Ірина Білик Iryna Bilyk

"You know, I was still very young… and about those events in which I was born... In fact, we were actually living in them, you know. I saw my parents, I saw what they were doing, I saw their environment, I saw those people. For me, personally, there was no such drama at that very young age, in childhood, I didn't feel it – we lived the way we lived. And the main thing was that we loved each other. It was very important. We respected each other – I saw it: how to love, how to respect, how to... give some basic help, to do a favour to someone. My parents were like that, you know, and their environment actually consisted of people like them, mostly intellectuals, and the people whom my father (he graduated from a seven-year school) had to cut trees with, were highly educated. This is how their life turned out... the history of the society in which they lived... First of all it is always good, when you are little, when you have parents around you, when you are young and strong, and beautiful. And then, from the height of this bell tower of life, you look back at it as something good because, of course, it makes a huge difference to compare the material benefits of today's society and what we used to have even some twenty years ago. But you have to understand and appreciate that we had such a generation... of really interesting people, the idea-obsessed people. Now I'm more shocked by people's indifference to each other and to what's going on around us. I do have some great hope for young people, for your generation... and that there must come that critical moment when you will understand that you need to rise up and do for yourself what is necessary, you understand."

"I already had two brothers. Vasylko was the youngest, and those two children were under my care, because my mother had to cook, wash clothes... Make... make ends meet, however she could. Just imagine, in February, my dad brought twenty-two rubles, even if the bread cost sixteen kopecks at the time, in order for a family of five to live for a month, twenty-two rubles was not enough. That's how much he was paid for his work. Or... in the Khrushchev period of [19]62 to [19]63, when we got up early at six o'clock, we went to take a queue in a bread shop, about eleven or twelve — a truck brought the bread... They would give a loaf of bread in one hand, a loaf of bread in one hand; and there was such a big counter, and such a slit in it, and such a big knife. They cut half of the bread that they were making, but we got only a quarter of it. They gave us a quarter of bread, for the three of us! a quarter! And the inside was clammy, and a crust was on top. Vasyl was a little boy, so skinny and small... He would pinch that skin, Roman would pinch from the other side, and until we reached home there was a little bit of pulp left, you know, the clammy part. You would not even give it to the chickens, not to mention to eat yourself, but my dad had to go to work, and my mom... I don't know how she survived, you know. I can't imagine. Now, coming to Kosiv and finding ourselves in this terrible situation, it was a shock for my mother. My mother said it many times, 'Ivan, why did we leave Siberia? At least we could get some fish from the Biryusa river, or catch an elk, or something, at least you could get something.' We already had our own potatoes there, but here... It is like the time before the harvest when everything is over, you have something available in the orchard, in the garden patch... When we came there, I was eating raw potatoes for three years. There were apples, but I ate raw potatoes, as I used to in Siberia. And there was no job, and there was no food to eat, and at the school, I had to go to first grade, there was no money to buy the school uniform."

"I kept asking myself, 'Why in such unusual conditions did my dad survive?' Because he told me about so many adventures from that life that there seemed to be no chance of survival. Well, that's a fact. They walked seventy-five kilometres on foot from Borzovo to Khandalsk to register their marriage, and my birth. So, seventy-five kilometres, my mom and dad took turns carrying me, but they were walking on foot! And on the way back, my mother says she was completely exhausted... [They were wondering] how to get home, [they] did not want to be in that taiga forest, that's it. Dad made a raft... and set it on the water. And he said, 'We are just going with the flow.' And they get into a whirlpool. My dad says, 'I don't know how [to get out]... I had such a long stick, because the river was deep, and we sort of moved along the edge, but we got into such a whirlpool that I only had time... to realise that I had to do something, and a thought struck me: ‘God, save us!’" Do you understand? 'Save us!' And then he says, 'We could have been all dead. You, and your mom, and me.' But we survived."