On our way to Siberia they gave us a salty fish and no water and I thought I wouldn’t survive
Nadija Mychajlivna Tymčuk was born July 8, 1930 in Vovkovyi village in the Demydivka district in interwar Poland. She witnessed both the Soviet (1939-1941) and Nazi (1941-1944) occupation of West Ukraine. Her father was conscripted into the Red Army after the second arrival of the Soviets in the Rivne Oblast (February 1944) and was arrested for alleged collaboration with the Ukrainian Insurgent Army after his return from the frontline. The whole family suffered the consequences of it and Nadija Mychajlivna herself was arrested in 1950 together with her mother and one of her sisters and imprisoned in a jail in Dubno. After being sentenced to five years she was transported to a prison in Kharkiv and subsequently to the Molotov district in Kazakhstan. She was released in 1953 and was allowed to return back to West Ukraine. She had to take on a job in a doctor’s household in Dubno so that she could register as a local citizen. Afterwards she completed her education and started working as a health care assistant. Her husband was also arrested, sentenced and taken to a Soviet labor camp and served his sentence in Karaganda, Kazakhstan. Nadija Mychajlivna currently lives in the city of Dubno in West Ukraine.