“They brought me to a prison in Dubno. I did my time here in Dubno. It was a transit prion. I took my granddaughter there and told her: ‘Look Yulia, this is where I did my time. In that window.’ They locked us up because of our father, that was it. That was our destiny. And I thought I wouldn’t have to suffer now, that they would give us something extra to our pension [for the imprisonment].”
“They held [the residents] up all night, so they’d sign [handing the farm to the kolkhoz]. A cow, a pig and three kids. Put on shoes, clothes, eat and sow. All that was necessary. People signed it. One man signed for 500 rubles, came home, lived in poverty, children cried, so he hung himself and that was it.”
“I had a ring, this beautiful golden ring with a loop. He took it off somehow. I don’t know how because we didn’t really go anywhere, maybe I was holding it and he took it from me. I said: ‘Listen, give me back my ring.’ The Chechen said: ‘Shut up or I’ll kill you.’ The Chechens could kill, and they could do anything.”
Nadija Mychajlivna Tymčuk was born July 8, 1930 in Vovkovyi village in the Demydivka district in interwar Poland. She witnessed both the Soviet (1939-1941) and Nazi (1941-1944) occupation of West Ukraine. Her father was conscripted into the Red Army after the second arrival of the Soviets in the Rivne Oblast (February 1944) and was arrested for alleged collaboration with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army after his return from the frontline. The whole family suffered the consequences of it and Nadija Mychajlivna herself was arrested in 1950 together with her mother and one of her sisters and imprisoned in a jail in Dubno. After being sentenced to five years she was transported to a prison in Kharkiv and subsequently to the Molotov district in Kazakhstan. She was released in 1953 and was allowed to return back to West Ukraine. She had to take on a job in a doctor’s household in Dubno so that she could register as a local citizen. Afterwards she completed her education and started working as a health care assistant. Her husband was also arrested, sentenced and taken to a Soviet labor camp and served his sentence in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Nadija Mychajlivna currently lives in the city of Dubno in West Ukraine.
