We continue our series of publications about the tragic events of Stalin’s camps, based on interviews with witnesses. Our film crew collected these stories during a trip to Ukraine this summer. Today’s feature is the memories of Dmytro Synytsia, a retired village teacher who was born in a prison hospital in Vorkuta.
Dmytro shares the stories of his parents — how his father, as a teenager, was imprisoned in Stalin’s camps for participating in the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) and took part in a prison uprising in the spring of 1953. His mother also endured the horrors of repression and years of imprisonment, saving her family. These memories are not just a reflection on the past but bitter lessons from history, reminding us that freedom always comes at a cost and demands constant struggle.
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Dmytro Synytsia, rural teacher, retiree:
I, Dmytro Dmytrovych Synytsia, was born in Vorkuta, in the village of Oktyabrsky, Komi ASSR, on March 13, 1956. The hospital where I was born served a dual function: it cared for both prisoners and the free employees, although the latter were 4-5 times fewer. In other words, it was a prison hospital. So, I can say that I was born in prison. My parents didn’t tell me much about this; I discovered the truth as an adult when I reviewed all the documents.
When I was five years old, my father told me that I should remember another date because that is my real birthday — March 5, 1953, the day Stalin died. He repeated this often. As a young boy, I didn’t understand what a birthday was, since no one celebrated them in those days. Why should I be happy that some man died and I was born? But my father repeated it so often that the first date I remembered for life was March 5, 1953, the day Stalin died. My father drilled it into my memory. Later, when I was finishing school, my father told me more about his life, but back then, his stories sounded like adventures from Sinbad the Sailor, like some kind of fairy tale. Scary, but still a fairy tale. My mother, when she heard his stories, would get very angry…
At the time of my birth, my mother had already been released, but my father was still serving his sentence.
Perhaps because I was born under the northern lights, I have been a lifelong wanderer. Now I’m a retired teacher; I taught geography and practical psychology courses. In a rural school, you teach whatever they give you… My parents had three sons; I’m the eldest, and my brothers, Ivan and Pavlo, were born in Ukraine.
My father lived to be 60, my mother – 90.
FATHER
My father, Dmytro Danylovych Synytsia, a Ukrainian, was born on November 7, 1926, in the village of Rudlyve, Mlyniv district, Rivne region. The village still exists today and is now part of the Dubno district. I have been there. It’s a small, very picturesque village, with the little Ikva river flowing through it.
In the village, remnants of the church still remain, where my father, as a 16-year-old boy, together with his friend (whose name I don’t remember), made an inscription that played a tragic role in their lives. They wrote in tar on the wooden church: “Death to Hitler and Stalin!” My father’s friend was killed by the NKVD agents, partisans of Saburov, for this.
Here is a document regarding my father’s release, which states that he was convicted on December 11, 1944, by a special session of the NKVD of the USSR. According to Articles 58-1a, 58-1-2 of the Criminal Code of the RSFSR, he was sentenced to 10 years in labor camps without confiscation of property plus 5 years of deprivation of rights. The reason there was no confiscation was that he was arrested while in the army. In 1944, after their village was liberated from the Germans, my father was drafted into the Red Army, where he served for 58 days. Then he was arrested by military counterintelligence and spent almost the entire summer in prison, in solitary confinement.
The fact is, after the Left Bank of Ukraine was liberated, men who had been on occupied territory were conscripted into the army and sent to penal battalions. They were not given weapons but sticks. Many died during the crossing of the Dnipro. However, this practice was no longer applied when Western Ukraine was liberated. Here, those conscripted from occupied territories were screened through SMERSH. And my father’s godfather—who had also been conscripted—reported during interrogation that Dmytro Synytsia had been part of a youth organization of Banderites.
They sent my father to a filtration camp in Alkino, Bashkiria. There was an entire system of filtration camps there, where interrogation methods dating back to the Tsarist secret police were used.
My father was lucky that he wasn’t in the forest, specifically in a hideout. He was a liaison for the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) and participated in two battles at just 16 and a half years old. He proved himself well, and they were preparing him to become an agent of the UPA’s security service. No one can believe that at such a young age, he went through special training and was able to identify NKVD agents in the detachment. He told me that he could spot where documents were hidden by looking at seams and could tell which boot heels concealed something.
My father said they were trained for interrogations. They were prepared for the fact that they would be beaten severely and that the information would be beaten out of them. So, they were split into “fives” (groups of five), and the level of secrecy was so high that each member only knew the others in their own “five.” That way, even if someone couldn’t withstand the torture and gave in, they could only betray those in their “five.” They knew nothing about anyone else.
Another incredible incident helped my father. The investigator, a 27-year-old Tatar, asked him: “Is it true that you wrote slogans? What did you write?” My father replied: “Yes, I wrote: ‘Death to Hitler and Stalin.'” One would think, what would come after that? Execution without trial or investigation. But how could the investigator write those words about Stalin in the interrogation materials? Wouldn’t that turn against him? So, the investigator cleverly avoided it. He turned to the window and said: “Synytsin, I heard the first part of the slogan — ‘Death to Hitler!’ But I didn’t catch the second part. I fought in the war and am deaf in one ear.” And my father realized that the investigator was giving him a lifeline, which ultimately saved him from execution. The execution article was removed, and since he was still under 18, they gave him 15 years instead of 25. He served ten years in Vorkuta, in a special regime camp for political prisoners called “Rechlag” (River Camp), OTP (Special Camp Unit) No. 10. He was arrested in June 1944 and released on March 24, 1956.
After returning to Ukraine, we lived in my father’s native village in Rivne region. But then, suddenly, we were ordered to prepare for the road because my father had no right to return to his homeland. We were given 24 hours to pack. The village council provided a cart, and at the station, there were trains heading east. By that time, my parents had three children, and as my father told it, the entire village emptied their pockets to gather some money for us to travel. My parents were threatened that they would be re-arrested and the children would be sent to an orphanage if they tried to escape. We left for the Dnipropetrovsk region because my mother remembered she had relatives living there. I don’t remember the journey itself. I remember only when we started living in Pochyno-Sofiivka (now part of the Magdalynivka community, Novomoskovsk district).
My father worked as a shepherd in a collective farm all his life, even though he was smart enough to be a mechanic or something else. But he chose this job because it gave him the freedom he wanted, and he could feel unrestricted. He would sing to the birds, and the birds would sing back to him. That’s how people remembered him: walking, dark-skinned like a gypsy…
He herded cows and read books. I caught up with him in terms of the literature he read only after I finished my degree in history. I couldn’t understand how he managed that with only four years of schooling. He knew Russian and Polish. Out of respect for a Tatar in the camp, he even learned Tatar and could speak it fluently. In May 1944, nearly all Crimean Tatars were deported from Crimea in just three days and sent to camps…
In the 1970s, he was almost accused of anti-Soviet activities again. At that time, Oles Honchar’s novel “The Cathedral” had just been published. The book was brought to us by Semen Kovalchuk, my father’s friend and a journalist. I was in 7th grade at the time, and I read it and then hid it from my father. Then this friend came by and said to my father, “Return ‘The Cathedral’ because now they could jail you for it.” My father came to me, but I pretended I knew nothing about it. He searched the whole house—no book. Later, he was summoned by the KGB. When he returned, he laughed and told us, “I told them—I specifically fled from people to the cows so that you couldn’t pin anything on me anymore. Who can I possibly agitate, the cows?”
My father was a natural entertainer, always cheerful and inventive. I remember once we were traveling with him to Rivne for my cousin’s wedding. At that time, it was impossible to buy a ticket for the Kovel train. People waited at the ticket booths for several days. Only those with a certificate proving they were going to a funeral were allowed to skip the line. A doctor friend suggested writing in the certificate that the mother-in-law had died.
We arrived at the train station, but people wouldn’t let us near the ticket booth. Then my father spread his arms wide and said, “Good people, my mother-in-law has passed away.” The entire line turned to him: there stood a gypsy in the middle of the hall, nearly crying. My father had tanned so much working with the cows that he was almost black. Someone said, “Let the gypsy bury his mother-in-law, or she won’t rest in peace without him.” My father approached the booth, handed over the certificate, and received four tickets. We ran to the platform and asked, “Is this the Kovel train?” — “Yes, the Kovel-Simferopol train.” We got on the train, and as it started moving, I told my father, “We’re going the wrong way.” We went to the conductor: “Where is the train going?” — “To Crimea,” she said, glancing at our tickets and turning pale. We got off at Synelnykove and, with some adventures, made our way back to Dnipropetrovsk. My father once again stood in the center of the ticket hall: “Good people…” The whole line turned: “Gypsy, why didn’t you go to your mother-in-law?” And he said, “Is it my fault they’re heading in different directions?”
The line almost fell over with laughter. Even the ticket clerks stuck their heads out of the windows. And who came up with this idea? — The trains “Simferopol-Kovel” and “Kovel-Simferopol” arrived at the station at the same time…
My father met my mother thanks to his friend, Sashko Kachalovsky. A Banderite and a daredevil, he received a shorter sentence and was released earlier. He met a girl named Ulyana, while my father was still serving his term. So, he asked: “Does Ulyana have a girlfriend? But one of our blood, someone who has been through suffering.” Ulyana did have a girlfriend… My mother gave birth to us, three boys, and a little sister, who passed away as a child.
MOTHER
My mother, Mariia Kostiantynivna Synytsia, born in 1928, was Ukrainian, from the village of Zalissia in the Shatsk district of Volyn region. It’s an incredibly beautiful village near the famous Shatsk Lakes—on one side is Lake Svityaz, the deepest in Ukraine, and on the other is Pulemetske Lake. My mother lived in a paradise in Ukraine. People still draw water from Lake Svityaz today because its quality is so high!
My mother was sentenced because my grandmother had brought a loaf of bread to some strangers. Whether they were UPA members or Bulbashi, in any case, they were partisans. In 1944, my mother, who was sixteen at the time, took the blame to save her family—she said she was the one who gave them the loaf of bread. And for that, she received 25 years. She served six and a half years.
My father was quick to tears; just a little thing and he’d be crying. I’m just like him. But my mother—I never saw her cry. The mark of the prison must have been too strong… I don’t remember receiving affection from my mother. I recently asked my brothers, “Did mother ever hug you?” My brother said, “No.” Everything was strict, but polite. This is also part of the tradition of communication in Western Ukraine—we call our parents ‘you’ in the formal sense. Parents are like gods—they gave us life! And that’s also part of our genetic memory. This is another way we are different from our enemies.
And she only shared her hardships when she was 86 years old. That’s when she confessed that they had tried to rape her during interrogation in the Lutsk prison in 1947. The girl was scared to death and screamed desperately. Her brother Mytko, who was also imprisoned there, heard her scream and started shouting as well. And in just a moment, the entire prison erupted in a wild uproar.
My father wasn’t beaten during interrogations—he was interrogated by SMERSH (the secret military organization “Death to Spies”), and they simply executed people. But my mother was taken by NKVD investigators, and she suffered greatly. They would shove matches under her nails, tip over a stool, and make her sit on its leg with her tailbone—within two minutes, a person would lose consciousness. According to my mother, this was the most terrible torture.
After her release, my mother wanted to stay in Vorkuta. Apparently, one could earn a living there, and every woman wants to build a better life for her family. We lived there for a year or a year and a half after her release, and then we left. My father’s heart wasn’t at peace… “I’m missing the sun,” he said. “No amount of money can replace it.”
I rehabilitated my mother by law, but at the time I wasn’t allowed to access her case, they only showed me a thick file.
My mother’s tragedy was also that none of her relatives ever said a kind word to her for practically saving them. Shortly before she passed, she complained to me that she had spent her entire life waiting for a word of gratitude from her sisters and brothers. Because if she hadn’t taken the blame back then, no one knows how things would have turned out. They all could have been deported.
“The Shine of Vorkuta” — My Way of Repaying the Debt
There is a writer in Ukraine named Andriy Kokotyuha. He has written many books, including some about the Ukrainian insurgent movement. However, after reading a few pages, I realized that since he is still young, just over fifty, he lacks the genetic memory of that pain; he has no personal connection to that tragedy. And I thought: how many of us, those who were directly involved, are still alive? I felt that I had a huge debt to my father, to my mother, and to the millions of Ukrainians who perished. There are not many among us who are willing to write about what they heard from their parents, what they saw with their own eyes. Who, besides me, will leave that historical memory for future generations, the one my father passed down to me?
And so I began to immerse myself in archival documents and slowly began to write, even though I’m not a writer, and I never thought anything would come of it. Some inner necessity arose, fueled by a deep sense of gratitude. I’ve written six books. Particularly curious people sometimes ask me how much I earned from this. I laugh in response. My greatest reward is that the book was printed.
My son turned to the SBU archives, requesting my father’s (his grandfather’s) case for review, and they showed him 78 pages of it. I used these materials in my book “The Shine of Vorkuta.” It’s a literary work, but I kept the real names of the torturers who interrogated my father. They were three Russians and one Tatar—without any implications, just stating the facts. Ukrainians are not saints either… Some cooperated, some betrayed. I’ve already mentioned my father’s godfather… Then he fought in the ranks of the Red Army. Out of the hundred men who went to war from our region, only two survived. The godfather did not return from the war; he died somewhere in Poland. And my father went through the hell of the labor camps and survived.
You see how fate unfolds… I believe it was because of the unimaginable kindness my father possessed. There were many moments when he could have died… but he didn’t.
In my book, I described many of my father’s stories. He often told me about how he started a fight—knocking off the sergeant’s cap three times in front of 2,230 prisoners. This happened when the most rebellious and active prisoners were about to be transferred to Kolyma just before the New Year. The system was designed so that OUN members and UPA fighters (Ukrainian Insurgent Army soldiers) wouldn’t stay in one camp for more than 7-8 months because during that time, they would form connections and could potentially organize uprisings. The greatest enemies of criminal convicts were the Banderites, as they were not afraid of death, and the fights there were fierce. As a result, a system of special camps for political prisoners was created, where, along with Ukrainian nationalists, professors from Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other places were also imprisoned.
When the authorities tried to transfer the most rebellious prisoners to Kolyma, they organized a sit-down strike. They sat on the snow and refused to get up. A sergeant attempted to lift them, but my father rushed towards him, grabbed him by the coat and knocked him down, causing his cap to roll away. This happened three times. Because of this incident, my father was transferred to the ‘special barracks’ (‘high-security barracks’), where he began to lose his mind. It was winter, freezing, and he sat in complete darkness, unable to tell night from day. He was given only 300 grams of bread a day and a mug of hot water. After this, people started calling him ‘blessed,’ and he had only a year and a half left to serve. The banderites (Ukrainian nationalists) ordered the foreman not to send Sinytsia (my father) to do hard labor, warning that they would kill him if he did. They said he had already served his due. While others went to work, my father went to the library. His task was to read a book during the day and recount it in the evening. I was amazed at how my father had the knowledge of a student of philology. It turned out that those professors in the prison were guiding his education.
About a year or two before my father’s passing, around 1984 or 1985, I overheard a conversation. My father said to my mother: “Marusya, I feel like I will soon have to report to the Almighty, but I really don’t want to be buried in this cemetery” (where he actually is now). — “Why?” — “Because it’s right in the center of the village, people are all around. You can’t just come and stand by me in solitude and cry… I really want to go back to the camp. I want to go back to the year 1953, during those three days — from March 2 to March 5. During that time, I was free.”
I couldn’t understand what freedom he was talking about, though I knew well which days he remembered. It happened like this. My father’s friend, a seventeen-year-old boy from Novomoskovsky district, sang a Ukrainian song. The guard shot and wounded him. On March 2nd, my father went to the infirmary to visit his friend. And he said: ‘Look, Mitya, they execute you for a song! So why live?’ The next day, my father climbed onto the roof of the barracks and sang. He had a beautiful baritone; he could create four-part harmonies on the fly in any company. Unfortunately, I didn’t inherit his voice, but my brothers sing well. I remember my father saying: ‘Son, I gave you everything – crooked legs and big ears, I passed all my talents to you, just don’t sing, stay quiet, because the chickens stop laying eggs when you do.’ I cried because the thing I wanted most in life was to sing like my father.
Father was not executed. The next day, he again climbed on the roof, this time accompanied by 50 to 70 other men, and they all began to sing. On the third day, the entire camp refused to go to work. Imagine, over two thousand men sitting in the cold, waiting for Stalin’s death. Word of his illness had already reached them. These men knew: if he survived, they would face death; if he died, they would live. Stalin died, and my father went to the infirmary to tell his friend the news. The camp took off their hats in respect before him. It turns out that was when he felt free! It was a cosmic story. And entirely true…
In our family album, there are many photos, including ones from Vorkuta. I’ve always been struck by the powerful energy conveyed by black-and-white photographs, the energy of silver. Only black-and-white photos can truly capture the energy of a moment, something that colored photos simply cannot do. When you look at photos from the 1940s-50s, at those people who had suffered so much, you are amazed by how angelic and bright their faces are. It’s a completely different era… They gaze into the future with a joy that comes from simply being alive. And yet, here we are, always in a state of complaint…
“I THOUGHT I WROTE ABOUT THE PAST, BUT IT TURNED OUT TO BE ABOUT THE FUTURE”
When I published the book about my father, I thought I was writing about the past, but it turned out that I was writing about the future. Just recently, in our times, the nephew of one of my students went through a Russian filtration camp in the Kherson region…
In August 2022, he was one of the last people to leave the occupied zone near Vasylivka. He spent three days in that camp. He is about 30 years old, never served in the army, and was a history teacher, which he still teaches…
So he told us. You sit in isolation, though not in prison conditions. It’s a small area, two or three farmsteads, fenced off, under guard. They didn’t feed you, just gave you water. In two or three days, they thoroughly check all the evidence. They confiscated phones and interrogated him about every recorded call, about every person listed in his contacts.
This man has a clear pro-Ukrainian position and was afraid of making a mistake with any answer. He miraculously got out… I think we will be horrified when we liberate the occupied territories. We will find so many dead there…
Both of my sons are on the front lines. One has been fighting since the first day, the other for almost a year. I believe that, first and foremost, they are fulfilling their duty to honor the memory of their ancestors. If anyone still thinks that Russia will give us a chance to survive, they are cruelly mistaken. If the world thinks that Russia will leave us and them in peace, they should know—it will never happen. The entire history of the Russian Empire is a history of conquerors. Remember what they came with in 2022? Denazification, de-Ukrainianization, de-Europeanization, and no sovereignty! Does anyone want their children and grandchildren to tread the path to Kolyma, to Vorkuta, and fill new Gulags? I don’t!