"They came and said, 'Weg [from] the house!' Our house was nice, it had four rooms: 'Weg from the house, weg from the house!' They drove us to the shed. We were in the shed. There were such beams. Just like in the shed. [In Ilovajsk] I even went to school. The school was, the school was, but it was so fascist. "
"The Germans were all-round. They were bad and they were the ones who when the food was brought said, 'Give us a pot, we'll give you some.' As a human being. Like at our place. There were some, who gave us some soup. In our country [in Ilovajsk] there was coal and railways. We were heating in the house and it was warm in the house. It's all gone, it's been a long time. "
"[The Germans] were fleeing, afraid of the Red Army. [My husband] said that the Germans were already fleeing, they already knew, he was saying that the war would be over. They experienced the end of the war in Prague and [her husband] said: 'Prague welcomed us nicely. They fed us. They gave us meat. Two types of meals were cooked. And compotes. Nice, Prague welcomed us nicely. In Prague, it is a Slavic nation. 'He said:' They fed us nicely. They also put Stalin in the courts. "
Valentyna Ivanivna Tyčynina was born on February 25, 1925 in Ilovaysk in the Donetsk region, Soviet Ukraine. In her hometown, she attended ten classes of a Soviet school and then transferred to the Philological and Literary Faculty in Dnipropetrovsk (now Dnipro) university. In Dnipropetrovsk on 22 June 1941, she was caught up in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, so she travelled back to Ilovaysk, where she experienced Nazi occupation from 1941 to 1943. After the war, she graduated from the Literary Faculty in Kyiv and then worked as a teacher of Ukrainian language and history at the pedagogical school in Ostroh and in Dubno in western Ukraine. Husband Yakiv Tychynin (1919-1987) served in the Red Army from 1939 to 1945 as commander of the Katyushas, a type of Soviet rocket artillery at the time. Valentyna Tyčynina currently lives in Dubno in the Rivne region in western Ukraine.
