"I know what I'm telling you, that my mother went to work in the morning and they took, I don't know what they took from me, maybe blood. I always said to myself, 'Why did the Germans take the children, what were the children for?' Then my mother used to tell me: 'They will take you in the morning and throw you in a cart in the evening.' But I don't know what they did. Maybe they took our blood, maybe they did some experiments with us, because my mother said, 'Then you were all on fire. You had fevers.'"
"I knew neither Ukrainian nor Russian. I didn't understand those languages. But when I talked to Ela, she taught me Russian. So that we could talk, she would talk to me, and I could understand her, so I learned Russian. She went to the first class here in Dubno, took me nicely by the hand and took me to school. I studied with her until the sixth grade and then she left. I went to a Russian school, so I learned Russian there too. I didn't learn Ukrainian until I was at university in Lviv."
"On the first of June we got married, on the nineteenth of August we went to Czechoslovakia, and on the twenty-first of August my cousin came and opened the door, that was in the morning, and said: 'So there is a war and you have attacked us.' Do you mean what you say, or do you not mean what you say?' - 'Yes, there is a war, you have attacked us.' I didn't want to believe that we could attack someone. We always said peace, peace, peace."
Antonina Ponomarenko was born on 5 January 1940 in Dubno, western Ukraine, into a Czech family. She belongs to the enclave of Volyn Czechs. In 1943, together with her mother, she was taken to concentration camps in Poland and Germany before she was liberated by the Red Army in 1945. In 1947, Volhynian Czechs re-emigrated, but the Ponomarenko family could not leave because of their father’s registered Ukrainian nationality. The witness worked as a secretary at the school from 1956. She then graduated from the Law Faculty of the Ivan Franko National University of Lviv from 1961 to 1967 and then worked as a lawyer and judge in Mlynov and Dubno. Since 1991 she has been the chairwoman of the Dubno Stromovka Regional Association. At the time of filming (2013) she lived in the town of Dubno in Rivne region in western Ukraine.
