One had to learn to lie to survive. No one could be trusted
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Nina Vallion was born on 1 April 1931 in Bratislava as Anna Jeremenková to Grigory Leontyevich Jeremenko, a Kuban Cossack in exile, and Maria, née Zajíčková from Záhorská Ves on the Slovak-Austrian border. The father who was born on 1 January 1897 in Ekaterinodar served as a captain in the White Guard army of General Pyotr Nikolayevich Wrangel during the Russian Civil War. From the autumn of 1921, he lived as an exile in Czechoslovakia and probably offered his services to the Czechoslovak intelligence service. He lived in Bratislava from the late 1920s, where he met the witness‘s mother and started a family. In the autumn of 1944, the witness with her mother and little brother Peter fled from Trnava to her grandparents in Břeclav, and her father fled to Germany to escape the liberating Soviet army and surrendered to the Americans. He emigrated to the USA likely after the communist coup in Czechoslovakia, to where the rest of the family followed him legally on an ocean liner sailing from France. At first they lived in New York where the witness found a job immediately, only to complete her education at a later stage. She worked as a travelling salesperson and a draftswoman in a design office, and she obtained American citizenship after five years. In the mid-1950s, she opened a fashion salon in Oklahoma. From 1968 to 1971 she lived in Munich with her second husband Robert Vallion and their children. After returning to the US, they settled in Portland, the capital of Oregon. She took up photography, graduated from law school later on and worked as a corporate lawyer for several years. Then she worked in the restaurant business until retirement. She has also spent the last few years of her life painting. She was living in Portland, USA in 2024.
