I survived it all
Stáhnout obrázek
Emilie Varská, née Andělová, was born on 20 June 1923 into a Czech family in Moldava, Volhynia, which was under Polish rule at the time. She attended seven years of basic school and then worked on the farm with her parents. She experienced the Soviet and Nazi occupations of Volhynia; in 1942 she was deported to the Third Reich to do forced labour. She worked in the arms industry near Vienna, in Hirtenberg, Enzesfeld, and Kottingbrunn. In 1944 she was liberated by the Red Army, but because she worked in the arms industry she was immediately arrested and taken to Lviv and then to Rovno, where she was sentenced to ten years for alleged espionage (though actually for being in forced labour). The sentence was later changed to five and then to two years. She was taken Novoyeniseiskiy near Krasnoyarsk, where she put to labour in the forests, fishing, and farming. After her release she was barred from returning to her native Moldava and instead transported to the Kazakh city of Karaganda, where she also worked in agriculture. Therefore, she could not participate in the 1947 remigration of Volhynian Czechs, and so her whole family stayed in Moldava. Emilie Andělová married the Belarusian Anton Varsky and gave birth to their first daughter in Kazakhstan. In 1958 she plucked up the courage to return to her native Moldava, where she worked in the kitchen of the local kolkhoz. In 2013 she was still living in Moldava in western Ukraine.
