Already the third generation of those born after the war is entering an adult, independent life. But the wounds inflicted by the war do not heal. They hurt the Ukrainian people, more than 8.5 million dead sons and daughters, with bomb explosions and shells that flew on the heads of the then minors
children of war, the glow of conflagrations, which still flash in the visual memory of those who had to endure those horrors. Every day the ranks of front-line soldiers, military widows, participants in the working days of the war are thinning.
We must cherish them as a national elite that personifies courage and courage, dedication and genuine patriotism, and is a living bearer of the heroic traditions of the people.
In order to prevent a terrible hard time, inhuman suffering, you need to know about them not from movies, but from the memories of eyewitnesses.
On the territory of the Kozelshchinsky district, 3010 participants in the war live today.
In order to prevent a terrible hard time, inhuman suffering, you need to know about them not from movies, but from the memories of eyewitnesses.
On the territory of the Kozelshchinsky district, 3010 participants in the war live today.
Fate was favorable to them: they were lucky to stay alive. After all, more than 5,000 soldiers of the district did not return to their families. Their faithful friends – more than 500 soldiers’ widows, who were not broken by terrible funerals, who found the strength to raise their children, carry through their lives the memory of the dearest people – husbands who fell at the front, are still alive.
The Nazis on Kozelshchansk land brought enough disaster. During the period of occupation (September 1941 – September 1943), the Nazis shot, hanged, over 200 civilians. More than 2,300 people, mostly young, were taken by the invaders to hard labor in Germany. Some of them died from overwork, some died during the bombing of Germany by Allied aircraft, while others, after being liberated by the Anglo-American troops, were afraid to return to their homeland and went to other countries.
Mikhailenko (maiden name – Gavrilets) Maria Kharitonovna was lucky, she returned home safe and sound. Today it is hard for her to remember all the events of a long and turbulent life, individual episodes recall pain in her memory, since fate was not always favorable to her, and perhaps there was such a time.
The family of Khariton Vasilyevich and Sofia Zakharovna had 4 children: Polina, Khariton, Maria and Olga. Parents had to make a lot of efforts, if only the children were fed and dressed like human beings. And then another misfortune befell the family: the father, breadwinner and support of the family, died tragically. He went by boat to put yater in the lake in order to catch fish for hungry children, and (as people later said) he was killed for this fish by fellow villagers Gerashchenko Yavtukh and Gerashchenko Mitrofan.
Sofia Zakharovna was left all alone with 4 children in her arms. The children survived only thanks to her extraordinary diligence, love for children, desire to give them happiness, which she herself did not experience.
Or they could not survive, like hundreds, thousands of similar Ukrainian families. To say that there was no bread is like saying nothing. There was a harvest, there was grain. But there was something else: “tugboats”, there was an anti-people preparation. Most of all, the “procurers” Korshun Sofron, Gavrilets Petr Porfirievich, Koretsky Yakov, Koretsky Afanasy were remembered. The same poor people, but endowed with some kind of power, mercilessly took away everything: clothes, grain, any
utensils, sparing neither the elderly nor the children. And for each of them at home, up to ten hungry mouths were also waiting.
In the family of a neighbor, they pulled out borsch, which was cooked in the oven, poured out the broth from it and took it with them. The unfortunate family did not know what to do and how to survive, but survived.
Maria, like many young men and women at that time, had the opportunity to play the role of a convict, a slave – an “ostarbeiter”. Anyone who has been a slave for at least one day, not unbending for 10-12 hours, can truly appreciate this horror. Those who resisted and were dissatisfied, and even when they spoke openly, there were cases – they were shot, and more often they were severely beaten and tortured. They beat me anywhere and with anything: sticks, fists, working tools, broke ribs, arms, and knocked heads down. From others – they sucked strength drop by drop.
For statistics, 2.4 million Ukrainians were deported to Germany for forced labor (80% of the total number of those deported from the occupied regions of the USSR to Germany).
They started with those who were born in 1920-22, and then – in 1922-24, and finally those born in 1924-26. And most often they took away those who had no protection. The first call for sending to a foreign land came at the end of 1942 from the council (it was located in the village of Peski, Kozelshchinsky district). Vasily Maksimovich, headman of the village of Gavrilets, pointed out to the Germans who were suitable for work. He saved and protected his children Vasily and Galina in every possible way, and sent strangers to forced labor. Now it is difficult to say, or he was forced, or he did it himself.
Those selected in Germany were transported, for the most part, to the station by submarine, since 13
m. drive on foot for too long, and you can’t follow – they ran away.
A seventeen-year-old girl knew that her fate would befall her in a foreign land, defenseless among the barbarians – foreigners. The village has already felt the cruelty of the new government, the neglect of themselves as people of the lowest grade. Late in the evening, people were afraid to go out into the street, as they could shoot.
In desperation, Maria ran away from home to the remote village of Butenki to her uncle Fyodor Zakharovich Koretsky. But with him, although he was the headman of the village, you won’t stay long. And when the fear was dulled, she returned home. And, probably, still become a slave. The policeman Korsun Fedor came and delivered an ultimatum: either you voluntarily go to the Reich, or your mother will be shot.
Having collected the most necessary things, she said goodbye to her relatives. With the same slaves (4 girls of the same age and one young man were taken from the village this time), she went into the unknown.
They traveled to Germany in a cold freight car, in which cattle were once transported. These were calf houses without windows, and where there were windows, grenades were hung in rows. Boys and girls supported each other as much as they could. There was no food or drink at all. Only in Poland they gave out several eggs. The owner treated the dog better than the convoy treated the escorted.
It is hard to say how long the trip to the “German paradise”, as advertised in German leaflets – invitations, took, but for a very long time.
All the youth from the village of this dispatch: Olga Petrovna Sivokon (now a resident of the city of Svetlovodsk), Lyubov Timofeevna Mikhailenko (a resident of the city of Komsomolskaya), Lyubov Fedorovna Mikhailenko (a resident of the city of Kremenchug), Mariyka, as they now began to call her, and Sivokon Ivan Alekseevich (deceased) – ended up in the city of Duisborg at a steel plant. They settled in wooden barracks, which were heated by iron, similar to ours, stoves. While the wood was burning, it was warm. Saved by the fact that the climate is much warmer than in Ukraine. The barracks housed 40 people who slept on bunk beds.
The mattresses and pillows were stuffed with straw, which quickly turned into gunpowder, and bugs swarmed in it. No sanitization was carried out, so the nights became another ordeal for exhausted and hungry people. They fed twice a day: in the morning at 9 o’clock – spinach, swede with worms (and only occasionally, on Sunday, black potatoes and cabbage, also wormy, not suitable for consumption); and somewhere close to 15 o’clock – spinach and swede again (sometimes on Sunday – pasta soup on water whitened with milk). The spinach was so poor quality, green, that it was disgusting to take it in your mouth.
And so it went from day to day from November 1942 to May 1945. People were thin; like candles; it seemed that the skin glowed through. Mariyka by that time weighed 45 kg. Exhausting work at the plant began at 6 o’clock in the morning. I had to work near the molten metal, which had to be scooped up with a ladle and poured into the appropriate closets or molds. After that, cool it with water, put it on a special iron cart and take it to change. Such work is not for a woman, and even more so not for a young hungry girl. My arms, legs, my whole body ached, and most of all my soul. Not all physically and mentally
withstand such a load. In order to support their forces, the “Ostarbeiters” were given from 100 to 200 g of bread with tyrsoy in the evening. They also gave meager money, for which you could buy a pack of ice cream.
One thing was good in Germany – to get to the hospital. There they treated and fed the sick in the same way, whether you are a German or a Ukrainian. The simulation did not run here.
For six months they lived, not seeing behind tears and work where the sun goes down, where it sets. Everything is tightly packed, disguised, behind barbed wire.
Later they began to allow people to leave the camp. We walked along a long, wide street, extremely clean, with neat, cheerful houses on the sides. Everything is well-groomed, cleaned, as they said, “licked” by the hands of “cattle”, i.e. forced Russians and Ukrainians.
The Germans rarely ordered women. But the men had no mercy. They were punished for misconduct at the factory, for household trifles, with beatings and hunger. There were cases when the “Ostarbeiters” themselves beat a hungry comrade half to death for stealing a bar (as they called it) of black bread. It was such a test, such a struggle not for life, but to death.
The long-awaited victory has come to our land. 1418 days were waiting for her. The territory of the Kozelshchansky district was liberated from the invaders on September 25-27, 1943 by units of the 238th and 299th rifle divisions of the Steppe Front. But those who were forcibly taken to hard labor found out about this only upon returning home, because there was no news from Ukraine.
Maria did not know that her brother Khariton was also sent to Germany. Khariton was a fighting boy, quick-witted, had, as they say, golden hands. On the way to Germany, the boy in the carriage was able to tear off the board and jump out at full speed.
At the same time, he broke his arm, it didn’t heal properly. The fugitive got home under a solid mass of cold autumn rain half-dressed, half-dressed. Only in some places compassionate people responded to the pain of a wounded boy
- they gave me food, warmed up, treated my hand. At home, he dug a dugout in the steppe and hid in it until the day of liberation. In 1943 he was drafted into the Soviet Army. He fought his way to Hungary, where he died a heroic death. He went to free his sister from captivity, as he told his relatives.
But American troops freed her sister. On the eve of liberation (a week or two before), already extremely exhausted people were taken out of all the barracks outside the gates of the camp and the guards drove in an unknown direction. Exhausted, hungry people could barely stand on their feet, the weak were beaten, and stones were thrown at the mass of people. We were allowed to rest only late at night. In some forest they gave a command to everyone to disperse in all directions. In a foreign place, where will you go? The people got back together.
Where the liberation came, no one said, and there was no question when.
American soldiers treated the liberated well, compassionately. There was not a single case that someone was offended, hit or pushed.
A completely different picture was observed when the liberated were handed over to the Soviet troops. The soldiers were treated contemptuously, rudely, treated only with profanity. Girls with severed spleens were especially offended. The impression was that defenseless “Ostarbeiters” were guilty of all the troubles of the war. Therefore, the road home, as well as the road to Germany, is by no means easy. Rather tragic, mournful and at the same time joyful to tears.
Having survived the cold, hunger, deprivation, people returned home. One can only wonder how that horror did not nail them to the ground. The war passed like an iron plow through the heart, fate, life. She is forever in our memory – national, kindred, individual.
Despite the bitter fate of the generation of those terrible years, it retained the purity of the soul, and goodness, decency.
The theme of war is inexhaustible. May future generations never have to go through what happened to their grandparents. Let our descendants say through the generations: “No one is forgotten, nothing is forgotten.”
Author : Mikhailenko Lyudmila Antonovna – Senior Lecturer at the Department of Ukrainian Studies, Kremenchug State Polytechnic University.
Materials of the scientific – practical conference “Kremenchuk – 435 years”