Female, born 1923

Female, born 1923 

Female, born 1923 

An interview with a native resident of the village Stratyn, Rohatyn district in Ivano Frankivsk oblast. The narrator and her parents were repressed by the Soviet government in 1944; her father died in exile in Arkhangelsk and the mother managed to escape and returned. The woman spent 17 years in exile, married another political prisoner there, and gave birth to two children. The narrator remembered a lot of Jewish neighbours of the village Stratyn and described in detail their families, places of residence, occupations and traditions. During the German occupation, all Jews in Stratyn – first, the man, and then, women and children too – were taken to the ghetto in Rohatyn and, after a certain time, shot. The woman recalled several stories about Jews hiding in the nearby villages and in Rohatyn, the fate of their property, houses and households. The narrator told about how she went to the Rohatyn ghetto to buy a shawl. The woman was a nurse in the Ukrainian nationalist underground and shared her memories of the girls taught nursing, doctors (there were Jews among them), and paramedics of the underground, the cases of providing help, her tasks in intelligence and showing the way to underground detachments. The conversation is full of names and pseudonyms of the rebels, information about the fate of some of them. A separate conversation thread is an exile in Vorkuta, the death of her father there, the limitations this posed for the children’s ability to gain education back home. Recorded in Stratyn. The interviewer – Marta Havryshko.