Zhanna KRYZHANOVSKA

(Dnipro, Ukraine)

Zhanna KRYZHANOVSKA, daughter of the repressed Mykola Bereslavsky:
«MY FATHER HAD NO ILLUSIONS ABOUT SOVIET VALUES»

On May 18, 2024, my father would have turned 100 years old. He was born in the village of Novospasivka, which was later renamed Osypenko, in honor of the aviator Polina Osypenko, who was born in our village. However, my father preferred the old name because Polina Osypenko’s real surname was Dudnik, and her husband Osypenko had only spent two days in the village, with practically no connection to it. Therefore, he wished to retain the historical name of Novospasivka. The village was founded by settlers from the Poltava region in 1805, and it is located near Berdiansk in the Zaporizhzhia region. My father studied its history, and some manuscripts he kept are titled «From the History of Novospasivka.» He provided materials to the local museum, but not everyone agreed with the idea of restoring the old name.
We are used to thinking that our patriots are mostly from Western Ukraine. However, both Levko Lukianenko and Viacheslav Chornovil—prominent leaders of the Ukrainian idea—were actually from Central Ukraine. My father was, in fact, from Southern Ukraine. I want to emphasize that my father’s national consciousness was formed not so much within the family—his mother was an ordinary village woman, an orphan, while his father was educated, and so was his paternal grandfather—but it was the teachers in his school, who were not locals, that shaped his national identity. One of these teachers was named Polishchuk, and as my father later learned, he was repressed. My father also remembered a fellow villager named Filymon, whom they called “Uncle Filymon.” This man died before the end of the war. At that time, he was around forty years old—still a young man. The boys, teenagers, would gather around him, and he would say that two evil forces had come together—referring to Stalin and Hitler—and that no one knew how it would all end. “I so want to live to see how it all ends,” he used to say, but he was ill and did not survive. My father often remembered Uncle Filymon as a politically aware person.
My father studied very well, was curious, and loved books deeply. You have to be born with that. He had a brother and a sister, but they didn’t have the same passion for books. He collected them and cherished them dearly. When he was taken to Germany, like many others, as an Ostarbeiter (forced laborer), he wrote letters to my mother, which were sometimes smuggled through, always asking: “Mother, please take care of my books!” Unfortunately, the library did not survive because the house was burned down twice by the Germans. Even though it didn’t burn completely, books are something that catches fire easily. His passion for books stayed with him throughout his life and was passed down to us, his children. In my memoirs, I wrote that I don’t remember my father buying us candy, but he always bought books, albums, and pencils. My mother would buy the candy, and my father bought the things that contributed to our development.
His younger sister was also taken to Germany. My grandmother, Hanna, my father’s mother, lost her husband on the front lines and was left alone with her youngest son, Volodymyr, who was only 14 at the time. The Germans nearly took him too for forced labor because he was tall, and they thought he was already 16. You can only imagine what people of that generation went through, especially my grandmother. She had to endure extreme hardship, left with nothing after their house burned down and stood empty. Everything needed to be rebuilt from scratch. And her children were far away, scattered across foreign lands, with no way of knowing whether she would ever see them again.
In Germany, my father worked at some factory with a fellow villager named Naumenko, and together they decided to escape back to Ukraine. My father knew German fairly well—he had studied it in school and improved it while he was there. He somehow got hold of a map, and German maps, especially military ones, were very detailed, showing even the smallest rivers. He memorized the map because they couldn’t take it with them. They traveled openly along the road, carrying a shovel on their shoulder, pretending to be moving from village to village looking for work. To avoid drawing attention, they didn’t sneak around at night but walked during the day. At one point, a policeman stopped them and asked, “Which village are you from?” My father answered, “Zabeltitz.” “Who do you live with, and who do you work for?” That question he couldn’t answer. The policeman knew everyone in the village, as it was small, so he arrested them but assigned them to work for some locals. These people treated my father well. I don’t know what happened to the other escapee, my father’s fellow villager, as their paths diverged.
There is a photograph (my brother has it) of my father when he was young and looking angry, because he was mad at the Germans. They were trying to convince him to take a picture to send to his «Muter» (mother)… Later, when he saw how kindly the Germans treated him, the relationships improved—not everyone supported Hitler. Many years later, I was in the fourth grade at the time, my father wrote a letter to the village of Zabeltitz, to the woman he had lived with. Her name was Kristina, and during the war, she was already elderly and lived with her granddaughter. It was the granddaughter who replied to my father’s letter, as Kristina had passed away. The neighbors, who also remembered my father well, wrote back as well. They corresponded for about twenty years, and my father wrote the letters in German. Even I corresponded with a girl from the neighboring family.
My father was released when all the Ostarbeiters were freed. He and his sister found each other in Germany. He wrote to her about the books he was reading and how he was collecting books and magazines. But his sister and the girls who were with her would reply, «Why do you need those books? You should buy yourself something to eat, and burn the books.» My father responded that he would never burn books: «I’d rather burn myself than burn books.» He used to say that there was no such thing as a «Soviet» nation; we are Ukrainians. Well, my aunt didn’t have the same awareness as my father. She wasn’t a fervent supporter of Soviet power, as she knew about the Holodomor and the repressions, but she didn’t have the same strong sense of national identity as my father did.
By the way, fate took him to Czechoslovakia for a while, where he met emigrants—conscious people who also guided him toward the Ukrainian path. Immediately after his release, my father was drafted into the Soviet army and worked as a translator from German in some military structure. He hadn’t seen his mother for years, his father had died, yet he was not allowed to return home. Afterward, he also served in the Urals, and only after that was he able to return home.
He would tell stories of serving with people who bragged about how many villages they burned in Western Ukraine while pretending to be Banderites. They dressed up as Banderites and burned villages. The local population knew very well that these were not actual Banderites. They heard Russian being spoken. I have talked to people from Galicia, and they confirmed what my father said. He already knew back then that the NKVD had prepared such sabotage units at a special school in Kharkiv.
He also told me about an incident when some of our soldiers were harassing our own liberated girls, accusing them of serving the Germans and attempting to rape them. My father stood up for them, and his own nearly shot him. But one officer, by the way, a Russian, who was clearly an intelligent and educated man, essentially saved my father.
When he was in Czechoslovakia, he had some connections for a time with the professors of the Ukrainian Economic Academy in Poděbrady, a renowned Ukrainian technical school. However, when he was about to cross into Soviet-controlled territory, he had to bury some materials because he knew they could pose a danger to him.
My father had no illusions about Soviet values. He was outraged when, even at school, teachers forced students to draw horns on the portraits of writers they had studied the day before, to distort their faces, and to add some offensive captions under them. He never celebrated Soviet holidays, but he also never forbade us from becoming pioneers or joining the Komsomol, as he understood we had to live in society and not be outcasts.
After returning to the village, my father got married and twice attempted to enroll in the history department—once at the Donetsk Institute, then called Stalin Institute (since Donetsk was then called Stalino), and later at the Berdyansk Institute. However, he quit his studies both times. Why? Because the history being taught absolutely did not satisfy him; it filled him with anger and disgust. Later, when I was finishing school and wanted to become a journalist—I was preparing for it, even published a little—my father told me, «They won’t let you write the truth, and you won’t be able to lie.»
It was the same when I decided to study history. We then agreed that I should go into philology and instill a love of the native language in children, even though I didn’t want to be a teacher. Fate, however, decided otherwise—I became a philologist and even did some writing. I have published some materials. When I worked at the Institute of Postgraduate Education, writing became a part of my job.

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