Олександра Папіна Oleksandra Papina

It turns out that this last train to go from Kyiv to Yasynuvata... This is the last train to reach Yasynuvata. At that time, it no longer continued to Donetsk. My father arrived on this train, and my husband left. After that... I don't know, literally there... it seemed to me that it happened right away. My father was somewhere... My husband came to Vinnytsia region to pick me up, and we went to Kramatorsk. My father... very fierce fighting had just started in Yasynuvata. There was no communication there, it was impossible to reach anyone. It was only if a person charged something somewhere, a phone, was able to send a text message, that was lucky. There's Halyna, who... On August 10 [2014], she got a granddaughter... Maksym's daughter Zlatka. And on the 12th [of August] he received a summons. Of course, he went to the military enlistment office. Halyna was thinking of exempting him somehow, and he had a fight with her about it. So, my father was out of contact, and Maksym was being taken away... I can't imagine Halyna's condition at all, how she survived everything there with her little granddaughter. We went to Kramatorsk... this is the impression of Kramatorsk... We arrived at night, the train arrived around four in the morning. It was my first time in this place, a strange city, into the unknown. My husband had some relatives there who... with whom we came to stay, they helped us until we found a more or less decent place to live. That's how we ended up in Kramatorsk. My father used to say that it was 10 days of hell. That is, without communication, without anything, almost constantly sitting in the basement. They had some meat in the freezer, no bread, nothing. You cook this meat and have to eat it because there is nothing else. He had to bury his neighbor, who was killed by a shell. The police just came and confirmed that, yes, he was dead. They said, “If you want to, bury him yourself." He and his neighbor washed him, dressed him, and took him to the cemetery in their cars. He said, “We arrived, and there were some, you know, Caucasians, I don't know, Chechens, Abkhazians, whoever." The coffin was being transported in some kind of Volkswagen van, presumably. Everyone who was going to the funeral was in a Moskvich. [The Chechens] let them in, waited there. They just buried him, put the coffin in that pit, buried him, no cross, nothing. They were coming back. [The Chechens] let the Moskvich through, but the Volkswagen van was confiscated “for the needs of the republic.” My father told me how he got out of that. There was no connection, he and his neighbor decided to leave Yasynuvata at their own risk. They drove to Avdiivka in his car and the neighbor's car and then went through the [Donetsk] filtration station. It looked like a checkpoint, but there was no one there, and they looked around — no tripwires, nothing. In short, they entered Avdiivka without any incident. He said, "We are entering Pokrovsk, and it's a Saturday, Independence Day, a wedding as if it's a completely different life."

I was given the tenth [or] eleventh grade, and I also had the ninth grade. I just don't remember which grade... It was either tenth or eleventh grade. It was just the election, the campaigning, the first round. They asked me, “Oleksandra Oleksiyivna, who are you going to vote for?” I'm standing there, thinking, well, gosh, how can I answer them, to explain, and to somehow, it's, well... I'm standing there, formulating an answer in my head, and another boy says, “Well, you're probably going to vote for Yushchenko, like everyone else?” I said, “Yes, I will.” I think, phew, he's done all the work for me. I said, “Yes, I will vote for Yushchenko”. He then... he realized that he had misspoken. He meant to say for Yanukovych. Later they clarified with me, "Are you really... I misspoke, I meant to say for Yanukovych." I said, “I didn't, I'm going to vote for Yushchenko.” They said, “Why?” There were already some stereotypes about these Banderites, the oppression of the Russian language. I must have been explaining something to them at the time because I said, “In fact, this is not a problem, your parents speak Russian, have you seen anyone beaten for speaking Russian in Donetsk?” They said no. I said, "What about harassment, you are studying here now, what language do I speak with you, what language do I speak? They said, "Yes, yes." Of course, they came home, and it's unlikely that there... Maybe a few of them wanted to... maybe they just retold this conversation, and that's it.

In fact, I didn't really take this academic paper very seriously. Somehow, at the time when I should have probably been studying, on the contrary, I took a more formal approach to it, I just gained a certain authority among my teachers, and then it all went on automatically, I don't know. Somehow formally... I didn't... But I know for sure that when I was interested in this topic... then with the sources, well, what kind of sources? It was some kind of official Foreign Ministry bulletin because even was [no] Internet back then... well, there was, but there was no straightforward way to access it. Considering the scholarship you received, going to an Internet club to pay for an hour of Internet was a rather considerable amount. That's the first thing. And secondly, even if you collected this information and put it on some floppy disk, you had to insert that floppy disk somewhere. Not everyone had even these computers back then. Again, you had to go somewhere else to an Internet club just to work in Word. So I would go to the periodicals room, some official newsletters of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, look for some articles about the signing of some agreements, analyze them. Then I did the same with some press. Then someone advised me, saying, “Do you know that in Donetsk we have..." I can't remember exactly how it was called, this Slavic Society... oh, the Center for Slavic Culture. Later on, from all this... I realized that it was one of the centers of this movement, which later backed the “DPR”. This was the official center through which these shady actions were funded, probably since the [19]90s, in Donetsk. I went there, they gave me contacts. The head of this Center for Slavic Culture was a professor at the mathematics department [of Donetsk State University]. I went there, but for some reason, I don't know, it didn't work out. I came there once, and he was very interested: come, come, come, we are there, and this and that, and we will practically write your thesis for you, just keep visiting us. But I didn't feel any such catch at that time, as they say. I don't know why I didn't go there. Somehow it didn't work out anymore and thank God.

My paternal grandfather, Vasyl Denysiuk, worked on a collective farm during the Second World War, just like everyone else. When the Second World War broke out, the Germans occupied Vinnytsia region, and he was 14 years old at the time. He was captured as an Ostarbeiter [forced laborer]. He was a prisoner and worked in concentration camps and factories. When the Second World War ended, he was somewhere in France, near the city of Calais. There, they were liberated by the British and Americans. He told me that when they were liberated, they were given a lot of food, some chocolates, and very nice clothes, something like a military uniform. Among them, in the camp where he was held captive, there were not only civilian prisoners but also prisoners of war, i.e., Soviet officers of lower rank. After they were liberated and before they were handed over to the Soviet authorities, many of them were encouraged to go to Canada or Australia. Among those who were... in the military, many agreed to this offer. They were probably aware of what could happen to them upon their return to the Soviet Union, but my grandfather did not agree. He did not accept this offer. He thought he was a boy, 14 years old, a civilian. That is, nothing bad could happen to him for sure. But after they were handed over to the Soviet authorities... They were sent to Odesa on five steamboats, as he says, and sailed for about a month. When they were handed over to the Soviet authorities, these Soviet soldiers who received them took away everything that the Americans and the British had given them, clothes and food. They gave them some rags in return. Already in Odesa after they arrived in Odesa, in the port, they were distributed and sorted into civilian prisoners and prisoners of war. He was sent... despite the fact that he was a civilian, a young child, at the time of his capture. He was sent to [a labor camp in] Magadan, where he worked in the taiga for five years. But he did not stay there for all five years. His fate was that his father was a communist, and he volunteered... as everyone was probably called a volunteer at that time. Everyone went to the front. He even died there and received some awards from the Soviet government after his death. His mother wrote a letter to the authorities somewhere. He was not released from that concentration camp but transferred to Azerbaijan, somewhere near Baku. It was already a somewhat lighter labor camp, and they were building roads there.