“From Kocanda I was going to Moldava to school. I was a little girl, and my brother was carrying me to school on his back. I didn’t want to go to school. At home they would always make me wear a red sweater, a red beret, and a black skirt, and as soon as I came to school, the children would always start laughing at me: ´Red as a poppy, red as a poppy.´ (a pun on her surname – transl.’s note). I was sitting there and crying and the teachers were wondering what was wrong with the beret. I didn’t want to go to school anymore, and I threw the red beret away; I didn’t want it anymore.”
“I was willing to go to Czechoslovakia. They didn’t let me go. If I had not been married... That was a mistake. I could have gone. [Kuročenko: You would have gone, but he would not have.] They would not let him. [Kuročenko: No, they would not.] And what about the child? Would it leave with no father? [Kuročenko: But there were women who did it.] Da. [Kuročenko: They did not look at it and they went.] Life would have been different there.”
“My parents took the horses to the farm to work, and during those three days we needed to do the horses' work. I was a little girl and they sent me to hoe a peanut field belonging to the Prošek family. I was working with my hoe, following the straight lines just as the other workers. [Kuročenko: That was at the time when the Prošek’s were already rich.] Otherwise they would not pay me for that part of the field. They tried to cheat on me, anyway: ´Milenka, just walk slowly...´ Boženka from the Prošek family was telling me to work slowly. I was drenched in sweat, and I didn’t want to stay behind; then they wouldn’t pay me for the work I had done. She was cheating me: ´You don’t have to hurry so much.´ They gave us lunch, too. Plum dumplings. [Kuročenko: With sauce?] Even with cream, with thick cream.”
“My granddaughter and her husband were told that one could earn good money in the Czech Republic. And what do they do? They go there to earn some money. They arrived in the Czech Republic, and she was a given a job – working alongside a surgeon during operations. [Kuročenko: As a nurse.] The one who has to clean everything. Nobody wants to do that kind of job there. They sent only people like her for that. The poor souls were working there, and they could not even come home for the holidays. They did not have money for that; they do not even earn that much. They spend what they earn there. And they have to pay there, too. [Kuročenko: For an apartment?] For the apartment where they live.”
“My sister had a warrior spirit. She was not afraid of anyone. They began banging on the window and she went to open the door. [Kuročenko: Slávka?] Not Slávka, Máňa. [Kuročenko: Máňa, Máňa]. ´What do you want?´ They pushed her aside and stepped inside the cottage. They are looking at him. ´Fine. You got some liquor here?´ People were distilling liquor from peanuts and selling it, and they had to go around selling things in order to buy clothing and things for the house. They gave them the liquor. ´I will be shooting.´ Meaning they would kill him.”
Emilie Kuzněcov, née Maková, was born May 9, 1928 to a family of Volhynian Czechs in the village of Kocanda. She attended a four-grade Polish school in nearby Moldava. She experienced the Soviet and Nazi occupation of Volhynia, and just like the other Volhynian Czechs, she recalls the suffering brought about by both of these regimes. She remembers the Ukrainian insurgent army raiding the region and the extermination of Jewish population. In 1944, after the second arrival of the Red Army to the Volhynia region, her brother Václav Mak joined the newly formed 1st Czechoslovak army corps. Emilie married a Russian officer in 1947, and thus she was not allowed to re-emigrate to Czechoslovakia on the basis of the Czechoslovak-Soviet agreement about the re-emigration of Volhynian Czechs. She lived with her husband in the village of Mirohošť, with the exception of from 1960 to 1970, when they lived in Rostov on Don. Her husband worked for railway companies, and Emilie worked as a janitor at the school in Mirohošť. She still lives in Mirohošť in Ukraine today.
