When she first heard that Ukraine was under attack, Halyna Semibratska, now 101, was confused.
According to the criteria of
“Aren’t the Germans the ones who attacked us?” asked Semibratska. No, responded her daughter, Iryna Malyk, 72. She was Russia.
It was a shock.
Semibratska is part of a small group of elderly Ukrainians to survive multiple invasions.
As children and teenagers, they saw their land and people devastated in World War II. German troops and tanks rampaged in 1941, wresting Ukraine from the Soviet Union, which many Ukrainians already considered an occupying force. The Soviets reconquered it in 1943 and 1944.
Since 2022, war has once again devastated some of the same towns and cities, and Russian forces are now making new advances in the north and east. As in the 1940s, invaders have established new administrations in occupied lands, seized grain and other resources, sent in secret police, kidnapped residents, and instilled torture and fear.
At her home in Kherson, captured by the Russians in 2022 and freed later that year, 83-year-old Zinaida Tarasenko told how her mother protected her from the Germans who occupied her village, Osokorivka. She was a baby, but the violence she saw still returns in her dreams.
The Germans used the family home as a medical clinic. “My mother was pregnant. The Germans forced her to clean her shoes and wash their uniforms.”
When Russian forces took Kherson, it fell to Tarasenko to protect his daughter, Olena, now 46, who was kidnapped from her home by Russian soldiers. She searched frantically for a week, going to a different prison each day, asking for news of her daughter. Then Olena returned. “She was scared. I didn’t ask him much. Just: ‘Did they hit you?’” But, she added, “she didn’t say much.”
Anna Lapan, 100, a Jew from Kharkiv, was 18 the first time German forces attacked the city. When the bombing began, she and her family escaped aboard a cattle train that took them east. Her father was conscripted and killed near Stalingrad in 1943. Later that year, she returned to Kharkiv, after the Germans were permanently expelled.
Lapan was forced to flee the city again in 2022 and spent three months sheltering in western Ukraine and then returned to Kharkiv once again. Her house had been damaged. “There are still cracks in the house,” she said. “We have not repaired them.”
Semibratska, who shares an apartment with her daughter in Izium, eastern Ukraine, could not believe that she was witnessing another invasion, and this time by a neighboring and “brother” country. In some ways, that made it seem worse than the war she had known before.
“I understand it, even though I’m older,” he said, adding, “But now I can’t understand what’s happening. It’s not a war. “It is not a war, it is an elimination.”
Yagidne, north of kyiv, was occupied in the first days of the Russian invasion. A Russian soldier forced Hanna Skrypak, 87, and her daughter into the basement of a school where there were more than 300 people. “I couldn’t make it because I had broken my leg before and I have back problems,” Skrypak recalls. “She grabbed my arms and pulled me there. ‘What are you doing? I can not walk!’ “They pushed me there anyway.” She was held for weeks in the basement.
Skrypak was 4 years old when German troops arrived at his birthplace, Krasne, a neighboring village of Yaguidne. His brother Ivan, 17, was taken to a forced labor camp in Germany. He “Died of hunger there.” Another brother died at home, falling ill during the war.
Ten people died in the school’s basement during the weeks of Russian occupation, including another woman who survived World War II. That left Skrypak as Yaguidne’s oldest resident, the last with living memory of both wars.
‘I understand, even though I’m older. It’s not a war. It is not a war, it is an elimination.’
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