“We got to Odesa and found German houses there. They were nice houses, only that they didn’t have any windows, doors, or anything else. Drought. A sea of grass. How come? Hunger. We tried to plant something in the garden, but nothing came out it. Everything dried out. Wine was all there was. The girls left for Kiev. Yeah, and they told us: ‘Ukraine is big, maybe you know somebody there already, so go wherever you want. You’re free.’”
“They took us to the train station and left us there. We sat there for one, two days, a week, and then some people came and stole whatever they could from us, our shoes and clothes. That’s how it was back then, you see. After collecting themselves, the women left to Kiev. What are you doing to people? They answered us like this: ‘The world is big, Ukraine is big, go wherever you want to go.’”
“The took all the grown ups to the church. There was a fence around it. Here’s what happened. A girl was tortured to death. And who did it? Banderovs [members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army]. That was the year when it happened. They took all the parents, left the kids at home, and we ran under the fence and listened. They had everyone lined up, men and women, they put them in pairs like this, and they were going to shoot them all. Us kids tore out of the house, we went to see what was happening, the church wasn’t far, and we were crying and screaming: ‘Mom, Dad, Mom, Dad!’”
Olha Volodymyrivna Minajeva, née Kozarevych, was born on 25 June 1934 in the town of Drativ (today Dratów) in the Lubartów county in the Lublin voivodship in eastern Poland. She has Ukrainian roots and her parents were agricultural workers. During the war years, her father was murdered by members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army after refusing to join the resistance. The witness, along with her family, was relocated to the Odesa Oblast in south Ukraine during the then ongoing transfer of the Polish and Ukrainian populations on the basis of an agreement between the Soviet Union and Poland in 1944. Due to drought and hunger, they then relocated to the city of Zbarazh in the Ternopil Oblast in Western Ukraine. Later, she again moved to the city of Dubno and worked in a furniture factory. In 2021, she was living in the city of Dubno in the Rivne Oblast in Western Ukraine.
