Роман Гусак Roman Husak

We often went hiking, visited Dobromyl, where a glorious castle of Herburdt family, is situated. They were so to say Ukrainian German princes who remained more loyal to Ukraine as compared to Polish lords. And the castle, founded on a quite high mountain in the forest, was not entirely destroyed at that time. How looks it now, I do not know. We also visited the cloister of the Basilian Fathers in Dobromyl. Later we stayed in the village Rozsokha where a little ancient stone church was built. Its peculiarity lies in the somehow broken liturgical norms regarding the composition of the iconostasis: deacon doors are on one side though should be on two sides, two-sided. They are there, unfortunately, only on one side. It is a special feature of that little ancient church.

"Teachers were offered to send their children to camp (in my opinion, it costed 40 Zloty). It was a large sum of money, forasmuch as two of us worked, they could afford to send us there. I was in Staryava and my sister, Liuba, was near Yaremche. The girl camp was in Dora, a village not far from Yaremche."

The future wife of this fellow traitor, renegade, Ivan Kusen’ and my sister attended courses in high school. Later, under Soviet rule, she worked at the reception in the polyclinic in Berezhany. Thus, “Horikh” was the pseudonym of that John Kusen’ in the UPA (Ukrainian Rebellious Army). He did not only give my sister away but also arrested her at the revolver point (perhaps, in accordance with the Bolshevik vogue, it was a gun,) subjected her for interrogation and the only witness against her. There were no other witnesses found. The only argument he possessed was that she, my sister, wrote, already in the high school two songs: "We were born out of people’s blood" and "We were born at the great hour" that was given actually her friend. Then that friend handed it to own husband. He was a partisan, but who knew that he would become a traitor! Therefore, the handwriting inspector evidenced against her on that inquest. The easterner Kozakov was a lawyer. Although being a good man, he was not allowed to participate in those sessions, which took place in a military tribunal. The former chef was the only one witness in this case.

We’d all been up and about when rushed into brother: “Be prepared!”, “Be prepared!”. It was a scout greeting. Being uniformed one should set two fingers not a hand to beret. A hand eventually was introduced later, at that time two fingers were common both to Ukrainian and to Polish. However if no berets, no uniform, one was welcomed without a gesture with a hand. Whereupon we immediately ran to wash, dress, threw bedding on the balcony railing to get it ventilated, and later, after prayer, we carefully made our beds and went to breakfast. Every group had breakfast separately, one by one.