was arrested in June.
H.H.: Yes, and this was already after June. We passed the news to all the cells everyone was listening. We didnt say how we found out. We had been on death row for 7 months and 10 days. They didnt know what to do with us.
I want to tell you about one dream. No one comes to us they take us to the bathhouse once every 40-45 days. They lead us through some kind of dungeon in that monastery. One time, this happened. Theyre leading us through the dungeon, and suddenly—stop, one guard waves his hand. We look: plumbers are fixing some alarm system or pipes. The guards didnt want the plumbers to see us, the death-row inmates. So they lead us through the courtyard, which is like a square—on one side, where the little church was, grass is growing, and on the other side are the small yards for walks. We had to cross the courtyard. Yurko fainted from the fresh air, and I also got dizzy I leaned against the wire mesh wall. We were so thin. It wasnt that they fed us so badly—you can endure that. Our tailbones, those coccyges, were sticking out.
V.O.: Yes, yes, Ive seen such thin people in captivity.
H.H.: Thats how we were.
THE PARDON
V.O.: And how did they announce the change in your sentence?
H.H.: They took me in the evening. There was a spark of hope. I said goodbye to Yurko Hutsalo. They took me to the right this time, to where the senior officer of the death-row block was. Some officer was sitting there, read me the change of sentence, and said, “Give thanks.” I dont know to whom. Was Voroshilov still alive then?
V.O.: In 1953, Voroshilov was appointed Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet.
H.H.: It was as if Voroshilov had signed it—“you will live.”
V.O.: And how did you take it? You tell it so simply, but it must have been a momentous event!
H.H.: I was so numb... But since they took me during the day, there was some hope, because I knew they took people to be shot at night. After that, they took me to the bathhouse, where they gave me prisoners clothes, because I had those womens shoes, that little shirt... They led me to another cell. There were about thirty people in the cell they were allowed to receive parcels. And everyone was like, “Where did you come from?” I was white, thin, maybe I looked a certain way. “I’m from death row.” My God, they were astonished, asking questions, giving me food, but I was afraid to eat it. A few days later, the guys said I had already put on some weight, a bit of color had returned to my face, thanks only to the walks and the moral atmosphere in that cell. The guys all slept, worried about the upcoming transport, but I just kept walking, started doing exercises, even started hitting the wall. And Yurko Hutsalo started smoking. Almost no one in the underground smoked. He used to smoke but quit in the underground. They would take us to the toilet to empty the slop bucket, and the guards would smoke there and throw away their cigarette butts. He would collect them in his pocket. The guard saw it—well, go ahead and collect them. Yurko would take cotton from his mattress, roll it, rub it on the chessboard, the cotton would catch fire from the friction, and he would smoke. One guard saw it, this “red-faced bastard,” and would say to us, “Well, young bandits, give me your bowls, had your grub.” I’d think, “What a scumbag.” He was so scary, pockmarked. And then he’d light up. As soon as he lit up, he’d throw the cigarette butt past the bowls: “What, you ate?” Yurko would pick it up. Sometimes the common criminals in the next block would throw out bread, because they got parcels, and he would bring it back in a newspaper. For us, bread was like gold. That’s how he was. One time he really got burned. A Galician woman was distributing food. She scooped up some porridge with a ladle—the handle broke. She moved the container away from the door and went to the first floor to get another ladle. That guard then quickly—and we had already eaten—“...... ................. ........ [unintelligible], quick, your bowl, and give me yours.” But there was nothing to scoop with, so he scooped porridge for us from our bowl into another bowl. And there was a rug there, and some dripped. He quickly wiped it with a handkerchief and closed the food hatch. That was the kind of man he was. When he was on duty in that block and saw me walking, he’d say to the others, “Scum, bastards, why are you lying around, youll croak. He’ll survive. You have to work in the taiga, you have to be tough, chop wood. He’ll survive, see, he’s walking, doing sports.” And I, to get a bit of air, for some variety, would ask, “Permission to wash the floor.” And the floor there was dirty, asphalt. They’d take me to the toilet, I’d get a basin of water, take a rag, a mop—and theres my exercise. Its pleasant for the prisoners, and I got my exercise, saw something new, breathed the air in the corridor. A few times, he secretly passed me sandwiches. When I handed him the bowl, he’d slip it in. I shared them with Vasyl Zhovtoholovyi. There were people like that. If only I could meet him...
From there, we were transferred to a smaller cell across the courtyard. I don’t remember how many of us were there, maybe eight. And we got death-row inmates again—Ivan Kruzhan, Vasyl Zhovtoholovyi. Ivan Kruzhan had even fought against the Germans, an insurgent, he didnt go abroad with the UPA. He told me, by the way, how they passed through a Hungarian division. The Hungarians let them through, threw them bandages, cigarettes, clothes, even weapons. He said the Hungarians were very surprised and let them pass through their section of the front to the Soviet Carpathians, to the Soviet . And they began their struggle. Then the UPA went abroad, but he remained in the underground and was caught only when I was. I dont know how he was betrayed. He, Ivan Kruzhan, was from Lavochne in the Lviv region. I don’t know where he is now. He was much older, he was in Vorkuta, poor man, it was terrible. I really wanted to send him an ex-libris. He told me that when he came home, where his house used to be—there were only nettles. He cried and returned to that miserable Vorkuta.
One day they called that Ivan in. He said they asked about me—it was strange because who was I to them? He said, “They asked a lot about you, how he is, what his future plans are.” I was very wary because all sorts of people were in there.
TRANSPORT TO VORKUTA
From there they shipped us out. I ended up in a large transit cell. Within half a day, it was full of common criminals, some dressed in civilian clothes. They spoke mostly Russian, some Ukrainian, some in a broken language. They looked at me, I seemed suspicious to them. “What’s your article?” I didn’t know which article, I didn’t know you werent supposed to say you were a political prisoner and had been on death row. I said, “I was sentenced to be shot.” My God! They were all over me: “You son of a bitch, you Bandera scum, you bastard!”—and started beating me. But some guys were sitting there with big sacks, maybe six of them, one in breeches: “Hey,” he said in Ukrainian, “break it up!”—and they took me in with them. They were some Galicians, also common criminals, I don’t know what they were in for. They saved me. Thats how it was. Im telling you the short version.
After that, they took me to Kyiv for transit. It was quiet there. From Kyiv to Leningrad, probably to the “Kresty” prison. A huge-e-e cell, and you could see the Nevsky Lavra, some church—I didnt know what church it was. They gave us aluminum mugs, as they called them, cups. I got a nail somewhere, made a kind of stylus on the cement, and drew churches for the prisoners, a kind of engraving. If I found that cup now, it could be given to a museum. I didn’t make one for myself. There were all kinds of people—Finns, Karelians, Balts, Poles, few Ukrainians. They said that from there, the road led to Vorkuta, Inta.
[End of Cassette 3]
V.O.: This is the fourth cassette, Hryhoriy Herchak. Today is June 12, 2003. We continue.
H.H.: And where did I leave off?
V.O.: At “Kresty,” from where the path leads to Vorkuta, Inta, and where else?
H.H.: And to Pechora. There were different people there, especially many Balts. There were Polish insurgents from the Home Army. They had caught someone there and were transporting them as witnesses. I learned a lot about the camps there. They kept us for over a month. There were fights, there was everything. They respected me because I was so young and quiet. They received parcels there—so sometimes someone would give me their porridge, an extra ration, and I started to gain weight. I remember a meeting with some Poles as they were returning from Poland to Vorkuta, somewhere in Komi. “Tell us about the underground.” I told them, they liked it. They told me that they had almost no one left in their underground. That the Poles also had bunkers. When they were leaving, in addition to food, they gave me a warm woolen sweater and a woolen scarf—that was a real treasure, because it would be cold there.
The Leningraders especially wound me up. I remember one saying, “My God, he’s so young, so handsome! I hope those Asians over there don’t take advantage of him—dont turn him into a thief or a drug addict, a chifir-addict.” I didn’t understand all of that... And another one said (I had already started learning Russian), “Oh, no, the western guys are strong—they’ll take him under their wing, they won’t let that happen.” And that really could have happened they opened my eyes to it.
I met a Lithuanian, just like me—Albinas Rozas, just as young, a year older. A blond kid. He moved in with me, we were like brothers—he was from the underground and so was I, we had the same problems, the same kind of provocations. They would give people sleeping pills. I remember he had a toothbrush and he had carved the Lithuanian coat of arms on it. I never met him again.
Here’s something else that happened. The guys knew I had been on death row and then pardoned. They took one of our death-row inmates, I think it was Ostrovsky, for interrogation in Lviv, and he ended up in a cell with someone who was about to be released. He hadnt been tried, he was from my village. He told him that Herchak was in the cell with him. “What, he’s alive?! They told his mother he was sentenced to death and executed.” “No,” he says, “he was pardoned.” “Oh, and she already had a memorial service, a panakhyda, for him.” Whether he passed the message to my mother, I dont know. And those guys asked if my mother knew. I said, “She doesn’t.” They started thinking about how to send a letter. Someone got a piece of paper, got a pencil, I wrote a letter, but there was no envelope, so I wrote the address on the outside. We went out for a walk. I didnt know Russian, so someone there passed the letter to a girl from Leningrad. Later, from Vorkuta, I write a letter to my mother, and my mother replies, “I know, because someone wrote me a letter from Leningrad saying that you are alive.”
KOMI, THE LAND OF CAMPS
We were sent on a prisoner transport. The journey was long. When we entered the tundra of the Komi ASSR, I was astonished that I had ended up in a land of camps. On both sides, at night, there were lights—you could see the zones, the camps. I ended up in Vorkuta, in a transit point at a punishment block. We went to eat in the punishment blocks dining hall. The camp was called “First Kilometer,” by the river. I met many people there. One day, I was invited to a barrack in the punishment block. There were many Ukrainians there. They told me I should stay there, not go to work. I was already thinking of staying, but I met a man from a neighboring village who worked as a cook. He said, “Don’t stay, go, youll see. We have a punishment block here, you can always refuse to work. You’ll meet people there, maybe you’ll get an easy job.” So I went, and ended up at mine number three.
V.O.: Where was this?
H.H.: Vorkuta. This was already May 1954. There was still snow on the ground, but the sun was already warming things up, so the old men were already sunning themselves on the ledge by the barrack. I probably have it written down somewhere, because in the camp, I used to write down when things happened. There was already a great deal of relief in the camps because Stalin had died. Prisoners were even allowed to wear some civilian clothes. They even let women from the cultural brigade into our zone they were artists. They were brought in under guard. There were many Germans—there was a German barrack. I got to know them. There were also prisoners without escorts—those who had short sentences.
V.O.: And they slept in the zone, right?
H.H.: They were brought into the zone to sleep. They brought a lot of news, even brought in a camera. They took a few pictures of me there with my countrymen. A parcel arrived for me, I opened it, and inside was lard in a small jar made of zinc sheet, with a small window on top, soldered with zinc. Back when I was hiding from arrest among the Lemkos, with a man named Oleksa Popel, who later came in voluntarily, he was a tinsmith, repaired sewing machines and clocks. And I had a knack for it, I helped him cut the tin, they dressed me as a Lemko, and I passed for a Lemko, learned their language. One time they went to visit someone, and I was sitting and sitting in the attic, thinking they were gone, so I would go down to the house and take apart and clean the sewing machine, and then he could fix it later, so it wouldnt rust. I took it apart, cleaned what needed cleaning, reassembled it, oiled it, and was adjusting it. Suddenly, a knock at the door. I look to see whos there. “Hryniu, open the door. Open the door, open it,” in the Lemko dialect. I opened the door. “Hide, Hryniu, the Muscovites are in the village!” I thought, “My God, how does she know that?” I hid because “the Muscovites are in the village.” I thought, “My God! How does she know that?” I hid. The owners came back, and I asked how she knew. “Oh, the sky and the Lemkos know,” as if Lemkos dont betray people, something like that.
When I opened that jar of lard, I ate and ate, and gave some to others...
V.O.: Who was it from, from your mother?
H.H.: From my mother. But there was a greeting from Oleksa Popel. I ate and ate, and when I finished, I looked at the bottom... He had made that little jar himself. Back then, all sorts of pots, buckets, pans, when they had holes, were soldered with tin. That was a problem after the war. It was written there: “Hryniu, dont worry, we are praying for you.”
V.O.: What, written right on the tin?
H.H.: Im walking back from work, lost in thought—“See, they are praying for me there,”—and I feel so light. “Halt,” it’s the zone! I return to reality again. Such simple words, but it was so pleasant that he had given me such a gift.
V.O.: And how many letters could you write at that time?
H.H.: Maybe once a month, but Ive already forgotten, and I dont know if I have it written down.
V.O.: And could people have paper on them, books?
H.H.: Yes. I even drew. I got colored pencils, then watercolors. They put me on the third floor, and I see a painter from Kharkiv, his last name was Osypa. I had just started drawing, and I loved to draw even before. It was interesting for me to meet such a professional. I had already started painting with watercolors. Then I earned some money, and back then they gave you money in hand. There was a time when you could even have long hair.
V.O.: Until what year was that?
H.H.: After Stalins death. Then they quickly banned it again.
V.O.: That was at the end of the fifties when Khrushchev began to tighten the regime. You said you were in about 34 camps?
H.H.: No, 31 camps and a prison.
V.O.: And all of that in Vorkuta?
H.H.: No, no, not only. After that, there was a strike I was a participant in the strike.
V.O.: It would be interesting if you could tell us about the strikes.
THE STRIKE
H.H.: There were several clashes with the guards, because the guys were already standing up for their rights. The common criminals were on the other side of the fence, there were few of them left, and they moved us there. There were over 4,000 of us, maybe even 5,000. We worked at the third mine. And the common criminals were moved to our zone. And there was some kind of clash with the guards. There were times when the guards even shot at prisoners. Theyd say, “Step out of the line”—and shoot him, claiming he was trying to escape. There was a strike at another camp, they shot some people somewhere else. There was a man named Dobroshtan who led the strike, I think he was a counter-intelligence major who was imprisoned. I worked as an electrician with him.
V.O.: Dobroshtan... Ive come across that name in literature somewhere, but is he still alive?
H.H.: You should ask Yevhen Proniuk about that. It was a Sunday, a day off. The sun doesnt set there for the whole day, it just gets lower. You can sunbathe all day long, standing in the sunbeams. The punishment block there is separated by a small fence. We were walking around, when suddenly we heard screams. What happened? The common criminals were playing cards, and when one ran out of things to bet, he would wager a person, who would then have to be killed. They had it in for one political prisoner, as they say. Someone said, You lost—go kill that political. And our guys were sitting at a table in the yard, two from here, two from there. And they saw that guy with some kind of nail: “Run!” And he jumped over the table, and a fight broke out there. There were more of the common criminals, and our guys yelled, “Theyre killing our men!” They rushed the fence. The guards somehow didnt dare to shoot. The common criminals started to flee into the forbidden zone, and they werent shot. They caught one and mixed him with mud. Everyone rushed in, some with stones, some with whatever they could find. It was terrible. After that, they declared their demands, announced a strike. They elected representatives from each nation, from the large nations, and even from the Moldovans. Dobroshtan was in command of the Ukrainians.
V.O.: If you could specify when this was...
H.H.: 1955. I have it written down on a diagram. My mother collected my letters, I could orient myself by those letters. The strike was sometime in the middle of summer. They hadnt cut off our water yet. The demands were roughly these: release the minors—they bring in maimed people from the mine almost every day (look whats happening in Ukraine now, and imagine what it was like in the zek mines!)—the maimed and the dead. Their legs were crushed, and they still kept them. So, release the disabled, reduce their sentences. Take women off heavy labor, because they worked at the brick factory, digging something—“for women are our future mothers!” Those were the demands. I was still new, nobody trusted me, and I didnt really get involved in that sort of thing. And then suddenly, a strike. They guarded the zone because some snitches were trying to escape. Several snitches were knifed. No one was allowed into the zone, only doctors and the authorities.
V.O.: And how long did it last?
H.H.: I dont know, about ten days. There were no wooden fences there, because theres no forest. Only between the zones were there wooden fences, but otherwise it was barbed wire, and we could see the tundra, and on the other side there were two two-story buildings.
V.O.: And how many rows of barbed wire?
H.H.: One main one, then a second one, and the same on the other side—so thats three, and then another one, between which the guard walks. And behind that wire, all sorts of tricks—an alarm system, a Bruno spiral that tangles your leg, all sorts of things. And of course, watchtowers, flares. And from there, in the two-story buildings, lived the free workers, who could see everything in the zone. In the common criminals zone, there was a stage, a kind of raised platform. And a square in front of the dining hall—the “stolovaya,” as they called it. And a bugle would sound there—we go to a meeting, to discuss everything. We stood guard at night, I even did it once with a Lithuanian. Those were the white nights, but to make sure no one got in, to prevent a surprise attack and being knifed by the guards, we had our own security, police, and investigators—but those who werent in the know didnt know about it.
Around 12 oclock at night, the Lithuanian and I hear a small plane flying. We know it shouldnt be flying here, because we know where the airfield is and when planes fly. Who is that flying? Theyve already surrounded us and are announcing over a loudspeaker: if you dont end the strike in an hour and go to work, we will use weapons. Once, twice. Outside the zone, soldiers and tractors lined up to break down the forbidden zone fence. People are already preparing, not sleeping. That plane landed, and after a while, we see some cars driving up. And passenger cars. About ten guards enter the zone, but without weapons, and some general, I dont remember his last name. It turns out hes a representative flown in from Moscow. They quickly announced for everyone to gather in the square, on the stage—a wooden platform. They covered tables there, took a red cloth from the club. Were waiting. They came out. The guards, athletic-looking, stood by. Representatives of the camp. Some Vorkuta authorities and this one from Moscow. And someone else was there. The one from the center immediately goes on the attack. To us who were on guard: “What are you doing walking around, it’s lights-out!” We say, “We have a strike.” And they reply, “What strike—it’s a work stoppage.” A strike was already something political.
People came out and brought the disabled: in the front rows were those without legs, covered in scabs... They brought them out on stretchers. Further back, the minors sat on benches, and behind them, people were standing. Outside the zone, free people came out, climbed onto balconies, onto roofs to watch. They kept shooing them away—but they wouldnt leave. “Well, who is the leader here?” Dobroshtan comes forward, so trim—“I am!” He had been a major in counter-intelligence. The representative saw that this was no joke. “What is the reason?” This and that: to be able to write more letters, for slightly better food, for more frequent visits, to release the disabled and minors. He listened and listened and suddenly said, “We dont decide this, Moscow deals with it. Write, complain. Tomorrow, immediately to work.” And he started to leave. But Dobroshtan—no one would have believed it—slammed his strong, athletic hand on the table—bam! “Oh, really? So this is how Moscow deals with us,”—I’m trying to quote approximately—“this is how Moscow deals with us?” And then: “Comrades! Everyone to the wire, immediately!” I remember it like it was yesterday: everyone roared—no fear—it was mass courage, I had no fear, and apparently, no one else did either. And everyone started to move. But that guy wasnt stupid he saw that everyone would go to their deaths. “To the wire, to the forbidden zone”—that meant death, because they would shoot. Then he—I was surprised—took off his cap and waved it: “Comrades! I beg you, calm down, calm down!” Dobroshtan raised his hand—everyone stopped, everyone breathing heavily, the whole square, thousands of people. “I cant resolve all the issues, but I will immediately resolve the issues of the disabled, the women, and the minors. They will start reviewing them now, you will see.” He left. They talked about something else there. And indeed, within an hour, they had set up tables outside the zone, brought the case files, and began to review the cases of the minors.
The next day, we went to work. I was considered an activist, although I wasnt really that active. As an activist, they took me to the fortieth mine. There was a hunger strike there.
OZERLAG
As an activist, they took me to a special punishment camp in Ozerlag, in the Irkutsk region, zone 308, near the Bratsk Sea—the sea wasnt there yet, in the Bratsk district.
V.O.: Some say “OZERLAG” stands for “special closed-regime camps,” or something like that?
H.H.: I dont know, maybe. I think thats enough for today.
V.O.: What, are you tired already?
H.H.: Yes, Ive had enough. Its an awful lot.
V.O.: On this note, the conversation with Mr. Hryhoriy Herchak on June 12, 2003, came to a halt.
V.O.: June 16, 2003, we continue.
H.H.: So, when we arrived at the 308th punishment camp in the taiga—now the Bratsk Sea has flooded it, but it wasnt there then—a supposed exiled KGB agent shows up, pretending to be some kind of sectarian. And he settled where the most Ukrainians were. Because people there mostly stuck to their nationalities. He acted as if he were unfortunate, climbed onto the top bunk, pretended to be a believer: writing something from the Bible, I dont know who he was pretending to be, but he was so modest. And next to him lay a sectarian, a man with little education, who watched what he was writing. He seemed to be writing in a notebook, but his pen wasnt leaving any marks. The old man became suspicious and said, “You know, boys,”—he was Russian—“hes writing something, but you cant see any trace.” And the boys figured out it was secret writing, that it would be developed later. There was a camp security service. The Ukrainians took him to the bathhouse at night. They say they tied his hands there and dropped him on his spine several times. I dont know if he confessed or not—they killed him. There were so many murders in the camp—but for this one, even a small plane flew in—they searched for him so hard. That had never happened before.
Then a commission from Moscow arrived, and they called me, poor soul, in for questioning. I was in a pea coat, like a common criminal, I never had any civilian clothes, while the other guys had something—a scarf or whatever. I was just learning to draw, not paying attention to that. They called me in too. A whole bunch of them are sitting there, saying, “Oh, look what old valenki hes wearing, a pea coat,”—as if I were “pretending.” I look: a small, old, blue-gray faded piece of paper is being passed from hand to hand, probably from Vorkuta. Someone had snitched on me, it seems. And I was completely innocent in this murder. They let me go. But a few days later: “Get ready for transport.” They gathered up the activists and threw me in with them. I gathered my scraps of paper, my drawings—and we were off.
They took us to a camp where they fed us twice a day. In the morning, just tea and bread, and soup twice a day. There was the “India barrack,” that is, all those thieves, the *shuriki*. They lived separately.
V.O.: “India barrack”—is that some kind of term? What does it mean?
H.H.: Oh, thats a camp term, it means all sorts of riffraff: *shuriki*, *vory*, “sixes” who help the thieves.
V.O.: And where does that word come from? Maybe its individual?
H.H.: I couldnt say. Ill try to find out, maybe I have some notes somewhere, because I have a lot of those words written down at home.
V.O.: Oh, I know where to look.
H.H.: In Jacques Rossis dictionary? Thats the Frenchman who was imprisoned with us.
V.O.: Jacques Rossi explains that *india* is “a punishment barrack, its inhabitants, also a separate individual.” Thats the first meaning. The second meaning is “one of the very lowest social strata of the GULAG.” It is written here: “Used-up human material. In many transit points, a significant number of the *india* contingent accumulates. Wherever the next transport dumps them, they, like locusts, pounce on anything edible, including garbage dumps.” That’s what *india* is. (Jacques Rossi. *The GULAG Handbook*. In two parts. Part 1. Second, expanded edition. Text verified by Natalya Gorbanevskaya - Moscow: Prosvet, 1991. - P. 136. - V.O.).
H.H.: Right, right, right. I continue. In our punishment camp, there was one “India” barrack. I ended up among the political prisoners there were different people there. They fed us twice a day there, and the gnats were terrible. What I liked there was that the prisoners didnt go out to work. Theyd say, “Were not going to work.” And anyone who did go was punished: “Why the hell are you going to work, you son of a bitch?” And I needed exactly that—not to work, because I was studying. I hadnt even finished four grades. So I found a Georgian mathematician there, and studied fine art. I even taught a Lithuanian, Petras Strumila, how to draw. He was one of the Lithuanian insurgents, Petras Strumilas, we were friends. We were at the 307th in the Bratsk district until 1956. By then, we had heard that a Moscow commission had arrived.
THE MOSCOW COMMISSION
After Stalins death, life in the camps got easier and easier. They reviewed cases and reduced sentences by half, and then millions of zeks were released. In our administration, the Moscow commission worked at the 11th camp. They would bring people to that camp point thousands would be released, and dozens would remain. So they brought us from the special punishment camp there too. They bring us, and half the camp is already empty. They bring in camp after camp, sifting through them. But you had to go to the commission under guard. They bring me to the commission too. The guys say, “They’ll release you, you’re young, and if not, they’ll cut your sentence in half.” I go to that commission with such hope. I arrived, stood there, and they looked at me negatively again, and again I see some blue-gray piece of paper being passed from hand to hand. And everyone who takes that paper glances at me, as if to say, look what he did. I dont know what was written about me there.
V.O.: Thats a document accompanying the case file, called a “memorandum.” It contains a brief characterization of the prisoner and instructions on how to handle him. It probably mentioned the assassination attempt and your participation in the strike. They didnt release people like that.
H.H.: That could be. I returned with such hope, but I received a rejection. My friends were released, but I was left with my 25 years.
V.O.: Did they ask you anything during this?
H.H.: They asked about the strikes. When I said that we went on strike, that we protested, they corrected me: “Not a strike, but a work stoppage.” He shouted at me. Because a “work stoppage” is something non-political. But its also true that I didnt beg. They told me later that I should have begged, said that I wouldnt do it again. I didnt beg not because I was so proud, I just didnt know I should, because I would have begged and maybe they would have cut my sentence in half. In short, they refused. Only two incomplete barracks of us were left in a large zone.
V.O.: And how many were there before?
H.H.: We werent there, we were from the punishment camp.
THE FIGHT WITH THE THIEVES
There werent many of us left, less than five hundred. We were living our lives, when suddenly—a transport of common criminals. One after another, one after another they brought them. We then occupied two barracks and set up a guard, stood watch all night so they wouldnt knife us, because there were cases in Vorkuta where common criminals burned political prisoners, and the guards didnt defend them until they had burned to death. There was no peace, there were various conflicts. There was a small store, a little shop, whitewashed. It was under repair, you couldnt go in to buy an envelope, toothpaste, or candy. They didnt make us work, they said, “We dont need your work.” I was walking with a Lithuanian. I remember these two-meter-tall Latvians playing volleyball with Ukrainians. By the little window of the store, the guys were standing in line, poor things, because it was under repair and the door was locked. Some Masha, a free worker, was selling cigarettes, stamps, toothpaste, and so on. People were standing there in a civilized manner, chatting, about forty or fifty of them. Suddenly, two *blatnye* (professional criminals) come along—why should they stand in line with the common folk! There was a kind of ledge there, and one of them steps onto it: “Masha, give me this and that!” Everyone is silent, because they know what kind of people they are. But there was this Fedir Kandiuk, he was from the UPA police. When it was disbanded, he hid in Georgia. He had blue eyes. They found him in Georgia, and he was imprisoned with us. This Fedir was strong, stocky, not very tall, but athletic. We watch as he grabs that *blatnoy* by the scruff of the neck from the ledge—and the guy falls. The second one goes for him, but Fedir uses some kind of move—and hes on the ground too. The common criminals see this and come running with knives, sharpened nails. And those Ukrainians and Latvians who were playing, they all grabbed a stone or a stick—a fight was about to break out! But the senior thief came, saw that it wasnt worth fighting, broke it up, and things calmed down.
Then the *blatnye* robbed the dining hall. There was going to be a fight. So they led us out of the zone with our things for a shakedown. They deliberately let them back into the zone first, and were supposed to let us in after. But the common criminals stood there with knives and stones and wouldnt let us in. I didnt take part in that, but those Lithuanians and Ukrainians said, “Let us through, well go.” But the guards said, “We won’t let you, they’ll knife you.” And they kept us outside the zone for a whole day. And it was cold. From there, they moved us to Vikhorevka—there was a hospital and two barracks there. We sat in Vikhorevka, freezing.
Ah, and there was another provocation! They wanted to throw us into a collaborators camp. And the collaborators would knife and beat the political prisoners. They did it on purpose, as if there was nowhere else to put us, so into the collaborators camp. But some free worker who was delivering water in a barrel to the camp whispered to the zeks not to enter that camp: “Boys, the collaborators are already waiting for you with knives.” And our guys refused to go. We waited all night, freezing, some of the old men suffered greatly. And only after that did they move us to the hospital in Vikhorevka, because there were a couple of barracks there. There were scandals with the thieves there again, but our guys won that time.
In Vikhorevka, they moved us to the 26th camp point. This was already 1957. They fenced off two barracks for us there, and we went to the dining hall in the common criminals zone. Everything was fine there. But one time we went to the movies in the dining hall/club. When it was time to leave—the barrack was surrounded, knives, stones, they wanted to beat us. The guys started to defend themselves. It would have been terrible, but apparently, one of the Chekists ordered them to defend us. They moved us from the 26th back to the 307th. (Or 308th?) This was still 1957.
To that 307th, they brought guys from Karaganda, from the Kazakh camps, so-called nationalists, as they said, and threw them in with us. And that barrack was an “India” barrack. But then they started taking people to work, but not everyone, only those who really wanted to. And I didnt want to, of course, I was busy with my own things. I met Volodymyr Pokotylo there. By the way, he still lives in Kyiv. He was learning to play the accordion, and he himself is an artist. I got to know him. But we didnt know those Karaganda guys yet.
There was a Belarusian foreman in charge of our guys, but he was apparently a good man, because our guys stood up for him. The *blatnye* had secretly imposed a tribute on him, to take from the zeks and pay them. He refused and probably had already made an agreement with those zeks from Karaganda that they were ready for a fight. But we knew nothing. We had, I think, already had breakfast, when someone came running: “The ‘India’ is attacking the Karaganda guys!” Well, I was still living with the memory of how they burned the barracks in Vorkuta and the authorities turned a blind eye, waiting until they burned down, and only a few people escaped. By the way, one of those who broke through is still alive, Mykhailo Molokh. It would be interesting to interview him. I have his details written down somewhere, how many were wounded, how many died. The barrack was burning, and anyone who tried to escape was either knifed or beaten with stones. But he and a Belarusian, Hryhoriy Babishchevych, somehow shielded themselves with stools and escaped, broke through. I even made an ex-libris for Hryhoriy. He had connections with the Ukrainian insurgents.
Still living with that fear, I took a winter hat from a Belarusian to protect my head, grabbed some kind of stake, and ran out—my God, there were so many of them, that “India”!.. The Lithuanians for some reason didnt join the fight, they just came out of the barrack and stood in a line. The fight was between our guys and the thieves. Our guys were already chasing them, they were running into their barrack. I remember a guy named Hryts and the poet Valentin Sokolov were for some reason with those thieves. Sokolov had two knives in his hands, and Hryts had a stake from a bunk—they had dismantled the bunks. But what could Sokolov do with that knife, he was so frail. A good man, wrote beautiful poems, but for some reason, he was with those thieves, though he wasnt a recidivist.
V.O.: Yuriy Lytvyn mentioned him, because he was also in Vikhorevka.
H.H.: In what light?
V.O.: As a poet, and he spoke well of him.
H.H.: And so Im watching, and this Khmelyk—he was from somewhere in the Drohobych region—approaches Sokolov and—wham!—not even on the head, but on the legs. He fell and dropped the knife. I dont know what would have happened next. And they had already dashed into the barrack. I looked like a *shurik*—because of that hat on me and being dressed so poorly, while all the political prisoners tried to dress better... Those Karaganda guys didnt know who I was. To stop them from getting through the door, those common criminals had these crowbars or knives on sticks. I somehow slipped past the windows and stealthily approached the door to grab that stick with the knife. But the Karaganda guys didnt know I was a political, they thought I was running away, and they came at me. One would have hit me in the head from behind, but another one said, “Dont hit him, hes one of ours!”—and he stopped. Oh, that was terrible. I moved away from that wall. But suddenly the garrison saw that our side was winning, and then the submachine gunners came in and started shooting. I remember a religious Georgian, a mathematician, they considered him a Ukrainian nationalist because he always defended the prisoners rights just like the Banderites. There were three such foreigners there. That mathematician said, “Grishenka, run, a bullet can ricochet!” He was right: when they shoot at the ground, a bullet can ricochet, wound, and kill. So I ran away. That was the kind of fight it was.
SIBERIAN CAMPS
After that, they sorted us out, punished us. This was at the 307th, in 1957. And from there, they moved us to the 04th. This was already 1958, a camp point for invalids. When we arrived at the 04th, they divided us: the healthy were taken to the work camp, and the sick to the invalid camp. And a Lithuanian, Petras Strumilas—I dont know what he was sick with—told me, “Pretend you dont have an arm.” I tucked my arm under my pea coat, the sleeve was hanging empty, and he helped me carry my things. And apparently, it wasnt written down that I was an invalid. They just looked—it was very risky. I “passed” as an invalid into the 04th camp. I met many people there, even Poles.
I remember one incident. Rumors were already circulating that they were going to transfer the Poles to Poland, those from the Home Army. And then they did transfer them, so they could serve out their sentences in Poland. I didnt have a guitar there. I went to where most of the Poles were, but there were common criminals there too. And the Poles received parcels from the Red Cross as foreigners. I went in on a Sunday, I could smell coffee, the Poles were drinking coffee, speaking Polish. I couldnt speak Polish then, I was just learning, but I was learning the songs.
[End of track]
H.H.: I borrowed a guitar from a common criminal. And he says, “Play something, Grisha.” And I deliberately played a Polish song (Sings):
Jak to na wojence ładnie,
Jak to na wojence ładnie,
Kiedy ułan z konia spadnie,
Kiedy ułan z konia spadnie.
Kule jego nie żałują,
Kule jego nie żałują,
Kopytami go tratują,
Kopytami go tratują.
And I strummed the guitar in such a way that it sounded like a cavalryman riding. The barrack fell silent, the Poles stopped eating, they were listening. And they came up to me: “Skąd pan jest? (Where are you from, sir?)” I said, “From Ukraine.” “And where did you learn that? We thought you were Polish.” I said, “Well, Im learning Polish and I love to play the songs.” They invited me over, treated me to things, called me over to play for them. They werent workers there, but invalids—almost no one worked. They even wanted to arrange for me (I had contact with the consulate) to be officially recognized as Polish by birth, despite my surname Herchak, so I could leave, and to write to my mother that I was the bastard son of a Pole. But I didnt want to write that to my mother. They said, youll go to Poland—and what do you need that kind of Poland for? We’ll gradually get you out of the country from there. Thats what they wanted to do. Such a little song—and look what it did.
Then from this invalid camp, they moved me to a camp in the taiga, where we lived in tents. There was one small barrack, but the rest lived in tents. I was friends with the artist Mytarchuk there. He still lives in Lviv, but I was told he is now blind. He himself is from the Vinnytsia or Zhytomyr region, graduated from an art school, was in the military, and joined the OUN in Lviv. A very interesting person. I learned a little about drawing from him. I, as usual, refused to work, so they put me in the punishment cell in a camp point for criminal offenders. They threw a few more of our guys in there who refused to work, the “refuseniks.” We ended up among the common criminals. This was not far from Taishet. It was very dangerous there. Interestingly, when they marched the common criminals to work there, an orchestra played, just like in the German concentration camps. But we were in the punishment cell.
And from there, into the taiga. There was some secret camp there with some underground installations, with locators. They took us to work through many checkpoints. The military was rebuilding something there. I lived there in a huge cistern, where I made myself a sleeping platform.
A group of Lithuanians and others got together and made an escape. Those prisoners were always digging—and they dug a tunnel. That Lithuanian was a geodesist, always walking around with his instruments. They caught them, of course. And they took me again as a “refusenik” to Taishet, to the 601st camp. This was already 1958. It was a large camp in a small town. I refused to work there again. They threw me into the transit prison in Taishet. A large transit prison. People are being transported through, and we are just lying there—me, the late Mykhailo Soroka, some Belarusian, and some old man from Polissia. When a spot opened up, we took places on the first floor by the window and the four of us just lay there.
Some *shuriki* came. And on the upper and lower bunks, they threw in a large transport of Jehovahs Witnesses from the outside. They had bread, they had food, still in their civilian clothes. There were about forty of them. They took us out for a one-hour walk. One of the common criminals goes up to the Jehovahs Witnesses and says something to them. And the Jehovahs Witnesses are not allowed to defend themselves, even though many of them are young. There were also some who had already been in the camps and were now imprisoned for a second time. And those guys start to rob them. Im still quiet, because there are only four of us. Suddenly, Mykhailo Mykhailovych steps out: “Get down from there!” And he grabs that *shurik* by the scruff of the neck. And one common criminal had a sharpened nail, wrapped in cloth, and hes coming with that nail. I then also jumped down from the bunk, grab my pea coat, and that old man jumps down, and the Belarusian too. And they think there are more of us, though there are only four, and one of them is an old man. I threw my pea coat over that nail and gave him a leg sweep. He fell. A fight broke out, the common criminals got agitated because they thought there were more of us. And the Jehovahs Witnesses are just watching, even though the upper bunks are full of them—they are not allowed to fight. Fortunately, there was some guard on duty who opened the door, and they immediately separated us. That’s what happened there. So that you know who Mykhailo Mykhailovych Soroka was.
V.O.: There is a historian, Lesia Bondaruk, and in her book about Mykhailo Soroka, on page 173, there is an ex-libris by Herchak for Mykhailo Soroka. Although it says “Yaroslav,” not “Hryts.” (Lesia Bondaruk. *Mykhailo Soroka. On the 90th Anniversary of his Birth and the 30th Anniversary of his Death (27.03.1991 - 16.06.1971)*. - Drohobych: Vidrodzhennia, 2001. - V.O.).
H.H.: Yes, I made that ex-libris, they found it on me somewhere. I remember, I did it with a fountain pen, it wasnt a linocut yet. And he was such an interesting man. We were on those bunks for I dont know how many months—they keep changing the people, but they keep us in the punishment cell. I was studying music as an amateur, notes, chords. He saw that and said, “O-oh!” He opens his things, and he has a theory of music book, some sheet music, because he, Mykhailo Mykhailovych Soroka, had studied in Prague. I remember when they were taking me for transport, he gave me a warm woolen blanket, a *kots* as they call it. And then I met this Kavatsiv, and I gave it to him. He was involved in the case of Cardinal Slipyj, the cardinal.
V.O.: Kavatsiv?
H.H.: Vasyl Kavatsiv, hes from Siberia.
V.O.: I recorded an interview with a priest, Yosafat Kavatsiv, in Stryi, but thats probably not him. (Kavatsiv, Yosafat, secular name Vasyl, son of Mykhailo and Varvara, b. 5.01.1934 in the village of Yablunivka, Stryi district, Lviv region. Greek-Catholic priest of the Basilian Order, repressed. Arrested in March 1957, 3 years of forced labor. Ordained 24.05.1962. Arrested 17.03.1981. Served time in experimental camp No. 319/7 in the village of Perekhrestivka near Romny in the Sumy region. Released in March 1986. Lives in Stryi. - V.O.).
H.H.: Hes from around there, it seems, from those parts. And the late Cardinal Slipyj was in exile somewhere in Siberia. He was imprisoned in connection with his case, because they were collecting aid for him. A good guy, so I gave him that blanket. And I was with Soroka again later.
From that transit prison, in 1958, they moved me to the 011th. They brought Kavatsiv there too. I remember there were courses there, Kavatsiv was either studying or teaching there. I wasnt there for long, and from there—to the 410th. I dont even remember exactly (here in my notes, I have a question mark, whether it was the 410th). The common criminals were also nearby in the zone there, a couple of barracks were fenced off, but we had our own dining hall there, as far as I remember. Cardinal Slipyj arrived with a transport to us. It was the summer of 1958, because it was warm. I remember, as if it were yesterday, there was a rabbi, a Jew, there, and a sectarian pastor. They often talked there.
V.O.: Did you ever speak with Yosyp Slipyj?
H.H.: I spoke with him later, in Mordovia.
V.O.: They say that not everyone managed to speak with him.
H.H.: He was a bit reserved, not very communicative, because there werent many people to communicate with there. He was so trim. There were a lot of gnats there in the taiga, so he wore a black mosquito net. Everyone respected him very much. I didnt speak with him then I was busy with my own thing, music, drawing. They didnt make us work, it was very good there, I was learning to play the guitar. Im sunbathing, stripped to the waist—Im so swarthy. I was playing, and a guard, some Russian, was listening. And he calls someone over: “Come here, listen.” Even more soldiers came, climbed up the watchtower. “Look at that little animal, he plays so beautifully, both camp songs and Ukrainian ones, sings beautifully.” They called me “little animal” because I was dark.
From there, they transport us to the town of Chuna, its quite far, a DOC—a woodworking combine. I was there in 1959 and 1961. We worked there together with free workers. A train would come in there, pick up goods. They made complex Finnish-style houses there. They brought wood from the taiga, cut it into boards, and made furniture. It was a huge factory. There was a whole mountain of sawdust. I would climb it to look at the taiga from there. We made boxes for shells, for all sorts of modern weapons, doors for barracks, we worked alongside the free workers.
I want to say that Siberians are very kind people, especially those of Slavic origin. They would bring food as if for themselves and share it with us. And they didnt live well either. That moves me to tears. Or to pass on a letter—“Okay, okay, Ill take it.” And he wouldnt just it here in Chuna, but a relative would be traveling somewhere, and hed mail it from there. Those were the kind of people. I met many free workers there, even the daughter of the KGB chief—she was in love with me.
There was a foreman, Petro, I forgot his last name, he studied in Prague with Volodymyr Horbovyi. The authorities respected him. He saved me, by the way. I had refused to work, was supposed to go to the punishment block again. But Yurko Hutsalo, with whom I had been on death row, told that foreman, “Go and ask for him, say he will work, he knows how to draw.” That I could do something for the authorities. The unit chief comes, and Im sitting in the punishment cell, a kind of semi-basement in the ground—Koreans are sitting there, drug addicts are sitting there. Im waiting to be taken to the punishment block. The unit chief says, “Give your promise that youll work, I heard youre a good worker,”—Hutsalo had arranged it that way. I didnt know where this was going, but I gave that promise, and they put me on light work—feeding small boards into a planing machine. That was doable. And girls worked there who had finished high school and had to do their work assignment. For about two years. A girl named Alla Zamaratska worked there. Her father was a major from Drohobych. They threw him in to work among us. He was Ukrainian himself, his daughter spoke Ukrainian. She came here and was very disillusioned. During our lunch break, we talk with the free workers, and she tells us how vulgar the released common criminals are. “In Drohobych,” she says, “at dances, they would ask, ‘May I?’—they would ask politely, bow, but here they just grab you: ‘Lets go!’” That was the kind of conversation we had with her. She fell in love with me, even sent letters to Mordovia, writing “general delivery” on the back. She told me a lot. She could even tell me when they were going to take us on a transport to a camp where we could be killed. There was going to be some kind of camp from which few would come out alive. Im thinking, “What kind of fantasies are these?” I tell the guys. They say, “What does she know, that girl?”
MORDOVIA, A SPECIAL REGIME CAMP
Then they really did take us on a transport to Mordovia, to the Yavas camp.
V.O.: And when were you taken to Mordovia?
H.H.: Where is Mordovia here? “Long transport, lasted seven days, freight cars, 740 zeks, Dubrovlag, town of Yavas, 11th camp point, 1961.” It was warm. Zalivakha was there, Lukyanenko... No, Zalivakha wasnt there yet.
V.O.: Zalivakha was from the 1965 intake.
H.H.: That was when I was at the 11th for the second time. They threw Lukyanenko in there. KGB agents were there, Berias generals. The camp was large, with two-story barracks. Across the road was the work zone. There were rumors that the maximum sentence would be up to 15 years. People were hopeful that maybe we wouldnt have much time left to serve. There was a man in charge of the storage room, the depot where zeks hand in their belongings, because you couldnt keep much in the barrack. And I was always reading books. And that storage keeper, a KGB general, got to know me—he saw some kid who liked to read books. We got to talking. “What for?” “For the Ukrainian liberation movement.” I explained everything to him, and he respected me for being a non-smoker, having no tattoos. One day I came and said that they would probably be re-sentencing us soon, the term would be 15 years. But he said, “Dont get your hopes up,”—and they had connections with those KGB agents, people came to visit them—“it will be 15, but the law will not be retroactive.” I tell the guys, but I dont want to give him away. “What are you talking about, hes saying that on purpose, he wants us to suffer even longer.”
And indeed: we had to serve on. And it got even worse, because they put a category like me, death-row inmates and recidivists, all in a special punishment camp. They locked us in cells, and then I remembered the words of that Alla Zamaratska, the KGB mans daughter.
V.O.: When were you taken to the special punishment camp and where?
H.H.: It was camp 10-A (because there was also a 10-B), in 1962. But why were we in an open section at first? Because there was no space. There was an old block. Block 10-B was already a cell-type. But they had already introduced the punishment ration for us, especially hard labor. They take you out to work in the quarry in winter, wearing only a shirt, a jacket, and a quilted coat. It was terrible. That ration was very reduced. And peoples spirits fell greatly, some even hanged themselves. I remember, they open the dining hall—“Line up!” They run, one in front of the other, to be quicker, because there was a system where you go in, sit at a table, and a couple of guys serve you. Those who got there faster were given more to eat. I somehow held on. The way the prisoners eyes looked as they waited for that food—such emptiness. Their spirits had fallen so low—how to survive this? But it turns out, you can survive even on that—I was there for five years—you just have to prepare yourself psychologically that it was hard in the camp, and now it will be harder. Food parcels were forbidden. You could receive some books by mail. If someone came for a visit, you could get a little something passed to you.
V.O.: And were the visits personal or general?
H.H.: They allowed them, but very rarely.
V.O.: So, you were on the especially strict regime from 1962 until...
H.H.: Ill check now. Until 1966, on November 28th they moved me to the strict regime.
V.O.: And who were you with on this special, cell-based regime?
H.H.: At first we were in an open section because there was no space. Then they took a brigade that worked very well, Jehovahs Witnesses. They work well. They had their own construction engineer. They were told they were building a warehouse. Because Jehovahs Witnesses are not allowed to build prisons or military facilities. They wont even build a watchtower, they wont build a punishment cell. They were great. They started building a warehouse. When they started the foundation, their engineer saw that it wasnt a warehouse, because there were many cell-like rooms—and they refused to build. Thanks to that, we had another month or two of rest. Then they brought foreigners into the camp. Those foreigners built us a “rest home.”
In that open-plan camp, there were different people, but the one I got to know was the sick Cardinal Yosyp Slipyj. There was a hospital there, and a doctor, Vasyl Karkhut from Kolomyia. He was imprisoned twice, an intelligent man, a patriot. That Karkhut arranged for Slipyj to be kept in the hospital longer. It was very hard for him in the camp with those criminals. We were even with criminal recidivists because they hadnt built the premises for us yet. They deliberately threw him in with the thieves, where every other word was a curse, where they smoked, brewed that *chifir*. I dont know how that poor man endured it there.
V.O.: Olexa Tykhyi told me about Dr. Karkhut. Olexa served his first term from 1957 to 1964.
H.H.: Yes, yes. I drew a little card for that doctor too, he sent it home. I spoke with Slipyj a couple of times then. He asked how someone so young ended up there, for what reason, and he blessed me, telling me to endure, and explained how to endure it all. He held up well, he could endure. By then, Slipyj was already hoping he might be taken to Moscow. He didnt tell me this, but others did. Some zeks would ask him, “Do you really believe there is a God?” He would say, “I would not be suffering like this if I did not believe.” And they made him all sorts of promises to break him, but he didnt break. There were also common criminals in that camp. I remember how they fought, those criminals. One poked another between the eyes with his fingers, and he went blind. One went on a hunger strike for several months. I have a drawing somewhere of him being carried out of the medical barrack like a skeleton. He was protesting in the sun like that.
One day, some civilians came for Slipyj, a car was waiting outside the zone. And there, if you went up a small hill they called the “vegetable cellar,” you could see outside the zone. They told Slipyj, “Get your things ready.” Thats when they released him to Rome.
V.O.: He was released in 1963. (The Judicial Collegium of the Supreme Court of the Ukrainian SSR pardoned Metropolitan Slipyj on 23.01.1963, and he was released to the Vatican. - V.O.).
H.H.: So I carried his things for him, some suitcase. He probably had books in there. He was already hoping to go to Rome. They worked on him in Moscow, promised him everything if he would convert to Orthodoxy. He did not agree, and then they transferred him to Rome.
One day, when they were finishing the new block, they dressed us in stripes. Although we knew it was going to happen, when they dressed us, it meant we would soon be sent to the camp. When I saw in the dining hall that we looked like zebras, in horizontal stripes, it felt so strange. They march us to work in the quarry—that also looked strange and alarming. Then they moved us to the new, still damp, cement barrack. I ended up in cell 17. I remember us watching for when they would open the door. “My God, where are we going to be in there?” Two people were already sitting there, in stripes, so thin. Cell 17 was terribly damp. There were 14 people in it. On one side were two-tiered bunks, and on the other, solid low single-tiered ones. And a small table. The slop bucket had a long, thick welded rod that went through the entire wall, and the guard would screw it shut with a bolt from the corridor. To take it out, the guard had to unscrew the bolt, which was shaped like a butterfly, and then you could pull the bucket out and empty it. The light bulb was deep in the wall behind bars, a loudspeaker, that blabbermouth, hung there so we had to listen to it. Two small barred windows. It was so crowded that if fuller people were sleeping, if they all lay on their backs, it would be impossible, some had to sleep on their sides. There were huge scandals because of the crowding. Many people, stomach problems—it stinks, teeth rotting—bad breath, some snore. It was—my God!—at night: “What are you doing, you bastard, snoring, not letting me sleep!” And whats the poor guy guilty of? “And why are you breathing your stinking mouth on me!” It was very bad.
V.O.: Was any bedding provided?
H.H.: Yes, there were mattresses, sheets. They only gave us porridge twice a day. When they gave just porridge, they called it a “tablet.” Something mashed together. Thats how we lived. But the work was hard. We extracted clay in the quarry, and others went to different jobs. And then there was a press-welding shop, we made parts for some machine for a Moscow factory. There was a shop for sewing gloves for the mines, they were lined with leatherette. I forget what the quota was, but some zeks, to get a good character reference, would produce 72 pairs, and then even more, per day.
V.O.: When I was sewing gloves in the 17th camp in 1976, the quota was already 80.
H.H.: Oh, you see. My eyes started to get worse. And I didnt like sitting, and those quotas kept getting higher and higher, because some zeks wanted to hit 100 percent to get a good reference. I signed up to be a loader—it was harder, but in the fresh air. They laid a track, wagons would enter the zone, and we would load them. Oxygen in cylinders, carbon dioxide, metal we loaded onto wheelbarrows. I had a friend, Imkhadzhi Atuev, a Chechen, we were friends.
In the neighboring cell was a priest serving his second term, a Pole named Józef Kuczyński. Mostly invalids, *shuriki*, and common criminals were in there, and he, poor man, was with them. I remember an incident where he needed to go to the toilet, but you had to wait for the walk, he didnt want to use the slop bucket in the cell because those *shuriki* would start yelling, “What are you doing, you bastard, stinking up the place!” He knocks: “Citizen chief, let me go to the toilet, my stomach hurts.” “What, you son of a bitch, a man with a higher education—and youve shit yourself?” He complained a lot, those *shuriki* gave him no peace. That was the neighboring cell, number 15, and I was in 17. I was learning Polish, and I would always shout to him, “Jak te słowo się nazywa? (What is this word called?)” And he would tell me, so and so, through the open window. It was hard to hear through the door in the corridor. We had a snitch in our cell—but I wont name him, a Ukrainian. He took note of everything and reported it. They called me in, saying I sometimes walked and talked with that priest during our walks. Then I arranged for him to pass me Polish books, because he received packages from the consulate as a foreigner. He once lived in Volhynia, knew Ukrainian and French perfectly, and defended his dissertation in France. One time an operative or a KGB agent calls me in and says, “We heard youre studying some language.” “Yes, Polish,” I say, “because I love Polish literature.” Well, I think, its a socialist country, fraternal peoples. But he says, “What are you doing with that Pole, they beat you so much! They are enemies of Ukrainians!” So that I wouldnt communicate with him—see what they were playing at.
I remember, we went out for a walk. He was an old man, he had stomach problems. Sometimes they would take out two cells for a walk. Cell 15 and our cell 17 happened to be out together. He went into the toilet, and I think there were four or five stalls there. I recently asked Hasiuk, and he also said there were five. I correspond with him. You couldnt see, but you could talk to each other. Kuczyński and I ended up in the exercise yard together. Im walking, my friend Yurko Hutsalo, with whom I was on death row, a stockier guy than me, an underground fighter from our region. Kuczyński went in and was sitting there, and there was a whole line for the toilet. The second one came out, the third, but he, poor man, was still sitting. They yelled, “What, you son of a bitch, priest, did you eat a rope?” He, poor man: “In a moment, in a moment”—it only made it worse for him. He comes out, and they pounce on him: “You Pole, *lyakh*,—what else did they call him,—capitalist.” Then Yurko Hutsalo was the first, and I, we chased them away. He thanked us very much, that priest. It was difficult for those intellectuals in the camps.
My mother came to visit me there, just that one time. She was so, poor thing, when I came out in those stripes...
V.O.: And how long did the visit last? A day or a few hours?
H.H.: I dont remember... No, I spent the night in the visiting room, we talked a lot with my mother. Of course, they were listening in. There was a small window that looked out into the corridor. I put a stool for my mother, she stood on it and saw how many prisoners were at the checkpoint—she cried so much! “My God, my son, what have they done to you?” And she cries—but what had they done? I want to say, by the way, this is very interesting. My mother liked to keep a diary, and when she wrote letters to me, she kept a draft. I have many of my mothers letters, and thanks to them Ive collected the addresses of the camps and some dates of when and where I was moved. And I collected her envelopes—if theres ever a museum, let it all be there, because I see that the Jewish museum has such things. She had a dream when I was moved to the special regime and dressed in stripes. She writes to me: “My child, I had a dream that you were doing so well, that you were in some cell or dungeon and in some kind of outfit, like a railway worker or something. You are sitting on the floor, very hungry.” And I was already on the special regime in a striped uniform, but not on the floor, on a bunk. But my mother had a dream—you see, what a thing.
V.O.: What year was the visit with your mother?
H.H.: I dont remember—it was somewhere towards the end of those four years.
YAVAS
So I was in the special regime for about four years. From there, on November 28, 1966, they transferred me back to Yavas, to the 11th camp point, to the strict regime. They changed my clothes to the black camp uniform. It was much better there. The same KGB generals were there.
V.O.: And on what grounds were you transferred—your term was up?
H.H.: There was a set term, but if you had a regime violation, they wouldnt transfer you. I wasnt a refusenik there, the work was going well for me. They transferred me and they transferred my friend—his mother asked for him when she came for a visit.
The 11th was a large camp point, there was even a secondary school in the town. Those KGB generals were still there. Some very interesting people arrived—the artist Zalivakha (Opanas Zalivakha, b. 26.11.1925 in the Kharkiv region. Imprisoned in September 1965 under Art. 62 Part 1 for 5 years. Served time in the Mordovian camps. Artist, winner of the Shevchenko Prize in 1995. Died on 23.04.2007 in Ivano-Frankivsk. - V.O.). I took advice from him. And I met my Hutsalo there, the one from death row. Ivan Hel was already there, also Ivan Hubka, Myroslav Melen (Ivan Andriyovych Hel. B. 17.07.1937, village of Klitsko, Horodok district, Lviv region. Arrested 24.08.65, 3 years of strict regime camps in Mordovia. On 12.01.72, H. was imprisoned for 10 years of special strict regime camps and 5 years of exile. Ivan Mykolayovych Hubka, b. 24.03.1932, hamlet of Hubky (village of Bobroidy), Zhovkva district, Lviv region. Arrested in October 1948, on 23.08.1949 sentenced under Art. 20-54-1 “a”, 54-1- Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the UkrSSR to 25 years of imprisonment. Released 21.08.1956. Member of the Ukrainian National Front. Arrested 27.03.1967, for 6 years of imprisonment, 5 years of exile under Part 1 of Art. 62. Released 1978. Myroslav Oleksiyovych Melen, b. 13.06.1929 in the village of Falysh, Stryi district, Lviv region. Member of the OUN Youth, imprisoned 23.09.1947 under Art. 54-1a, points 8, 11, “terror,” for 25 years, perpetual exile, and 5 years loss of rights. Participant in the Norilsk Uprising. Released 12.07.1956. Member of the Ukrainian National Front. Arrested 26.03.1967, released 23.09.1973. Writer, musician, public figure. Lives in Morshyn. - V.O.). Melen was a conductor, so I pestered him to learn. Vasilis Postolaki, a Greek from Moldova, was a conductor, graduated from the conservatory, and wrote music. I took lessons from him there too. There were many interesting people in the camp then. When I arrived, the school was already running. So I went straight to the eighth grade, even though I hadnt finished four. But I was one of the best students there. And the teachers were almost all free workers, Mordvinian girls or officers wives—one was Belarusian. They were sympathetic towards us—they clearly understood that we were political prisoners. There was one KGB general who taught mathematics. And another one taught German—Pavel Pevnev, I dont know what he was, a general or not. He was originally Piven, from Azov in Kuban—is there such a city?
V.O.: There is.
H.H.: He was from there. They said he was a very interesting person, but Ill tell you about him. We found a common language, he gave me advice. Once we wrote a dictation. When I had just arrived, she asked, “Why do you have such an accent?” I said, “Im a foreigner.” “And where from?” “From Galicia.” “And where is that?” “Its Western Ukraine.” “Ah, Ive heard of Western Ukraine.” This young Mordvinian woman was asking. Then there was a dictation. I spoke poorly, but I could write and use punctuation, because I had studied it. “Guess who wrote the best dictation?” Many Russians were studying in the eighth grade. They guessed different names. “No, you didnt guess—our new foreigner!” So I wrote the best dictation.
I got to know that Pevnev, the teacher. He didnt teach me German because I refused somehow it was passed off that I knew Romanian, they recorded it as a foreign language. And I also knew about a thousand words of German. I didnt study a foreign language, I had a free period that I could skip. And Pevnev taught German. He was so cultured and knew Ukrainian very well.
Pevnev worked in the bathhouse. When a transport arrived, he would meet it. I didnt know why. But some guessed that he was a KGB agent. He was so trim, athletic. He was waiting for a particular prisoner whose interrogation he had once conducted. He was a KGB agent for Ukrainian affairs because he knew the Ukrainian language. There was such a department in Moscow. Bandera sent couriers, they parachuted into Czechoslovakia, crossed the Czechoslovak-Polish border—its easy to cross. They were in a group and were supposed to make contact with a certain Zenon, who was an architect in Poland and was already working for the KGB. They were told, “Wait.” In the group was Mykola Levytskyi, from the Drohobych region. He had studied in West Germany, where he joined the OUN. They sent him to study in Spain for the sake of his mission, to be sent in. It turns out Bandera had connections with Spain, where they trained intelligence officers in some secret school. That Levytskyi came as an intelligence officer to make contact with the insurgents. That was already the collapse of the insurgency, provocateur groups were already active: parachutists would descend, and they would already be waiting for them. This was not an isolated case. By the way, I still dont know the correct way to say it: *provokatsiyni* groups or *provokatyvni* (provocational or provocative).
V.O.: I guess in Ukrainian, one should say “provocative.”
H.H.: So, as Levytsky told it, they crossed the border. He had a radio set, and the idea was that as soon as there was an alarm, you shouldn’t say anything, just press the button. That was the agreement because more than one group had already been caught. He says, we ended up at a safe house. He has a dream that something bad is going to happen to him, that he shouldn’t go to the meeting. But they went. People with tridents on their uniforms come to them, all speaking Ukrainian, and lead them to another meeting. On the way, some river had overflowed because of the rains, and they had to walk in a single file. They tell him, “Please step this way, like this”—this was to tie him up so he couldn’t swallow the poison. One grabbed him by the hands, and another by the neck so he couldn’t bend down. And he couldn’t press the button on the radio to signal they’d been caught. So cunning. The intelligence officers already knew about such radios they weren’t fools. I think one of them managed to shoot himself or blow himself up with a grenade, I don’t remember anymore—you’d have to ask Levytsky.
V.O.: There’s a little book here, written by Volodymyr Marmus, a political prisoner. It’s called “Friend Superior”—it’s about Oleksa Savchyn. It mentions groups that were parachuted in from abroad: Myron Matviyeiko, Vasyl Okhrymovych, and Mykola Levytsky is in there. Volodymyr wrote it based on Savchyn’s stories. (Chortkiv, 2001, 118 pp. — V.O.).
H.H.: Oh, interesting! Let me read it.
V.O.: I can give it to you I have several copies.
H.H.: Thank you! These are my, one might say, brothers-in-arms. Oh-oh-oh! How alarming it was… And the Belarusian insurgents had the same thing happen to them. It was already a collapse, because even NATO had Soviet spies, the Chekists already knew what the foreigners were planning.
V.O.: By the way, Vasyl Kuk—who was already under arrest—made a statement then. I don’t know for certain what was written in that statement, but it was a signal: don’t send couriers here, because they all fall into the hands of the NKVD. He took on such a moral responsibility. Some of the insurgents became embittered with him, calling him a traitor, but Vasyl Kuk essentially wagered his conscience so that people would not die in vain.
H.H.: Yes, yes, yes, I know about that statement someone sent me a copy. It was in the newspapers. In the West, some were very offended, but they didn’t know our situation. I hold no grudge. It’s all very complicated, and it’s not for me to judge, of course.
So they caught them all and took them to Moscow for interrogations. Not even to Kyiv or somewhere in Lviv or Ternopil, because these were important people. I don’t remember if one was shot there, or if that was from another group they told many stories.
But this is about Pevnev. Levytsky ends up being interrogated by Pevnev, an investigator for Ukrainian affairs. He’s a teacher, but he doesn’t tell me he worked for the KGB. But the zeks guessed he was a KGB man. About others, they knew they were KGB generals, but this one was some kind of crafty fellow. And he was an interesting person, and not stupid he treated Ukrainians with sympathy. He gave me advice, too. He was waiting for Levytsky to arrive from the prisoner transport to warn him not to tell the zeks that he was an investigator. But Levytsky, as soon as he arrived, immediately told his acquaintance, Ivan Kazhan from Lavochne. Ivan Kazhan was a death-row inmate. We also didn’t want to give Levytsky away, to say that he had already revealed Pevnev was a KGB man. By that time, who knows how many informers there were in the camps. So, a few of us knew for sure that Pevnev had interrogated Levytsky. But Levytsky didn’t complain about him, that he beat him or anything. Then I started talking to Pevnev in a way that he understood I knew he was a KGB man.
And one time it was like this: “Mr. Herchak, let’s go for a walk.” His speech was refined, but I noticed he also knew the Galician dialect. Damn them to hell! I ask, “And how do you know the Galician dialect, words like that?” And he just lies to me…
[End of tape 4]
V.O.: Hryhoriy Herchak continues. June 16, 2003, fifth cassette.
H.H.: …without even blinking an eye, like an old Chekist: “Oh, I traveled through your lands.” “And what were you doing there?” And I already know he’s a KGB man. “Maybe some operations?” And he lies to me: “Well, we were doing excavations. The Banderites had killed soldiers there, and among the soldiers were many officers, and they’re still lying in the ground, and the officers’ families are demanding they be exhumed for an anthropological examination to identify them and return them to their relatives. And I love languages.” By the way, he spoke German so well that the Germans who were imprisoned with us said he sounded like a native. But when I showed him that I knew he was a KGB man, he admitted to me that he was an investigator for Ukrainian affairs, that he knew our movement. And he let me know that he was Ukrainian: “My name is Piven, from Kuban, from Azov.” And he also recommended to me (and he was right, by the way): “Hrytsko, don’t go to Ukraine. You love the forest, you’re used to the forest.” He advised me to go to the Altai Krai: “There are lakes there between the mountains, there are Ukrainians there, exiled long ago, apple orchards in the valleys, it’s quite warm, the winter isn’t so harsh—no one will bother you there, you’ll live your life. But if you come to Ukraine, they’ll be on your case and try to make you an agent. You have a good reputation, people of different nations respect you, so it will be a hassle.” Remember, they already had detachments then?
V.O.: Yes. Detachments and brigades.
H.H.: In every barrack, there was a detachment. The detachment leader would read out a character assessment once every four months. What was my assessment? I’m proud of this assessment: “Hryhoriy Herchak is engaged in versatile self-education, is sociable, and finds contact with different nationalities.” And I really did sing songs, knew a couple hundred words in different languages the Uzbeks and Georgians respected me. “Works well.” I say that’s a good assessment. But Pevnev says, “No, that’s actually a bad assessment: people like you, who get along with everyone, have contacts, everyone loves you—they’ll try to recruit you as an agent.” By the way, that’s how it was—they pestered me until I started going gray. I was released almost completely gray. And in Kyiv, they summoned me all the time. The KGB men even threatened me with death: either the police or hooligans would kill me. It was terrifying I didn’t know what to do. But that’s another story.
I don’t think Pevnev was an informer in the camp. He said they wouldn’t let him into Moscow when he was released, that he would only be allowed to live no closer than one hundred kilometers from it.
V.O.: He had committed some serious sin against the Soviet authorities, right?
H.H.: He didn’t say, but you’ve asked a good question. He sees that I can keep my mouth shut, so he told me he had been sent to Germany on assignment twice. He knew German perfectly. They sent him to some city as a tourist. The intelligence service knew that Soviet tourists had to be monitored. He had a different last name, went around with the tourists, and led them to see some architectural monument. It was there that he was supposed to pass something to someone. The first time, it was successful. But the second time, he had just stepped aside, and three men in plain clothes appeared: “Major Pevnev, we ask you to leave Germany within such-and-such a time.” They didn’t arrest him, but when he returned, he was put on trial.
In 1963-65, they started bringing party workers and collective farm chairmen to us to tell the prisoners how good life was. They also brought those who had been in the camps and were released. They urged us to behave well, to repent, so that we would also be released. Quite prominent people began to write letters of repentance, and they were indeed released their sentences were reduced. And in the camps, they began to the so-called SVP.
V.O.: “Soviet of Internal Order,” or as the prisoners called it, “suka vishla poguliat” [the bitch went for a walk].
H.H.: Exactly. They wore red armbands, and for that, their sentences were reduced. I remember, they would come out of that office, all with armbands. They also rounded us up in the high-security section to listen to a member of the Banderite leadership, Luka Pavlyshyn, and another Kolyma political prisoner who was sick with silicosis, Vasyl Zhohlo. The poet Ivan Hnatiuk came with that Pavlyshyn. (Hnatiuk Ivan, b. July 27, 1929 – d. May 5, 2005. Arrested December 27, 1948, sentenced to 25 years, released February 6, 1956. Writer, laureate of the T. Shevchenko Prize in 1999. — V.O.). They forced all of us out of our cells into the club-canteen we sat down, and they came out onto the stage, with a KGB man to make sure they didn’t say something else. So they gave their speeches.
V.O.: There is a book by Ivan Hnatiuk, “Paths and Roads. Memoirs,” published in 1998. I’ll have to look and see if there’s anything about this in it. Because you’re not the first one to tell me this. (Regarding the speeches before the prisoners of camp No. 7 in Sosnova by Luka Pavlyshyn, Taras Myhal, and Ivan Hnatiuk, see the book: Yarema Tkachuk. Storms. A Book of Memory. - Lviv: Spolom, 2004. - pp. 111 - 120.).
H.H.: In the penal camp 307 in Siberia, I was in a very bad way. Some were receiving parcels, but I didn’t want to bother my poor mother with such things, so I always lied to her… By the way, my mother kept my letters, they still exist, and I read some to the guys: “Mom, I’m living very well, I have enough to eat. Don’t send me anything.” And then in that penal camp, I got to the point where my heart was stopping. One time my friend, a Lithuanian named Petras Strumila, received a small parcel. And remember, sugar used to come in big chunks. Petras broke up that sugar, I took some, the Lithuanians were sitting in the smoking room, drinking tea, playing chess. We’re drinking that acorn coffee with that sugar, there were some pastries there. And suddenly I feel nauseous—I’d never had that before. And my heart hadn’t hurt before that. I look, and the window just went up-up-up. I still had my wits about me, I put that sugar in my pocket, and then I don’t remember anything. I fell, the Lithuanians put me on some boards and carried me to the medical unit. It was a Lithuanian barrack each nation lived in a separate building there. They’re carrying me, and some guys were playing volleyball. Everything became so bright to me—I saw everything in red, as if through red glasses, and my hearing returned. I hear them asking who they’re carrying. “Oh, Hrysha!” And they’re surprised. And then nothing again.
They brought me in. In the camp, there was this “quack”—a doctor, Petro Duzhy, former editor of the Banderite journal “Idea and Action.” He was well-educated, graduated from a university in Prague, and in the camp he was a “prydurok”—that’s what they called those who got a “cushy job” in the camp. They bring me to him. I was even starting to see a little. He bent over me, gave me some smelling salts—and it was like it was lifted by a hand, I could hear and see again. He gave me something there, and I went to the barrack. The guys there were sitting on stumps that hadn’t been uprooted. They had cleared the forest there once and were supposed to build a barrack. I also sat down next to them. I wanted to stand up, but my head spun, and I fell again. Then I went to the barrack, but I told the doctor that I had fallen again. And Mykhailo Kolesnyk from Lviv was sitting there. People came to visit him, he received parcels, and he had glucose. When they started saying I needed glucose, Mykhailo Kolesnyk said, “I have glucose.” And I had nothing, because I had refused parcels so as not to worry my mother. They went to Duzhy and asked him to give me glucose. And he says, “I’m a doctor, I know, he’s young, it will pass, he doesn’t need glucose.” Kolesnyk and the late Mykhailo Mykhailovych Soroka came and pressured Duzhy. I come to him, and Mykhailo Mykhailovych Soroka is sitting at the appointment. I came for the first injection. Duzhy says: “Oh, Hrytsunia’s little heart is weak, I’ll give him a little shot.” And I think to myself, “I know why you’re giving me that shot—because they pressured you.” Later, when it became fashionable in the Siberian camps to write repentances, many did, and Duzhy wrote one, he was released, and they gave him a job for it in the Dnipropetrovsk region. He worked somewhere in a laboratory. He was one of those who used to say that it was no longer worth suffering, that everything was over, that one should write a repentance.
Agitators started arriving—they keep coming to agitate, even former prisoners are coming, everyone you can imagine. People wrote repentances, and they were indeed released. They started pestering me too, but my case was such that I hadn’t given up many people from the former opryshky. Those people had committed murders or assassination attempts—they shot and missed one plenipotentiary, Kaukov, wounding him in the leg. By that time, these guys were already married, had families, and are still alive today. If I had given them up, they would have been shot immediately. I didn’t say this under torture, but the Chekists suspected it and came to break me, saying my case had “loose ends.” Even when I was released, I thought, “My God, what if they pressure the guys and they confess, then they’ll drag me in too, because I’m involved”—I was very afraid of that.
Major Svyatkin, a Mordvin who serviced our camp for the KGB, was pressuring me from another angle: “Condemn the Banderite movement!” I say that I’m not a Banderite, that I only collaborated with them, I didn’t take an oath. They summon me once, a second time. I say that I repent for what I did, but I won’t condemn anything. That is, I wouldn’t write it, but I would make a speech, because you had to speak on the radio. Volodia Ostrovsky, with whom I sat on death row, he used to distribute medicine to the cells there—we both made a speech. True, he helped me: he said that I had never been a “die-hard” nationalist. I asked him what that word meant, and he said it meant a “complete nationalist.” They read that over the camp radio. ...
V.O.: Who read it, Ostrovsky?
H.H.: No, the KGB men read it, the camp staff who ran the radio that was in every cell.
V.O.: And whose text was it?
H.H.: They wrote it down. True, I said that I wasn’t a nationalist. And that what I did was wrong, that those murders happened, I repented for that. They altered the text a bit, and they did it cleverly. It was in Russian. When I came to the cell, a Latvian explained to me that a “makhrovaya roza” [a double rose]—and he was a florist—is a full rose. So I wasn’t a complete nationalist. That was my speech. (On October 2, 2003, H. Herchak added: “There I said that I had written a repentance. It was my mother who once wrote a plea for my pardon. And my accomplice asked me to write one too. People often ask me: ‘Why wasn’t your sentence reduced? They released people for less.’ I say: ‘Repentance is not condemnation. You had to condemn nationalism or some party you belonged to. And I only wrote that I wouldn’t do it anymore.’)
I haven’t finished talking about how Hnatiuk and Pavlyshyn spoke. Pavlyshyn spoke quite well he didn’t criticize nationalism. True, there was a sense that the struggle wasn’t worth it. Someone from the audience told him that the newspapers write that you robbed people—someone said it in Russian, because it was a Russian. So he says: “They say, they write in the newspapers that we are robbers, that we took gold.” And he showed his little finger: “I don’t have even this much gold hidden anywhere. We came out of that struggle poor.” I remember that verbatim. Then they say to him, “You are free, and we are suffering here. You see what they’ve brought us to: they starve us, the work is hard, and what about the conditions in the cells!” He said: “I will sound all the trumpets, I am sure things will get easier for you, that your sentences will be reduced.” Then Hnatiuk said that he is being published, that he is living well. There was a question from the audience: “How are you published if you were in the camp?” I didn’t know it was so hard to get published, but I listen to what he says. And he says: “I came to Lviv, brought my poems to an editorial office and said that I had been in a camp, so could I be published? And the editor said: ‘That doesn’t mean anything—the poem just has to be well-written.’ And so they publish me.” True, the audience was skeptical there was a squabble. He read a few of his poems, and we really liked the last one, it was so symbolic, as if about the prisoners: that a flowering tree was growing, a strong wind blew, tore off the leaves, carried them away to distant lands, scattered them from their native soil. So we understood that it was about us, the prisoners.
As I already said, in 1966 we moved from the special strict-regime to the 11th camp point. At that time, a camp newspaper called “For Excellent Labor” was published. It was published on the outside, posted on stands in the camps, and given to read in the camp. Prisoners were published in it, some even wrote little poems.
V.O.: The MVD published it. It was distributed only in the camps. There was a note on it: “Not to be removed from the institution.” In Ukraine, such a paper was called “Trudovaya Zhizn” [Labor Life].
H.H.: At the 11th, Zalyvakha and other guys were already there. Then someone brings me this newspaper “For Excellent Labor,” and there’s my article… No, I’m lying, it was different, I forgot. I go to the camp store—I have money for something I published in the newspaper “For Excellent Labor.” Back then they paid money to those who were published. But I don’t know anything about it. I ask: “Is that newspaper here?” “There’s an article you wrote.” A small article. It was what I had said on the radio. They twisted it there. Thank God, there was no criticism of nationalism, only that I had killed a Chekist. They must have taken that from my file. I said I didn’t write the article, I’m against it, but the guys say: “Don’t do that. One guy already protested that he didn’t write anything, wanted to get to the truth—and he ended up in a closed prison.” I didn’t write it, but, of course, the reason was that the radio had read it out. That’s how it was.
I didn’t live peacefully for long. They sent me to load coal. I started to resist the work, didn’t want to do it. I called someone a name—and they put me in the isolator for 15 days. They throw you into the worst cell, it was very cold there, no bunks, nothing. There’s some tattooed thief sitting there. He already had a political charge, but he’d been convicted of theft several times before.
V.O.: He “adopted a political platform.”
H.H.: Yes, if the criminals want to kill him, they’ll kill him anywhere. So they throw him into a political camp. They gave us a lot of trouble in the political camps. I’m eyeing him, and he’s eyeing me. Then he asked me who I was, what for? I said I was political. He’s looking for something, pulls out a piece of a blade and comes at me: “I’m going to cut myself now.” I back up against the wall: just in case—I know a few moves, I’ll kick him so he doesn’t cut me. But, I see, no—he’s cutting himself, it even makes a ripping sound—the blade was dull, or what. God, the blood started gushing…
V.O.: And what did he cut?
H.H.: That vein, what’s it called? The one in the forearm. Blood went up the wall—it’s gushing. He pressed it, and the blood just—shhh-shhh-shhh. And then less and less, and the smell of blood, it’s cold in the cell—and that smell.
V.O.: Did he cut one arm?
H.H.: One, in one place. “But don’t you scream and don’t knock.” I nodded that I wouldn’t, but I felt sorry for the man. And he can’t stand anymore, the blood is just—whoosh-whoosh—you can see his heart beating, less and less. And then he’s like he’s asleep. And it seemed to me, as if a pleading look: go on, knock. Maybe his end had come, he’s dying, so I really should knock. I was thinking of knocking, but only when he was weakened, so he wouldn’t attack me. I look, just blood—shhh-shhh—less and less, and he has such a pleading look. I start pounding hard on the metal door. “What’s going on in there?” I shout: “Warden, a man is dying!” “What happened?” “He cut himself!” He came, looked at the blood: “You son of a bitch, you bastard,”—cursing at me—“what, you didn’t see?!” I say: “I was asleep.” And I was supposed to be asleep they bring those planks for the night. He’s yelling at me, quickly gives a signal, and those quacks, the medics, run in from the camp. They take me out of there immediately and throw me into a general cell, where about eight men were sitting. It was easier there, at least there were bunks.
I served those 15 days and went to work. I had a dirty sweater on, loading coal in the boiler room, and the boiler room was so big it probably heated the whole town of Yavas—pipes with hot water went out from there. We loaded coal into carts, others took it to the boiler room and burned that coal. It was called the coal field—there were mountains of coal there. My gloves were dirty, my face was dirty.
Suddenly a “voronok” runs up. A “voronok” is a messenger who summons you to the headquarters, because there was also a headquarters in the work zone. The chief engineer, the shift supervisor, and the KGB man’s office were there. Maybe there was no KGB office there, I don’t remember anymore. “Who’s Herchak?” “I am.” “The chief engineer is summoning you.” I get ready to go, and the guys say: “Oh, maybe he wants you to draw something for the authorities—thank God, you’ll have less work, you’ll draw them the three hunters or something.” That was the thought. I go there, he doesn’t say anything: “Sit here.” I sat down, I see that all the doors have signs saying who’s where, but this “chief engineer” has nothing written on his door. I wait and wait—“Come in.” I go in, and I see a captain, a bit plump, with a small belly. And to me—“Hrytsko!”—he extends his hand. I say my hand is dirty, but he shakes it. I smiled a little. “Don’t you recognize me?” “No.” “You still have all your teeth—I don’t anymore.” “And how do you know me?” “We’re brothers-in-arms—you shot at me, and I shot at you.” And it turns out he was a senior lieutenant and head of the operations group back then, and there were such incidents, but he shot at me more than I shot at him. I sit down, and he says: “No, no, come over here, to the table!” I pulled up a chair. He asks how I’m living. I tell him so-and-so. He says, “It’s good they didn’t shoot you, because they could have, but Stalin died”—this and that. And he tries to recruit me as an agent: “Why should you,” he says, “be sitting here?” He’s from Ternopil, new. Every nation that waged an active struggle had its own KGB man in the camp, so he could speak your native language. You know that. And the Ukrainians had two, because the nation was larger, the struggle was bigger—one was from Kyiv, I forgot his name, and this one was Rusyn.
V.O.: Maybe Honchar?
H.H.: Probably not, I don’t remember anymore. This one says: “Come on, confess, there are guys still sitting, and those opryshky who carried out actions with you already have families and children, and you’re suffering here.” And I’m afraid, I think, what if those guys confessed something, and it smells of murder… Oh-my-my… So I keep quiet. And he says, “The guys in Ternopil are sitting without work—you just tell us and you’ll get out, why should you suffer for someone else, why should you sit here?” I say, “I have nothing.” I don’t know—maybe he didn’t even want me to work as an informer. He had to say something. We talked a lot, I left and told the guys about it. I tell them how I talked about his false teeth and my real ones—a pity, I said, that I didn’t knock them out back then. But he didn’t beat me, others did, that’s how it was.
That Rusyn and the head of the operations group, Taranovsky, chased after me and my accomplice, Yurko Hutsal, with his group. The late Yurko and I were on death row together, we went through the camps together, trusted each other with everything, like brothers, talked about a lot. One time we’re walking—and I had become nearsighted, started wearing glasses after a concussion, I think it was minus four. And then I only wore glasses at the movies. So Yurko and I are walking, and Rusyn comes with a folder under his arm, he has such a belly now: “Oh, Hrytsko, what do I see—you’re in glasses? What happened?”—he spreads his hands. And he didn’t know my eyes were already bad. And Yurko Hutsal loved to joke. We were on familiar terms, he would say “Comrade Captain” instead of “Citizen”: “Comrade Captain, don’t get too happy—Hrytsko could easily hit a figure like you.” “Oh, I know, he’s a good shot, especially with a short-barreled weapon.” We walk and reminisce about how we shot, how there was an ambush, when the insurgents were fleeing, left food behind, and he says they came and ate those sausages, he says: “I remember there was a machine gun, we took it.”
And there was a hospital there, civilian nurses worked there. I see the windows flickering there. I had a doctor friend there, Zvinis, a Lithuanian. He says those Mordvinian women were surprised that a KGB man was joking with camp inmates.
CAMPS 19 AND 17
In 1969, they take us on a large transport, to the 19th camp point, in the settlement of Lesnoy. I hadn’t finished school in Yavas, so I continued the 11th grade at the 19th. I finished school there. The principal was a Mordvin, I forgot his last name, he used to be an officer of the OBB—“Department for Combating Banditry.” A very good man, he loved to whisper with me, was often interested in our movement. He wore civilian clothes. And women taught there. A guy named Yelin was studying there, that’s an interesting story. He had escaped across the border to Germany—there were many like that, but the Germans returned them all. He told a lot about the Germans. One time other teachers were asking him about Germany, and the principal came in, listened and said: “What are you lying about, Yelin?” They look at his file. “The Germans gave you up because they got you a job at a factory, and you were stealing watches and money from clothes in the locker room, they caught you, and then they didn’t want to keep you in prison and handed you over.”
There was another incident at the 19th. There was a small, old BUR there.
V.O.: I know where that is. I was in the 19th from April 12, 1974.
H.H.: There was a raised area there, and under the floorboards was an empty space. The guys were digging a tunnel there—they would get in and make a hole all the way under the forbidden zone. There was a place to dump the earth because the floor was higher, the space was empty. So that no one would hear, I would come there with one guy, play the guitar, and we would sing duets. I didn’t plan to escape, we just sang so they couldn’t hear them digging. Then one guy from Chernivtsi broke, and they found that tunnel…
V.O.: And who was digging?
H.H.: Yosyp Terelya was there, there was a whole group of them. Whether they would have escaped further or not, but they would have escaped from the zone. (Terelya, Yosyp. B. October 27, 1943, political prisoner in 1962-66, 1966-76, 1977-82, 1982-83, 1985-87).
V.O.: Did they succeed or not?
H.H.: They didn’t succeed, because one of them informed. They had already dug up to the forbidden zone. They were put on trial. It’s a pity they didn’t succeed.
V.O.: And how much did they get—three years each, probably?
H.H.: I don’t remember anymore.
V.O.: Did Yosyp Terelya get a sentence too?
H.H.: Yes, of course. They punished me too. They transferred us then, such recidivists and especially dangerous ones like me, to the 17th camp point. That’s where Soroka was, Masyutko (Masyutko, Mykhailo, b. November 18, 1918, in Chaplynka, Kherson region – d. November 18, 2001. History and Philology Dept. of Zaporizhzhia Pedagogical Institute. Writer. Imprisoned: 1937-42, 1965-71. Book of memoirs “In the Captivity of Evil” (1999), stories “Predawn Alarm” (2003). — V.O.). But to the other one, where there were a couple of barracks.
V.O.: That’s 17-A.
H.H.: Yes, could be. There was no space there, so they housed us in a workshop. The workshop was large. They brought bunks in there. It was so bad there, they said they wanted to shoot us. Such were the rumors. We lived in the workshop, in the work zone, and they brought us food in containers from the residential zone, where the club was. They didn’t force us to work at first, but then they started to. I took up running, did some exercises. Someone snitched that I was running, because there were informers, and they didn’t let me out of the zone for work, so I wouldn’t escape, because I was supposedly preparing to escape. By the way, Yevhen Pryshliak was imprisoned with us there. (Pryshliak, Yevhen, b. 1913 - d. 1987. Member of OUN since 1929. In 1936, sentenced by the Polish authorities to 6 years, released in 1939. From 1943, he led a combat unit, the regional SB, from 1950 - leader of the OUN in the Lviv region. On January 22, 1952, captured by the NKVD and sentenced to death, commuted to 25 years. He spent 10 years in solitary confinement in Vladimir Prison, the rest in the camps of Mordovia and Perm Oblast. — V.O.).
I remember, they started to build some two-story factory in the work zone. We worked at that factory. The camp warden was Garkushov. He was Garkusha, a Ukrainian. Often, on our day off, I and a man named Mazurov from Dnipropetrovsk, who was imprisoned for the Ukrainian language, would go out and sing on the second floor of this unfinished workshop. There was such an echo, the Mordvinian guards would stand outside the zone and listen—we gave them such a concert.
We were imprisoned there. They stopped scaring us that they would shoot us in the forest. They had already housed us in the residential zone. And the work zone was just across the fence—do you remember that?
V.O.: Yes, yes, I was in 17-A from October 30, 1975.
URAL, ZONE NO. 36. EX-LIBRIS
H.H.: We didn’t stay there long, because they selected us, I don’t know by what criteria, and they transport us by etap to the Urals.
V.O.: What year was that?
H.H.: Seventy-two. They brought us to Kuchino, to the 36th camp, on July 17, 1972. There I was already imprisoned with the dissidents. So many new people—Yevhen Sverstiuk was there (Sverstiuk, Yevhen Oleksandrovych, b. December 13, 1928. Literary critic, publicist, one of the leaders of the Sixtiers movement. Imprisoned on January 14, 1972, under Art. 62, Part 1 for 7 years and 5 years of exile. Served time in Perm camps and in Buryatia. Doctor of Philosophy, Laureate of the Shevchenko Prize in 1993. — V.O.), the Jews Semen Gluzman (b. September 30, 1946, imprisoned May 11, 1972, under Art. 62, Part 1, 7 years of imprisonment and 3 of exile. Currently the Head of the Association of Psychiatrists of Ukraine. — V.O.), Mendelevich, Aryeh Vudka, a Jew from Lithuania Grilius, and those from the airplane affair, Makarenko was there.
V.O.: There were many of the “airplane people” there.
H.H.: Yes, yes. A major-pilot, Dymshits, was there, and Zalmanson was there. Good guys, by the way.
V.O.: In Mordovia at the 19th, the “airplane people” Lassal Kaminsky, Mykhailo Korenblit, Anatoly Azernikov, the artist Boris Penson were imprisoned, and at the 3rd, Israel Zalmanson…
H.H.: I remember Zalmanson and Dymshits because we talked with them very often. They started bringing Russians to us too. Seryozha Kovalyov was close to Sakharov he was a biologist himself. Levko Lukianenko really lifted our spirits. (Lukianenko, Levko, b. August 24, 1928, imprisoned January 20, 1961, for 15 years under Art. 56 and 62, Part 1 for creating the Ukrainian Workers’ and Peasants’ . — V.O.). We were so downhearted, thinking the struggle was over, we had fought, and now no one was fighting. Even Kampov, a former communist, came—remember, from Zakarpattia?
V.O.: Yes, I recorded him too. (Kampov, Pavlo Fedorovych, b. September 21, 1929, from Zakarpattia. Mathematician, publicist, human rights activist. In 1970, under Art. 62, Part 1 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR—6 years in strict-regime camps and 5 years of exile. Served time in Mordovia, the Urals, and Tomsk Oblast. In 1981-89—on fabricated charges of fraud. Now lives in Uzhhorod. — V.O.).
H.H.: He’s a mathematician, almost blind, can’t see well. He came, so gullible, admitted he was once a communist, and the zeks went after him: “You, communist, you bastard!” Especially the shuriks. But I treated him well. He wrote me a letter: “Hrytsko, I remember how well you treated me when everyone was accusing me of being a communist.” And he was gullible.
When the Helsinki Accords were signed—we didn’t know everything yet, but some zeks knew and refused to work, because a political prisoner has that right. And Roman Hayduk, he’s from somewhere in the Ivano-Frankivsk region, young, not knowing what it smelled of, refused and wouldn’t go to work, because there are human rights, a political prisoner has the right not to work. They searched and searched for him, and one day they found him. It was a day off or something, we went outside, and they were leading him away. He doesn’t want to go. A doctor and a bunch of guards are with him, they’re holding him by the arms. You could see the veins on his head, he’s screaming, and Kampov shouts: “What are you looking at—save him! Look how they’re torturing him!” And the zeks just stand there watching. Some say this or that, but no one shouts to save him. But they came up to Kampov, looked at his tag—“Ah, Kampov? Let’s go.” He doesn’t know what that means. They sent Roman Hayduk away, and then they came for Kampov: “Get your things!” And into the isolator with him. He had his fill of that isolator, comes out: “Hrytsko, those are fascists!” And he’s so plump, short. “How they torture people! What kind of communist was I then!”
V.O.: “There is no idea worth sitting in that punishment cell for!”—that’s what they said about him.
H.H.: Yes, yes. In that zone, at the 36th, I already had some ex-libris, because I started making them back in the special strict-regime, when they took everything from the cell and there was nothing to draw with. I remember, Slavko Hasiuk, and he was such an intellectual, says: “Don’t worry, Hrytsko—there are new art forms, like the ex-libris.” I knew about ex-libris, but not the details. He got some magazines, Latvian or something, where there were ex-libris. I looked at how to compose the fonts and the image, the character of the ex-libris owner. I started drawing ex-libris—the first one I drew was for Yaroslav Hasiuk. Back then we had fountain pens, not ballpoints. After getting to the 11th, I started making linocuts Zalyvakha got me a chisel and linoleum. And then at the 36th, I made a lot of them, they were even guarding me. I remember, there was a forge in the work zone, I made myself a chisel there without a handle, just wrapped it in a rag and hid it between my fingers, just in case. Someone got me some linoleum, and I was already cutting ex-libris for many of the guys, and it was coming out quite professionally. I remember there were times, it’s Sunday (and on Sunday they let you sleep an hour longer), and I get up even earlier than that hour, pour that acorn coffee the orderly brought into a cup, sit at the nightstand and write letters—it looks like I’m writing letters, but I’m actually cutting an ex-libris and keeping an eye on the door so the guards don’t see. The prisoners are sleeping, because they’re tired, they have a chance to sleep in a bit on Sunday, and I’m cutting and cutting. Suddenly the guards are coming, the senior guard—I quickly throw the chisel and the linoleum ex-libris into the cup. And when the authorities come, you have to stand up. On my table are letters from my mother, as if I’m writing back. I stand up and say in a quiet voice, so as not to wake the prisoners: “Hello, Comrade Warden!” “Hello. And what’s this, Herchak,”—he looked at my tag—“you’re drinking tea when the authorities are talking to you?” “This, Citizen Warden, is not tea, it’s coffee.” “You’ll talk your way into trouble!” And he started shouting, and the prisoners sat up. And the guards rushed to see what I was writing—letters to and from my mother. And so they left. I’m just saying how you had to hide with that, if you’re cutting an ex-libris.
And then there was no paint, nothing to print with. In the work zone, there was a forge, I got some rubber there, and, so the blacksmith wouldn’t see (there was a guy named Nezdiyinoha), that I was burning the rubber, the guys would specially invite him for tea, for chifir, because he loved to drink. He would go for a drink, and I would volunteer for duty. We quickly threw the rubber into the furnace, the rubber burns, and there’s a metal sheet on top, and the soot settles there. We scrape it into a container, then get some oil and an empty metal box from some cream, I pack that soot paint in there, and it smells like cream—as if it’s cream. I close it—and now I have paint. Like a shoe brush, and when I print, my hands are dirty. I pretend that I just started cleaning my shoes, everything smells of cream.
I remember, one time I’m printing, and here come the guards. When I’m printing, there were always lookouts—either Chornomaz or Sapeliak standing post. (Chornomaz, Bohdan Danylovych, b. February 9, 1948, in the village of Stehnikivtsi, Ternopil district, Ternopil oblast. Imprisoned in Uman on July 13, 1972, for 3 years under Art. 62, Part 1. Historian. Sapeliak, Stepan Yevstakhovych, b. March 26, 1952. Member of the Rosokhach group, arrested February 19, 1973, 5 years of imprisonment and 3 years of exile. Poet, laureate of the T. Shevchenko National Prize in 1993. — V.O.). They give me a signal that the guards are coming—and I’m already cleaning my shoes, having hidden everything. I’m cleaning my shoes, there’s that stench, they come in: “What is Herchak cleaning so hard?” And Sado, an Assyrian, says: “Getting ready for freedom, Citizen Warden.” “Ah, you need to sit a little longer.” And they left, and I continued printing, making impressions of the ex-libris. That’s how you had to hide. To get them out to freedom, they were passed among books. I often printed so that one side of the page was clean, and the text was printed on the other, so they think it’s an illustration in the book when they quickly flip through the books. And then on the outside, they cut them out. I have now collected 72 ex-libris just from my time in prison. I made a lot of them in the 36th zone—I made them for birthdays, the guys asked, for Lukianenko, for Sverstiuk, for some of the Jews.
It was very pleasant to say that I even began to polish my Ukrainian language then—because it had gotten to the point where I even started thinking in Russian—but now I was asking everything, writing things down in my pocket, and so I studied the language.
I was involved in music then, composed a couple of songs. I had composed before. I remember, Sapeliak ended up in a psychiatric hospital, and his poems needed to be transported. Someone brought a few poems…
[End of track]
…, they said some guy wrote them, who was in the madhouse. They passed them to Sapeliak he had just started writing poems then. Sapeliak gave them to me… [recording glitch]. I read them, I liked two, and I asked if I could compose songs to them—they were “Etapy, etapy” [Stages, Stages] and “Byite, kuranty, mazhornyi lad” [Strike, Chimes, a Major Chord]. I composed melodies to those poems. We knew who wrote them, but I didn’t say that I composed the songs myself, because I could have been punished for that, for composing something against the authorities. So I just said that I had heard the songs played by some Ukrainians somewhere. By the way, when I was released, Zenko Krasivsky and someone else came to see me. They were already on their way to Lviv, and I was working at a vocational school, and they came to me. I wasn’t acquainted with Krasivsky and I say: “Oh, someone already told me, Sverstiuk or someone, that these are Krasivsky’s poems.” And when we got acquainted, I said that I had composed two songs to those poems. He barely remembered, until I said “Etapy, etapy, dorohy daleki…” [Stages, stages, long roads…]— “Oh, I remember, I remember…” That’s how it was.
I sang songs there with a guitar. I had a friend, Ionas Kadžionis, a Lithuanian—he was also an underground fighter, and his wife was imprisoned, and so was he. A very similar fate to ours, because they also went on campaign groups. And he studied Ukrainian songs, and I Lithuanian. He sang first voice beautifully, and I second, with the guitar—and we sing. We sing, and the Lithuanians and Ukrainians surround us, and it was strange, in Lithuanian, in Ukrainian… I remember, there was something a bit unpleasant and funny for us. I taught him to sing the Ukrainian song “Shumyt lishchynonka, shumyt hai zelenyi” [The hazel bush rustles, the green grove rustles]. One Ukrainian, and the second Lithuanian. I remember him singing: [Illegible in Lithuanian], and it was pleasant for all the Lithuanians.
There was a guy named Timo Havastõk. In Russian they called him Khavastik, because Russian doesn’t have the “h” sound. He was a conductor of a military choir, had been involved in music for 16 years. He wrote music, had a clarinet and played it. When he wrote music, he needed accompaniment to check it. One time he’s on the kantele—it’s an Estonian instrument like a gusli—and I’m playing chords on the guitar. The Estonians surround us, and we play. I remember him coming to me, and I knew a few dozen words in Estonian. He comes, and I’m on the top bunk on Sunday drawing something—back then there was only one day off—he says in Estonian: “Tervist, Krisa”—“Hello, Hrysha.” “Põitem hrat.” He’s inviting me to play chess, and I say I’m drawing something here and don’t have time. Then he takes my guitar and plays chords on it. So I climb down and go to play. And when we get into it, the two of us, the Estonians surround us, and I’ve already forgotten that I don’t have time. That’s how it was with the Estonians.
I want to say that statements, repentances were often posted on a stand there—there was a stand near the canteen or in the canteen. One day, a statement appeared there—the repentance of Ivan Dziuba. (Dziuba, Ivan Mykhailovych, b. July 26, 1931. One of the leaders of the Sixtiers movement. Author of the book “Internationalism or Russification?” (1965). Arrested April 18, 1972, convicted under Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR to 5 years in camps and 5 years of exile. In October 1973, he appealed to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Ukrainian SSR for a pardon. The statement was published in “Literaturna Ukraina” on November 9, 1973. Released on November 6, 1973. — V.O.). Yevhen Sverstiuk, poor man, was so worried, you could see it on his face, he lost weight. And there was this guard, Rak, a captain or whatever he was, I don’t remember, a senior guard, knew a little Ukrainian—they said he was from Odesa. Someone snitched to him that Yevhen was so worried. I remember Yevhen saying: “God, I didn’t expect Ivan to do this—I thought Ivan was ready to lay his head on the block for Ukraine.” So one day Yevhen is walking, and Rak is walking and says to him so mockingly: “Mr. Sverstiuk, you look so down! What happened to you? Are you sick?” And Sverstiuk cut him off somehow, I don’t remember verbatim—something like, what’s it to you what happened to me. And they were always picking on Sverstiuk. I remember, Sverstiuk loved cleanliness and was always washing his zek uniform, so much that it turned white from it, faded.
V.O.: It faded because he also washed it with soda.
H.H.: Few people washed like that. He loved cleanliness, so he washed. So they had nothing to pick on him for: “Sverstiuk, why are you not in proper uniform?” And he’s dressed normally, even has the patch on—but the color is different. And for them, it was just an excuse to pick on such a person. Then they took Sverstiuk on an etap. As soon as they took Sverstiuk—an etap comes to us: Ihor Kalynets, Ivan Svitlychny, Semen Gluzman, Valerko Marchenko. (Kalynets, Ihor Myronovych, b. July 9, 1939, imprisoned August 11, 1972, under Art. 62, Part 1 for 6 years and 3 of exile. Poet, laureate of the Shevchenko Prize in 1991. Marchenko, Valeriy Veniaminovych, October 16, 1947 – October 7, 1984, journalist, imprisoned June 25, 1973, for 6 years and 2 years of exile, a second time as a member of the UHG—October 21, 1983, 10 years of special regime and 5 years of exile. Died in a prison hospital in Leningrad. Buried on the Feast of the Intercession in 1984 in the village of Hatne near Kyiv. Svitlychny, Ivan Oleksiyovych, September 20, 1929 – October 25, 1992. A recognized leader of the Sixtiers movement. Imprisoned August 30, 1965, for 8 months without trial, a second time—January 12, 1972, under Art. 62, Part 1 for 7 years and 5 years of exile. Laureate of the Shevchenko Prize in 1994, posthumously. — V.O.). It seems they came from the 35th zone to the 36th. It was interesting for us again—new people, someone to talk to.
I remember, there was an incident with Svitlychny. Svitlychny brought a ton of books, so Sapeliak and I helped him carry them. We brought them to him, because Ivan was a bit frail. I lived in the same barrack with Svitlychny then, and then they separated us. They sent Svitlychny to work in the laundry. One day, a surprise search, and Svitlychny, apparently, had some secret notes, anti-Soviet stuff, in his pocket, and the guards are almost on to him when he says to me: “Hrytsko, there’s a note in the pocket of my padded jacket.” Not everyone there knew Ukrainian. I had to take it. But how to take it if they can already see? I quickly put on Svitlychny’s jacket, crumpled the note and hid it. And they could have seen that the patch on the jacket was different. They went to Svitlychny, started searching, I hid it, and somehow it passed. That was an incident where I saved Svitlychny’s note. I remember, there was something written on a sheet from an old notebook. I passed it to him, and so it was resolved, but it would have been big trouble if they had found it.
And another time with Svitlychny, in a different barrack. I lived in the second barrack, but he was in one section, and I in the neighboring one. Once Ivan Svitlychny ends up in the BUR, I don’t remember for what. They knew that Ivan Svitlychny was writing materials that were secretly passed outside the zone and ended up abroad. Ivan Svitlychny had those materials, he passed a message from the BUR about where they were—with some Lithuanian who maybe brought him food. He trusted him and passed the message for me or Pavlo Strotsen—also from the Chortkiv region—to get those notes. So we went, I remember, both of us, sat down on the beds like that, because Strotsen wasn’t from our section. Pretending we were looking for some books. And those notes were hidden in a jar in the sugar, there were quite a lot of them. They took them out of the sugar, hid them, and then a search came. So Svitlychny was saved from great trouble.
Levko Lukianenko was also there, we talked often. I remember, it was his birthday, and I didn’t know. He lived in another barrack. The guys asked me to make him an ex-libris. I know that Levko is so combative, unbreakable, so I drew a Cossack riding into battle with a saber.
I remember when Levko was being released. He had suffered so much in the camps… About ten of us went out with him, talking for the last time. And among the prisoners there are many informers, you don’t know who to talk to about what. And we, as old underground fighters, observed the rules of conspiracy: we think one thing, say another. And he suddenly says: “Guys, I’m being released, and as soon as I’m out, I’ll continue the human rights movement. I’m sure things will get easier.” And it hit me like an electric shock: I thought, my God, what is he saying! That’s the kind of man Levko Lukianenko was.
V.O.: He was released in January 1976.
RELEASE
H.H.: I grew so fond of those dissidents, I got so much information from them and learned so much. True, they also learned a lot from us. I remember that Semen Gluzman got some kind of film—I wouldn’t want people to think it was me, but I already had an idea. They wrote in tiny script, made capsules, and passed information outside the zone. You had to swallow it, then it would pass, and on the outside, they would copy it and send it abroad. Such a complicated path. Sometimes they even passed poems that way. But the Chekists suspected. One of the dissidents, a Russian, told me that he was called in for interrogation. He came from the guardhouse and said that now, when people are released, they might even check them with a special X-ray to see if there’s anything in their stomach. So I already guess that the Chekists know that things are transported this way. People were already afraid to transport them. They made these capsules, wrapped in some kind of film. You should ask Semen Gluzman, I don’t know the exact details either. Like an onion—one layer on another, one on another. If it comes out of you, you peel it, wash it, and swallow it again. And you can do this several times.
The time came for me to be released. Svitlychny and others approach me, asking if I could do it. And somehow I trusted them so much, although I knew it was very risky… To serve so much time, and then to transport something—that’s another sentence.
V.O.: Yes, to serve 25 years—and then go back…
H.H.: Yes. And I agree to it—that’s how much I loved and trusted them. I’ll tell you honestly, I often think that now, if I were being released, I wouldn’t do it. But back then, I trusted them so much! I didn’t eat anything, I swallowed those capsules… And I brought them to Kyiv, to Nadiika Svitlychna. I stayed with others, with Horbal…
V.O.: When were you released and what was the procedure? Were you released directly from the zone or taken somewhere by etap?
H.H.: No. I’ll tell you later how I got out. It’s an interesting story, how I got out. I swallowed all that, having eaten nothing. I already had a tendency for constipation, and then I didn’t eat anything at all. I also stopped by Stefania Shabatura’s place. (Shabatura, Stefania Mykhailivna, b. November 5, 1938, tapestry artist, arrested January 12, 1972, 5 years of imprisonment and 3 years of exile. — V.O.).
V.O.: Right from there, from prison?
H.H.: Yes.
V.O.: But she was in exile in Makushino, Kurgan Oblast in Kazakhstan.
H.H.: Should I tell that story too?
V.O.: Please do.
H.H.: Well, okay. Ihor Kalynets asks me: stop by Shabatura’s. And he gave me some letter he had written to her. And I, like a savage, not knowing how to behave…
V.O.: After serving 25 years in captivity…
H.H.: I went to Stefania in Makushino, Kurgan Oblast. She lived in a dormitory. I arrive, they ask who I’m going to see, but there happened to be no one there, I went up to some floor—Kalynets had told me. I come to the room number and listen. And it’s so quiet, it’s nighttime, I listen, a voice from abroad, either “Voice of America” or some other—the wretch had a radio in exile and was listening. So I lightly knock-knock. “Who’s there?” I say: “From the Dniester.” “Oh! Hrytsko? Wait, wait,”—maybe she was undressed. She lets me in. And she was already expecting me, she thought it would be later. She even had something to treat me with, a leather jacket from a parcel, an expensive one, for a poor zek. There was even some wine, I remember. Well, I told her a lot about her fellow dissidents. But how much I was in love with those dissidents, how much I believed them! It’s simply like a miracle to me now. How hard it was for me to get there.
V.O.: Remind me of the date of your release in 1977. You were arrested on December 2, 1952, so you were probably released around those days.
H.H.: How can I say, how I was released. They call me to the accounting office. It’s a good thing I wasn’t taking out drawings, only a couple of ex-libris were in books. There were a couple of drawings. But I wasn’t taking anything out secretly other prisoners did that, and by the way, I’m still collecting them. Bohdan Chornomaz helped a lot. Chornomaz was already released, I got a placement in Uman. I was afraid to go to my home region, so they wouldn’t do something to me. I didn’t want to go to Ukraine at all, but I grew to love those dissidents so much, and they said Ukraine needed people like that, so I went. That KGB man Pevnev was right to recommend that I go to Altai Krai and they wouldn’t bother me. But I went, and they did bother me on the outside. But those were already slightly different times, perestroika was on its way.
So I was released, they call me to the accounting office outside the zone to give me money. My certificate says how much they give for travel. They give you some nonsense, not much. And then I see, there’s some more money—it turns out, it’s from the Solzhenitsyn Fund, and I get some more rubles. I took the money in my pocket, but how to travel? I need to go to Chusovoy, and I, poor thing, don’t know how. In short, someone shows me. Some common criminal was driving by, they stopped him, and he took me there. I arrived at the station, I don’t know anything. There are released prisoners sitting and standing there, common criminals with tattoos, a bunch of guards are going somewhere. They see me and ask: “What, you a zek? Where you from?” I don’t know those criminal zones, so I have to say I’m political. “From the 36th zone.” “O-o-o, that’s where the politicals are, and what were you in for?” I’m already lying that I was in for banditry, because I don’t want to say for political reasons. “What kind?” “The ninth point,” I say, “I have. Robbed banks—lots of money there.” “Oh, well done, let’s go drinking.” And I’m afraid to drink, God forbid. I see there’s also a bunch of guards standing nearby. They all come up, greet me, and my handshake is firm. “Look at you, 25 years you sat, and what a strong hand!” And they hug me like that. And then I see: some of them started to get rowdy among themselves. A guard comes over: “Alright, move it, friends. Come here, you’re a political.” And to me. “Where did you serve?” I say: “In the 36th.” And they are guards from a criminal zone. “Oh, it’s interesting where you are, we used to come there for shakedowns. Everyone has their heads full of books, such intellectuals are sitting there.” I had such an interesting conversation, they act like friends, and even asked where I was going. I say to Kurgan Oblast, the city of Makushino. So they showed me where to board, I got a ticket there and then changed trains, and I’m on my way.
I traveled with one person, then another, there were no major adventures. Then I asked about a bus, a bus took me to that dormitory where Shabatura lived. I spent the night there. I couldn’t go to the toilet because I was afraid of losing it. What if someone comes into the toilet and says, “What are you doing sitting there?” So at night I went out, somewhere behind the bushes in the snow… One came out, and it was so dirty. I brought it back, washed my hands. So as not to swallow it again, we stuffed it into a toothpaste tube. With difficulty, only one came out. I was afraid to eat much.
I’m going to Moscow, traveling through Moscow, I don’t know anything, I’m looking out the window. It’s one of those wagons that isn’t a compartment, but open, a platzkart. And by the window there are benches, I always sit by the window. In the next section, I hear Romanian, two are talking. One comes out, and I approach him: “Bună ziua.” “O-o-o, bună ziua! De unde ești?” “Good day, where are you from?” And I tell him in Romanian that I’m from Ukraine. “And how do you know the language?” “Well,” I say, “I learned.” They liked it so much that they took me to the dining car. And they immediately recognize that I’m a zek. True, Stefania Shabatura gave me a winter jacket made of pure leather, but the rest of my clothes were from my zek life. It looked ridiculous. One of them didn’t go to the dining car, but the other was traveling from Kazakhstan, he was on an internship, something technical. He says he saw camps there. We went to the dining car, he got some wine there. I’m afraid to drink much, he keeps offering me a glass—“Pro libertate!” “For freedom!” I remember he had a question: he had heard somewhere that the Banderites were against an independent Moldova. So I convinced him with the fact that two Moldovans served with us in the UPA and were imprisoned. I told him their names, but I’ve forgotten them now. Then he was convinced. I even gave him some drawing, I remember. So he helped me in Moscow to change to another station to go to Ukraine.
V.O.: And did you visit anyone in Moscow?
H.H.: I didn’t go anywhere, because I was afraid with that thing—that constipation, it was terrible. They didn’t give me any tasks for Moscow, because this was more important: to transport the capsules. I remember, there was one capsule from Oles Serhiyenko.
And there was another very interesting incident, traveling from Moscow on the train. We are sitting there by the window, and apparently, I have some suspicious look. Everyone is sitting, but they see that I’m a zek. They ask where I’m from and what I was in for. Well, I think, the Sakharov era is here, so I said for politics. God, how one guy jumped on me, someone from Vinnytsia, in riding breeches—he wore breeches, but he was traveling because some party official had died. And one woman from the Urals, she lives in the Vinnytsia region, with her Ukrainian husband. And how they attacked—not so much me, as Sakharov, Solzhenitsyn—God, what are they doing to the ! And they latched onto me, I started to defend them. I never thought I’d get into such an argument—I thought I would travel and keep quiet, because I had served so much time. But I got into that argument. But that suspicious man kicks me, nudges me and signals for me to shut up. So I stopped arguing and went to the window. And there were two girls standing there, who were traveling to study from Murmansk or somewhere, they shake my hand: “We heard your conversation. We study in Kyiv, we support you.” That’s how it was. Then they got off somewhere, and this guy is sitting and lightly gestures to me under the table: a captain of the internal troops or the police, I forgot. He had a Belarusian last name. And he shakes my hand, quietly shows that he also sympathizes with it. After that, he started treating me to things. He was traveling to some Belarusian town and was bringing gifts. He was bringing gifts, and he treated me with them. And I’m already quiet, because those two are looking at me like I’m an animal.
I arrived in Kyiv. It was night, it was dark. I had memorized how to get to Svitlychna’s place, but I hired a taxi, and I don’t want to say where I’m going, but just approximately—there was some movie theater not far from that place. In short, I arrived, then looked for it on foot, found that little street. I didn’t have anything written down, I had to keep everything in my head, but it was hard for me to navigate the city, because I’m a man from the forest and the camps.
V.O.: Was this to Nadiia or to Leonida Svitlychna? (Svitlychna, Leonida Pavlivna, b. April 2, 1924 – d. February 18, 2003, engineer, wife of I. Svitlychny. Svitlychna, Nadiia Oleksiivna, b. November 8, 1936, philologist, sister of I. Svitlychny. Samvydav organizer. Imprisoned May 18, 1972, for 4 years (Mordovia). On October 12, 1978, she was allowed to go abroad. — V.O.)
H.H.: To Nadiia. I go up to some floor, and stood by the door like that. All the doors were upholstered with black leatherette. I found the right one and listen to what’s behind the door. And it was already morning, her son Yaremko was sick and didn’t go to school, she’s doing a lesson with him—I can even hear it. I didn’t want to knock, because I thought that if the door is upholstered, you have to knock very hard, and the neighbors are probably watching her. I didn’t know I had to press the bell. I just start to knock—no one hears. I remembered that I saw in a movie somewhere that there are such bells. I pressed it, the bell rang. “Coming, coming!” And she looks at me. “Hrytsko? Just a moment.”
V.O.: And how did she recognize you?
H.H.: They had described me to her during a visit, that such a person would arrive, in glasses, with a black mustache. She was already waiting. I don’t know how they arranged all that, but it was done efficiently. She opened the door. And it was dangerous to be at her place, with what I had inside me. They sent me to Alla Marchenko, the wife of Mykola Horbal—I think it was there, not far from the Pechersky bridge. (Horbal, Mykola Andriyovych, b. September 10, 1940, in the village of Volivets, Gorlice district, Kraków Voivodeship, Poland. Arrested November 20, 1970, in Ternopil, imprisoned April 13, 1971, under Art. 62, Part 1 for 5 years and 2 years of exile, a second time—October 23, 1979, for 5 years, a third time—October 10, 1984, for 8 years and 5 years of exile, released August 23, 1988. Member of the UHG, writer, musician, People’s Deputy of Ukraine of the II convocation. — V.O.). Some floor there too. And part of it came out of me there. And then I went to Olia Stokotelna’s, and it came out there too. I don’t remember everything anymore, it was a real torment.
V.O.: Indeed, because this all went on for many days.
H.H.: I have a tendency for constipation, and I hadn’t eaten for so long… Very unpleasant, but it all got done… I don’t think about it now—some poem by Svitlychny was also transported by someone, and if you knew it was transported in this way, it would be interesting. That’s how it was, that’s how much I loved those dissidents.
Then Svitlychna took me to Mykhailyna Kotsiubynska, to the late Antonenko-Davydovych. (Kotsiubynska, Mykhailyna Khomivna, niece of M. Kotsiubynsky, b. December 18, 1931, philologist. Antonenko-Davydovych, Borys Dmytrovych, b. August 5, 1899, d. May 9, 1984, political prisoner 1934 - 1957. — V.O.).
And then Nadiika was going to work, and, not having time, she leaves me alone. And it was a problem for me to find all that, so I went to the Shevchenko Museum. I had already learned to get around by myself. And wherever I went, I collect all the tickets, to later give an account, because I was supposed to be at Chornomaz’s already, they were already waiting, because they had been informed that Herchak was released and would be living with Chornomaz in Uman. The KGB is waiting, the police are waiting, and I’m not there—I was at Stefania’s, and then so long in Kyiv. So I collect all those tickets for my report, where I’ve been. At an exhibition… There were no such incidents in Kyiv.
IN UMAN
I went to Chornomaz’s. I took a bus, quickly found the house. There was no elevator, a four-story building right next to the prison for alcoholics and short-term prisoners.
I’m at Chornomaz’s, I need to go to the police to register. I arrive—it’s supposedly the police that deals with this, but it’s actually the KGB. And they’re on my case: “Where have you been? Go to the KGB!” I went to the KGB. There was a KGB man named Kostiuk and some KGB man from Rivne, who spoke good Ukrainian against the Banderites—he must have been the KGB chief. “Where have you been?” “I was in Kyiv.” “With whom?” I already understand that they know everything, but they don’t say that I was at Svitlychna’s…
V.O.: And you don’t mention Shabatura?
H.H.: I’m quiet about Shabatura. I say we visited Kotsiubynska, Antonenko-Davydovych, but I don’t mention someone else. It turns out, they know. “You went to Kotsiubynska’s? Have you lost your mind?” And here the tickets from the museums I had collected helped me a lot. They knew everything. I remember it like it was yesterday, when they brought me to Antonenko-Davydovych and told him about me, that I had been imprisoned for 25 years—I was even ashamed—he knelt, grabbed my hand and kissed it, saying he bowed before my suffering. I told a little about the prisons, he was surprised at how many prisons and camps I had been through.
In the KGB, they pestered me. They were surprised that I had been in prison for so long. They were interested in me telling them something. I said that I had been imprisoned with KGB generals. They immediately went: “Shh…” They jumped up and said we needed a smoke break. I wanted to say that I’m a non-smoker. They bring me to an office where everything is dismantled, under renovation. And then one says: “Speak, you can check—we have no listening devices. Tell us about those KGB men.” They were surprised and furious why the KGB men were not kept separately, but with political prisoners. Because they don’t keep policemen with criminals. They were obviously scared, because if they end up in a camp… It was so funny to me! I told them everything, because it wasn’t a secret—how I walked with that Pevnev, what he told me. It turns out, they didn’t know that and probably concluded that they needed to be careful.
V.O.: And how did you settle in at Chornomaz’s?
H.H.: The KGB summoned me, and I’m trying to get a job—no one hires me because I have a release certificate. And it’s already, I think, three months and a few days—they can sentence you to “khimiya” as a “parasite” if you don’t work. No one hires me. They summon me and say: “You’ll be begging with a sack again soon!” So I go to the KGB and say that no one will hire me. They asked what I could do. I said I was a lathe setter. They call a secret factory that wouldn’t hire me. I said it was a secret factory, but they said: “The Americans have long since shat out those secrets.” And they took me there. “But,” I say, “I’m getting married soon.”
There the foremen received me well, they say: one guy here is retiring, you’ll be setting up the machines for him. I told them I knew those machines, but I say: “I won’t be working long, I’m going to Kyiv, I’m getting married.”
And then Bohdan Chornomaz found out that a graphic artist was needed at the inter-district trade base. By the way, Bohdan Chornomaz had worked at that base before his arrest. I went there, they hired me immediately, because they needed an artist. The head of the inter-district trade base was an old communist named Terletsky. At first, I didn’t have a room, so I helped the girls there arrange goods. I saw so much there… There were goods from abroad—clothes and everything was there. And often after work the boss says: “You stay a little longer.” Cars or even bigger vehicles arrive, we load goods. Not for the store, but for those party officials. They give us chocolate and wine, we sit and drink, even put chocolate in our pockets, and go home. Then they found a small room, I set up a workshop there and wrote fire safety slogans: “Turn off the light when you leave”—I made stencils like that.
Apparently, the KGB had already told the director who I was—Terletsky calls me into his office, asks questions, then shakes his head: “I’ll have a smoke, I want to smoke,”—this was to go outside—he waves his hand—so they wouldn’t be overheard. “They said you were imprisoned?” “Yes, I was.” “And were there communists imprisoned?” And he was, apparently, one of the Ukrainian communists, an old man. I say: “There were real communists imprisoned, honest ones.” He got interested and says with such sympathy: “But be careful: God forbid you take anything, because here,” he says, “a lot is stolen, people take things, you can even take a watch. But you don’t take anything, because one day they’ll search you and then—a sentence.”
One time on the monument to the tank soldiers, someone at night wrote some anti-Soviet slogans against Brezhnev, through a stencil. God, they summon me, because I write with stencils. Such a hassle. I say it wasn’t me. I had an alibi, I was able to exonerate myself because I was at Bohdan Chornomaz’s in the evening, there were more people there. And once there was an incident where I was already going to work and waiting for the bus to go, because that base was outside the city. The workers who know me are waiting, especially the women and girls. I see a car drive up. The KGB man Kostiuk gets out, he wore civilian clothes. “Come on,” he waves, “I’ll give you a lift.” He gives me a lift to the base and interrogates me along the way. Those girls arrive later on the bus: “Who’s that friend of yours who gave you a lift?” It’s a good thing I didn’t lie about who that friend was. I say: “That’s a KGB man.” I was wondering what they would say. And they say: “We know, he comes to us to get goods.” I think: “My God, if I had lied, what a mess I’d be in.” And it turns out, he also takes scarce goods as a KGB man, so he doesn’t have to buy them.
V.O.: Please continue, at least with the main outline of what happened to you next. How long were you in Uman, and then you were somewhere in Kharkiv.
H.H.: In Uman, they found out that there wasn’t enough square footage to register me in the Chornomaz’s apartment. So I had to look for another apartment. Well, it’s clear why—so I wouldn’t be with Bohdan. I still get letters from Uman. Especially from Bohdan’s wife, Tetyana Lytvynenko. She didn’t know about that struggle, and she says: “God, you opened our eyes, you made us patriots of Ukraine.”
They’re kicking me out of the apartment. Bohdan started looking for another apartment for me.
We visited those women who had been imprisoned—Domanitska and Surovtsova. (Surovtsova, Nadiia Vitaliivna, March 18, 1896 – April 13, 1985, political prisoner in 1927-1956. — V.O.)
V.O.: You met with Nadiia Surovtsova?
H.H.: As soon as I visited there—a day or two later the KGB already knows. I didn’t go again. Bohdan was acquainted with Surovtsova even before his arrest.
We’re looking for an apartment, walking around—not this one, not that one. Then they say there’s a room for rent. We wait, no one’s there. The owner comes, carrying water in buckets, because he has no well. A private house, a garden with a farmstead. But we look: NKVD pants. He says it will be fine, low rent, seems like a pleasant man: “You’ll help me.” I say: “I know a bit of carpentry.” We go into the house, he wants to offer a treat, such a good fellow, pure Ukrainian language. I look—on the walls are NKVD photographs. “Did you serve somewhere there?” I ask. “I fought against the Banderite gangs in Western Ukraine.” Well, I had no choice but to say it, because the KGB would tell him anyway when he went to register me. I say: “And I’m a former Banderite.” He takes my hand, shakes it so hard, “Those were the boys!” he says. And he now works, goes into the prison. “Those were the boys!” We went out into the yard, he brought out some wine. I say: “So maybe you’ll register me, so I’m just registered, but I’ll live at Bohdan’s?” “Alright,” he says.
V.O.: You can’t fool the KGB there.
H.H.: Yes, yes, yes. He didn’t even take money. To register me, he went with me to the police: “Here, I’m taking this one into my apartment.” They registered me. It’s an interesting story to tell—“Those were the boys, those were the people!” Let Bohdan Chornomaz tell you!
IN KYIV
V.O.: And how long did you stay there?
H.H.: Not long, I got married later and moved to Kyiv.
V.O.: You should say this too: got married—to whom, when?
H.H.: To someone who had connections with the dissidents. When I was at Nadiika Svitlychna’s, I met Liudmyla Lytovchenko. She had divorced her husband. I got married, moved to her place in Kyiv. We lived near the Pechersky bridge on Bastionna Street.
V.O.: Ah, so that’s right nearby.
H.H.: Yes. She worked at a school. She wasn’t allowed to be a teacher, so she taught labor, sewing, at the school. Right here near the Pechersky bridge is school No. 33, where she worked. I moved there. God, they don’t want to register me. They summon her: “Do you know that his hands are bloody up to the elbows, what are you taking in?” They let the neighbors know who would be living here. And next door lived some officer, he wore civilian clothes. I didn’t know he was an officer. He had two little daughters. I started drawing, and those children came in and watch what I’m drawing: “I love to draw too,” the older one says in Ukrainian. I don’t know how old she is, maybe ten or even younger. And she draws next to me. Her mother lets her, and her husband is at work. He was a major, I think. And the KGB men found out. And the woman herself said: “Do you know what they said about your husband? That he will rape the girls, that he’s a bandit.” But she didn’t believe it, she could see from my character.
Next door lived Yachminov, formerly Yachmin, an officer, now he became Yachminov. Before his death, he said he wanted to be buried in an embroidered shirt. He spoke Ukrainian. And his wife was Moldovan. She came to see Liuda, my wife, for something, and addressed me, and I say: “Where are you from?” “From Moldova.” And I spoke Romanian. She was so happy and: “Come visit us.” I would visit sometimes. Then they told her: “Be afraid of this man.” They spread such rumors.
I got a job at a vocational school they needed a graphic artist. But I couldn’t work as a graphic artist it was forbidden for me. So I worked there as a sort of janitor. Less pay, but even that was good, because no one would hire me. The director’s last name was Koval. I told him right away that I had been imprisoned. “Well, okay, you’ll work, because the artist has retired.” So I worked there.
V.O.: And how long were you in Kyiv?
H.H.: I was in Kyiv for quite a long time. I arrived from Uman around the end of 1979, and at the end of August 1988, we went abroad.
V.O.: Wait, but you also lived somewhere in Kharkiv?
H.H.: I didn’t live in Kharkiv, I only went there for vacation, because Liuda’s mother lived there.
V.O.: Ah, so Stepan Sapeliak was telling me that you recommended him to someone in the village of Khorosheve… So that was at Liudmyla Lytovchenko’s mother’s place.
H.H.: And Liudmyla’s husband had also been in a camp, but he was rehabilitated.
EMIGRATION
V.O.: So you say you left for Canada in August 1988. What was that procedure like, and why did you go to Canada?
H.H.: Why I went to Canada, that’s quite difficult to say. I’m on the outside there, they’re not bothering me about my case having “loose ends.” But here they started to pick at me, that I hadn’t said everything during the investigation. Indeed, I hadn’t said a lot of things, I was very afraid that there were people who already had families, and if they got to them, they wouldn’t know the situation, they would confess, and then I’d be facing the firing squad again. Playing on this, the KGB men wanted me to cooperate with them. And it got to the point where I’m walking from the vocational school, and some wretched car pulls up. I look—a KGB man in civilian clothes: “Get in, Hryhoriy Andriyovych.” Well, I have to get in. They take me somewhere and have a conversation with me, so that I would cooperate with them. All sorts of threats, all sorts of cunning tricks, generous promises. In short, they pestered me a lot, there were even threats. Then the driver takes me home. They take me to the forest somewhere. It even happened in hotels. There were special rooms in hotels.
And I also had contact with people from abroad. Young women couriers would come to me, secretly carrying all sorts of writings. The KGB men knew that. My God, it was terrifying.
V.O.: What kind of writings?
H.H.: Those that the dissidents wrote. Roma Pashkovska would come, Motria Zanko, who was later found murdered in her apartment in New York. A female doctor would come. It’s clear that the KGB were watching.
V.O.: Those were dangerous dealings.
H.H.: Yes, yes. But I tried not to get too involved in it. I started making musical instruments, I made liras with the late Mykola Budnyk.
V.O.: And I have a whole cassette of the kobzar Budnyk.
H.H.: Yes, yes, I made liras with him. He lived here near Zvirynetska, in a summer kitchen. Such a hut, he was poor. A wonderful person. In the summer he worked in a geological expedition, and in the winter he refused. I, of course, told him I had been imprisoned, the times were already easier. He was interested, because he knew nothing about our movement. Young people would by. One girl came, she was studying at the conservatory, a bandura player, Tetyana Loboda. The KGB didn’t like that. They went to the neighbor, a war veteran, an officer, who spoke Ukrainian, a wonderful person…
[End of tape 5]
V.O.: The conclusion of Hryts Herchak’s story. This is Hryhoriy Herchak, sixth cassette, June 16, 2003.
H.H.: …the KGB men came and said that the one with the black mustache and glasses is a very dangerous person. They say, be careful, keep an eye on him. And he—a good man—told Mykola, and Mykola told me—I was already suffering: you can’t even make liras. It’s terrible. And then some doctor started coming. We’re making liras, and he’s sitting and listening. Mykola says he’s some kind of suspicious character.
They took me to the forest, even though I didn’t give my consent. Once that driver is taking me (they’re all in civilian clothes), and he says: “How many in Ivano-Frankivsk, how many of yours are cooperating in Lviv—and even more important people. Why are you resisting? You sat for so long—and you’ll get a new apartment, and a motorboat.” They heard I wanted a motorboat. This was before Chornobyl, before the radiation. “And we’ll get you a boat—everything.” Someone informed on me that I wanted a boat. And I say: “What good is that boat to me, I’m nearsighted, they won’t give me a license.” And the other one says: “I have a friend, we’ll get you a license.” And then he sees that I don’t want it, so he says: “And you know, if you keep resisting, this could end badly. The police know you, they could even kill you at the police station. Or hooligans.” That was a hint. I was very worried. There was an incident. I was under surveillance and had to write a report on myself to the local police officer every Wednesday. A Captain Starunsky, in the Pechersky district. A wonderful person, by the way.
V.O.: You had administrative surveillance?
H.H.: Yes, yes.
V.O.: And for how long did you have it?
H.H.: I had it back in Uman.
V.O.: You had it in Uman too? For how many years?
H.H.: I didn’t count. I had it here too before leaving. I was already working at the vocational school, and in the courtyard near me, here by the Pechersky bridge, was the local police station. On Wednesday, I had dinner and I’m going to write an explanatory note that no zeks are in contact with me—it was necessary for some reason. I’m working well, they respected me at work. I wrote it and left it on the table, I say goodbye. Captain Starunsky spoke Ukrainian, treated me very well. Some thin guy in civilian clothes comes in, looks at the photos of wanted criminals. The table is small, Starunsky is sitting at the table, and I’m standing here and about to leave. And that guy glanced at the table and says: “E-e-e… You political scumbag!” And he wanted to hit me on the head, but I automatically deflected his hand and hit him on the arm. And Starunsky then says: “I will not allow you to fight in here!” And he gets up from behind the table, and that guy shoves me with both hands in the shoulder, and I hit my head against the wall. I leaned against the wall and want to kick him in the head, because I was trained like that. It’s a good thing Starunsky got between us, otherwise it would have been a new sentence…
V.O.: Yes, yes, you would have been a hooligan.
H.H.: I came home, I don’t say anything to Liuda, but I’m thinking: God, how helpless I am, what they are doing to me! And I had this thought (and I still had sinusitis for a long time, I couldn’t bend over anymore), to flee abroad, again through Romania. But what about the sinusitis? I’d need an operation. And there was even such a thought, I confess, but so that people don’t laugh, to tie a stone to myself and jump into the Dnieper, to drown so I wouldn’t surface, to rot there. That’s the kind of thought I had.
V.O.: And what year was this confrontation? Was Gorbachev already in power or before that?
H.H.: I don’t even know… What year was Gorbachev in power?
V.O.: From 1985.
H.H.: I think it was, probably, before that.
V.O.: Still the stagnant times?
H.H.: Yes, but somehow they weren’t pestering as much.
V.O.: The regime had become softer?
H.H.: Much, although it was still quite harsh. And I started to go gray. Rita Dovhan comes up: “Hrytsko, what’s wrong with you—something in the family? Something with Liuda? You’re going gray before my eyes, so thin!” And what can I tell anyone? That was the situation. And back in the camp, the Jews told me: go abroad. They wanted to help. I remember, a Jew named Grilius was imprisoned, he even memorized the address where my father lived in Argentina, to go to Buenos Aires and Sarandí, Petzenher ……………………… [illegible, name]. When they were being led through the zone to the bathhouse before their release, he saw me and shouted: “Hello, Grisha! Sarandí, Petzenher!” Meaning that he remembers, that he will pass on the address. There’s a lot to say, I’ve already forgotten a lot, but the Jews tried very hard to get me out, and they helped me so much.
V.O.: And how was it with the visa? You were leaving together, the two of you?
H.H.: Yes, and two children, Liuda’s two sons, from her other husband. There were big problems with the visa. We went to Moscow. She needs to go to work, because when the holidays end, they won’t let her go. She needs to get a release from work. Nadiika had already passed me money to travel through Paris. It was a whole network of connections, again the Jews passed us money so we would have something to travel with, because we had no money, we were poor. Then the KGB, apparently, wanted to get rid of us, they know we’re not going on a visit, but for good. We went to this… Students from Poland studied in Kyiv—Ukrainians and Poles. One of them accidentally says that there was a Polish woman at a Ukrainian concert, that he told her about me because I know ancient songs. We went to the Polish dormitory where those students from Poland lived. This was Władysława Łucka, as she says “Łuczka.” She, it turns out, is of Ukrainian origin, only her husband is Polish, she was there for some professional development. We got acquainted. Then further and further with the Poles, and I already started to send my works abroad for them to hide in Poland, since I needed to hide all sorts of little things, ex-libris and so on. When they went for some holidays—they were let go for holidays—they would hide them between their lecture notes and gradually transported a lot. By the way, I trusted them a lot, they got so attached to me.
The Chekists found out that they were visiting me. I come home from work and see that they are standing there in tears. What’s wrong? It turns out, they were told in Poland that I am a KGB agent, that they shouldn’t have anything to do with me. But they say, “We don’t believe it.” They kept transporting things anyway.
H.H.: So, at the beginning of August 1988, we were already abroad. We traveled through Paris, visited a mathematician, what was his name?
V.O.: Leonid Plyushch?
H.H.: We were at Leonid Plyushch’s, he arranged a very interesting tour for us. (Plyushch, Leonid Ivanovych, b. April 26, 1939, Naryn, Kyrgyzstan. Mathematician. Well-known publicist, literary critic, human rights activist, member of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Human Rights, member of the Foreign Representation of the Ukrainian Helsinki Group. Arrested January 15, 1972, charged under Art. 62 of the Criminal Code of the Ukrainian SSR. On July 5, 1973, a court sent P. for compulsory treatment in the Dnipropetrovsk special psychiatric hospital with a diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia.” Through the efforts of the international community, he was released in January 1976. Western psychiatrists declared P. sane. Lives in France. — V.O.).
V.O.: And how did you settle in Canada?
H.H.: I worked as a loader. And then Vasyl Romaniuk (Romaniuk, Vasyl Omelianovych (Patriarch Volodymyr), December 9, 1925 – July 14, 1995, imprisoned in 1944 for 20 years, served 10, a second time—in January 1972 under Art. 62, Part 2 for 7 years and 3 of exile. Served time in Mordovia and Yakutia. — V.O.) came and asked a businessman to have me write signs. A little bit in a nightclub.
V.O.: Did you earn any pension there?
H.H.: Very little pension, because I later came back to Kyiv, and I was working under the table. I earned about 48 Canadian dollars a month in pension there.
V.O.: That must be a pittance?
H.H.: Yes, but that’s how I did it. The pension there works differently than here. But they give me this pension and another one, not earned.
V.O.: What is your situation there now?
H.H.: In a home for the elderly.
V.O.: And why? You and your wife…
H.H.: She divorced me. She works for Radio Liberty.
V.O.: I don’t know this story. You don’t have to explain the reasons, but at least tell me the year.
H.H.: When we arrived in Canada. I met her husband, he’s a journalist, very erudite, I liked him. A Russian last name, he’s from Donbas, Vasyl Zilgalov.
V.O.: I know Vasyl Zilgalov, he was in the URP for a bit.
H.H.: But it’s not worth mentioning, because it doesn’t add anything to the story.
(Here follows a thiefs song performed by H.A. Herchak, the text is unclear: In the second verse:)
Ти сказала: нічо, синку,
Ой крав же я бай теличку (?),
Ти сказала невеличку...
Вкрав я воли половії,
Ти сказала: ще й другії.
Як пішов я по другії,
То там мене та й зловили,
До темниці мя всадили.
Аби-с, ненько, не зогнила,
Що ти мене не навчила.
This needs to be written down in musical notation. [Illegible]. These are special sounds, new special signs are needed.
V.O.: The end of Hryts Herchak’s story.
[End of recording]
V.O.: October second, 2003. Mr. Hryhoriy wants to add something.
H.H.: There I said that I had written a repentance. It was my mother who once wrote a plea for my pardon. And my accomplice asked me to write one too. People often ask me: “Why wasn’t your sentence reduced? They released people for less.” I say: “Repentance is not condemnation. You had to condemn nationalism or some party you belonged to. And I only wrote that I wouldn’t do it anymore.
On the website of the Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group http://museum.khpg.org.
