"People and my father helped them. They supported them. They fed them and then formed a partisan group. But the Germans knew what was happening. So they went to the Russians and interrogated them. The Russians stopped in the villages and helped the people. And the Germans then burned houses and interrogated it. It was terrible."
"They wanted to return to Poland, so they went to the border. But they did not reach the border. They stopped here in Dubno, in Račín and then in Dubno. They got a house and repaired the house. There were three of us. "
"They took us to the Odessa region, to Odessa. I remember parts of it, because I was four or five years old. In the Odessa region [we were in the village], I remember Suchyj Tashlik. We stayed there for several months, I don't know much about it, and we decided to return [to Poland]. We rode in carriages. "
Iryna Volodymyrivna Potapova was born on April 28, 1940 in the Lubartów District in the Lublin Region in eastern Poland (then the General Government). In 1942, Father Volodymyr Ivanovich was transported to the Buchenwald concentration camp and subsequently to Dachau, where he died in February 1945. Iryna Volodymyrivna, together with her mother and siblings, then went to the Odesa region to southern Ukraine in 1945 as part of an ethnic exchange between Poland and the Soviet Union. However, due to unfavorable conditions, the whole family decided to go back to Poland, but due to closed borders they had to stay in Ukraine. They settled in Račín in the Rivne Region and then in the town of Dubno. After school, Iryna Volodymyrivna worked in a bank, after studying at the University of Uzhhorod and in Lviv, as a teacher in the villages of Molodavo, Račín and Majdan, but also in Dubno. She currently lives in Dubno, in the Rivne Region of the western Ukraine.
