“They brought us to the border and people were just scared. They saw that there were some poor, unhappy people living over there. It was just after the war had ended. They said that they were 'Brjanian ones'. And as our parents saw what was going on they left their cattle and they tried to run back across the border. But guards surrounded us and forced us back to the railway cars. And that was it.”
“It was winter and there was some major holiday going on. They took us from Slovakia, from the village of Hanigovce, from the Prešov District, or what the name of that district had been back then. They would put us in those railway cars, the simple ones, in which cattle had been delivered, and we were in the same cars as those animals, and that's how they brought us here.”
“I remember that there was some kind of propaganda. As there was this granny going with us on a train stating: 'Over there, we will be well off.' That's a thing I remember. She said: 'They said that if you want to catch a pig you could do so and the whole pig would belong to you. Even fences would be covered with sausage.' That's how it was. I remember that, I was just a child and this granny wouldn't stop speaking.'
Hanna Petrivna Jankovska née Shutjak was born on April 6, 1939, in the village of Hanigovice in Prešov district in the then Slovak State. As a result of the Czechoslovak-Soviet agreement from July 10th 1946, she and her family ‘re-emigrated’ to the West Ukraine in 1947, settling in the village of Hlynsk in the Rivne region in a house which Volhynian Czechs had left. In her new place of residence she completed seven classes of elementary school and after that she had been working in a kolkhoz. Her husband was also a resettled person, being born in Eastern Poland. She witnessed the Warsaw pact invasion of August 21st 1968 while visiting Košice, Slovakia. When the interview was recorded she has been living in the village of Hlynsk in West Ukraine.
