This story was recorded by Olena Mikhailovna Gritsenko in the city of Vinnytsia in 2009.   For 66 years, Alena remained silent about her experiences in a German forced labor camp in occupied Ukraine during the war.  These are her words. My name is Alena Mikhailovna Gritsenko. I am 82 years old now.

And I spent my whole life learning to live with memories that I couldn’t speak about out loud.  For 66 years I kept silent, pretending that that place didn’t exist, that that girl didn’t exist, that all of this was a dream of someone else, not me.  But the closer old age and death come to me , the more clearly I understand that if I don’t tell this now, no one will .

I was born in a small village near Vinnytsia, in the western part of the Ukrainian SSR.  When the war reached us, I was 14 years old.  I was a thin, stubborn girl who helped my mother with the housework and dreamed of becoming a teacher. My father died at the front in the first months.  They only brought us a short notice about him on grey paper, which my mother hid in the iconostasis as a sacred relic.

I had a younger brother, Petro.  He was 9 years old then.  He always ran around barefoot and always asked me to read aloud to him from our only book, an old primer.  Before the war, our life was simple and hard, but understandable.  In the spring we dug the garden, planted potatoes, beets, and onions.

In the summer we worked in the collective farm field, collecting ears of grain after the harvest, and drying apples in the attic.  In winter they heated the stove, spun, and mended clothes.  We lived poorly, but we had our own hay, a few chickens, and one cow, which my mother called Marusya.  And I believed that the world was fair.  If you work hard and don’t do harm to anyone, everything will be fine.

The war destroyed this childhood belief in one day.  The Germans entered our village early in the morning.  I remember the crunch of snow under boots, the dull rumble of cars, the scream of some woman at the well. The village men stood by the fences, gloomy and silent, and the officer in the grey coat walked down the street as if he owned everything here.

They quickly occupied the village council, took all the grain from the barn, and led the collective farm cows out of the barn.  But that wasn’t the worst part.  The worst thing was the way they looked at us girls.   At first we thought that the worst thing was searches and requisitions.  But a year after the occupation, rumors began to spread throughout the village about girls who had been taken away, about young people who were being taken to work in Germany.

Someone said that they pay money there and give good clothes.  Someone whispered about camps from which no one returns. My mother forbade me to go outside alone and forced me to hide in the cellar when a German car arrived in the village. I was angry with her, I thought that she was exaggerating, that nothing would happen to me .

I was still a child and didn’t understand how quickly a person can turn into a thing.  That autumn, when I turned 16, a new commandant came to our village .  Along with him arrived two soldiers whom we had not seen before.  They walked around the courtyards with some lists, noted something, argued about something .

That evening they knocked on our door.  The mother came out to them first, wiping her hands on her apron.  I stood behind her , feeling my fingers go cold , even though it was warm in the hut.  One of the soldiers said something in German, the second translated the broken Russian.  The girl must come with us.  Checking documents.  Commandant’s yard.

My mother tried to explain that I had no documents and that we had lost everything during the evacuation.  that I’m still a child.  The soldier shrugged and repeated: “The inspection won’t be back for long.”  He didn’t shout, didn’t wave his weapon, and spoke calmly, almost casually, as if he were inviting me to a village meeting.

My mother squeezed my hand so hard that her knuckles turned white .  I looked into her eyes and saw something in them that I had never seen before.  not just fear, but the understanding that she is now losing me.  I put on my only warm scarf, put on my worn-out felt boots and went out to the soldiers. They didn’t let me say goodbye properly, they only allowed my mother to baptize me.

My brother was not at home.  He ran off to play in the river with the neighbors’ kids.  I left without even saying goodbye to him. This goodbye still stands in my throat like a lump that is impossible to swallow. Me and three other girls from the neighboring yards were loaded into an open cart and driven along the snowy road to the city.

Nobody really explained to us where exactly and why.  Some of us cried, some prayed, some, like me, sat speechless , looking at our mittens, the seams of which were already beginning to come apart.  The village was quickly left behind.  Then the familiar fields ended, and the road went through the forest. When we reached the Big Highway, I realized that I would not be able to return on my own .

In the evening we were brought to an estate fenced with barbed wire not far from the city.  Previously, the soldiers said, this was the estate of some Polish or Ukrainian landowner. Then there was a rest home for the authorities here, and now it is a German arbeitsel camp, a labor camp for people like us.  Large gates, watchtowers, searchlights, barracks made of dark boards, stretching along the fence.

Officially, as I found out later, this place was not on any map or in any papers.  But I stood before his gates, shaking with cold and fear, and I knew that just because he wasn’t on paper, he wasn’t any less real. At the checkpoint they took all our things from us. I had a few of them.

a handkerchief, an old cross on a string, a handkerchief embroidered by my mother with initials.  OG.  The soldier tore the cross from my neck and threw it into the box without even looking at it.  They took us to a barracks where dozens of girls were already sitting on bunks.   The stench of damp straw, sweat, cheap soap and urine hit my nose so hard it made my head spin.

Someone whispered: “Newbies!”  Some looked at it with pity, others indifferently, as if it were just another batch of potatoes that had been brought to the basement.  On the very first night, our names were taken away.  In the morning we were lined up in the yard in one line.  An officer with a wooden board in his hands slowly walked along the line and shouted out numbers.

I remember how he stopped in front of me and spoke in German.  Akhtun Tverziy. The girl standing nearby translated.  48. From that moment on, for them I was not Olena, not the daughter of Maria and Mikhail, not Peter’s older sister , but simply the number 48, sewn onto a piece of white fabric on my sleeve.  “When they call your number, you have 5 seconds to answer,” the woman in the next bunk whispered to me that evening.

“If you don’t respond, you’ll get hit. If you make a mistake, it’ll be even worse.”  Her name was Lydia Ivanovna Moroz.  She was 22 years old and had already lived in this camp for a year.  She seemed to me like an old, almost grown woman, although now I understand that I myself was almost a child. Lydia became for me what my mother once was, the one who explains the rules of the new hostile world.

” You’re not a person here anymore,” Lydia told me on the first night, as we lay on the hard boards, huddled close to each other to keep warm. “You’re a number, a thing. The sooner you understand this, the better your chances of surviving.” I didn’t fully understand what she meant then.

It seemed to me that if I was obedient, neat, and worked well, the Germans would understand that a mistake had been made with me and let me go home. This childish hope lived in me for several more weeks, until reality erased it completely. Our day began before dawn. A sharp whistle, shouts in German, the dull slap of boots on the earthen floor of the barracks.

We jumped up, grabbed our thin jackets, lined up in the yard while the officer slowly counted us with his gaze, checking against the list. Then everyone was sent to work. Some went to the kitchen to peel potatoes and wash boilers, others to the laundry to wash soldiers’ underwear in ice water, others to the field next to the estate, carrying sacks, digging trenches, unloading trucks.

I ended up there, Then here, depending on what number they called. The work was hard, but you could get used to it. The most terrible thing wasn’t the screams or the blows, but the looks. I noticed pretty quickly that some soldiers looked at us not as labor, not as an enemy, but as something special. There was no open hatred in their gazes, like we were used to, and no indifference.

There was something sticky, something intense, something that made you want to hide underground. Back then, I didn’t yet know the word obsession, but that’s what I later found for their gazes. Some girls became their favorites. We saw how the same soldier, day after day, would search for the same girl with his eyes, as if marking her for himself.

He would remember what shift she worked, where she stood in line, when she went out into the yard. And then, one night, her number would be called from the barracks door. Two guards would come inside, shine flashlights in their faces, find the right one,  They throw a short commandant, and she disappears into the darkness.

Sometimes she returns in the morning, sometimes never. The first person I saw like this was a girl named Hanna. She was only 15 years old. She had light braids and eyes the color of cornflowers. One young non-commissioned officer, I think his name was Franz, kept looking at her when we stood in formation.

Lydia noticed this before I did and quietly said: “He will take her, it’s always like this.” First he looks, then gives a piece of bread, then calls at night. A week later, Hanna was indeed called at night. She returned in the morning, silently lay down on the bunk and lay there for 2 days, turned away from the wall. When she started talking again, her voice became somehow empty, as if there was nothing left inside her.

I watched all this with horror and kept hoping that it would not affect me. I tried to be invisible, not to look up , not to stand out, but one day I realized that I was being watched too. It was  A soldier named Klaus. I didn’t know his last name then, but now that I think back to his face, it seems he was too young for what he was doing.

Tall, thin, with short blond hair, he walked through the camp with a slow, deliberate gait, always keeping a little apart from the others and constantly looking in my direction. At first, I pretended not to notice. Lydia whispered to me, “Never meet his gaze.  Never. If you look, he will decide that you agree.

And if he thinks that you agree, it will be worse.” I walked with my eyes fixed on the ground, counting my steps, trying to blend into the crowd, but it was impossible to hide from his gaze. I felt it even on my back, when I carried buckets of water, when I washed cauldrons, when I stood in formation in the wind.

He didn’t shout, didn’t hit me, didn’t give any orders, he just looked. Then the gifts began. One day, when I was scrubbing the floor in the kitchen, someone quietly called out to me. I turned around and saw Klaus at the threshold. He silently put a small piece of white bread on the edge of the table and left without even looking at me. White bread.

I hadn’t seen him since the war began. I stood looking at this piece and did n’t know what to do. Lydia said in the evening : “Take it and eat it.” If you don’t take it, he’ll be offended, but don’t thank him or smile. You  I don’t have to be indebted to him for that. A few days later, he brought me an apple, then a clean handkerchief.

Each time, he put it next to me so no one would see and then left. The other girls started looking at me differently. Some with envy, some with pity, some with hidden anger. I felt an  invisible wall appear between me and the others. Lydia said: “He courts you in his own way.  For him it probably looks like love, but for us it’s always danger.

” In the middle of winter, the door of our barracks opened late at night. Cold air rushed in . Someone blinded us with the beam of a flashlight. I heard my number called. Oh, he’s firtsich. Everything inside me broke off. Klaus was standing at the door. He had a lamp in his hand. He nodded towards me. Lydia squeezed my hand so hard that my bones creaked.

I stood up, my legs felt like cotton wool, and followed him. He led me into a small stone room behind the main house. Previously , it must have been a wine cellar or a storeroom. Now there was a table, two chairs and a kerosene lamp. Klaus closed the door, put the lamp on the table and looked at me for a long time, silently.

My heart was pounding so loudly in my chest that it seemed he would hear it now. I didn’t know what he was going to do, I didn’t know how to behave. I didn’t have  There was no experience, no words, no advice for such a situation. He sat down, took a photograph from his pocket and put it in front of me. In the picture there was a smiling, fair-haired girl holding a dog in her arms.

“This is my sister,” he said in an unexpectedly soft voice. “She was 16 when I left for the war.  You look like her.” I looked at this strange girl with a dog and did not recognize myself in her, but for him this connection was obvious, almost sacred. He talked about his home in Germany, about his mother, about the village, about how his sister loved to sing.

I sat on a chair, motionless, like a wooden doll, and waited for it all to end. That first night he did not touch me. At some point he got up, opened the door and said: “Go, go back to the barracks.” I returned almost running. Lydia was waiting for me, not sleeping. Her eyes sparkled in the darkness. ” What did he do?” she asked in a whisper.

” Nothing,” I answered just as quietly, only speaking. Lydia frowned. This is worse. It means he is building something in his head. It means you are not just a body for him . When this fantasy collapses, it will be the hardest for you. The nights with Klaus began to repeat themselves.

Sometimes he  He called me every other day, sometimes taking a week off. Every time, the same stone room, the same table, the same lamp, the same photograph of a girl with a dog. He would say, “I was silent.” He would read me letters from my mother, telling me how he missed home, how the war had taken his childhood.

Sometimes he would ask me to simply sit opposite him and look at him. I tried to look past him, at the wall, at the lamp, at my hands. But he caught my gaze and seemed to be looking for confirmation in it that he was not a monster, but simply an unhappy person. I did n’t see a monster in him. I saw a man who did monstrous things, hiding behind his grief.

This distinction came to me many years later. Back then, I was simply afraid of him. Afraid that one day he would stop talking and start doing what they did to others. Afraid that when he realized that I would never be his sister, he would kill me. I was even afraid that I would get used to these nights and stop being afraid.

One day he brought me a dress, blue, with small white flowers, a little big for me, but still warm. “This is her dress,” he said, without looking up at me . “They brought it for me from home for the day. I put it on. The fabric didn’t smell of war, but of something long forgotten, soap, dried herbs, ordinary life.

This smell was almost unbearable. Klaus looked at me for a long time, carefully, as if checking if the picture in his head matched what he saw in front of him. Something like satisfaction flashed in his eyes . “You look very much like her,” he whispered. From that day on, he began to call me by a different name. Not Ale, not 48, but Greta.

At first I didn’t understand who he was talking about, then I realized that was the name of his sister. “Sing, Greta,” he said, handing me a tattered notebook with German songs. I didn’t know the words, my voice  trembled. I got confused in the melody. He winced, but endured. She sang better, he once said.

But you will learn too. At that moment, I realized that for him, I was no longer a person with my own life and memory. For him, I had become a living shadow of a dead girl. When the news of his sister’s death came, there was such a cold in the room, the likes of which I didn’t remember even in the barracks.

He entered, his eyes were reddened, a crumpled letter in his hands . “She is no more,” he whispered in German. I didn’t quite understand the word, but I felt from his face that something irreversible had happened. He threw the letter on the table, came up to me and grabbed me sharply by the shoulders. His fingers dug into my skin.

His breathing was heavy and hot. That evening, he crossed that invisible line that he had previously avoided. I will not describe in detail what he did. I know that there are things that cannot and should not be said out loud. I will say  Only that night my body finally ceased to belong to me. It became a vessel for his rage, his pain, his despair.

He said something in German, cried, then laughed, then cried again. “You’re the only one I have now,” he repeated, pressing me so tightly that I could barely breathe. I lay motionless, like a stone, and in my mind I went somewhere far away, to a place where no one could touch me. I returned to the barracks in the early morning, staggering as if after a serious illness.

The dress with white flowers was wrinkled and torn. My hair was tangled, my lips were swollen, my legs were unresponsive.  Lydia was waiting for me at the door.  She didn’t ask anything, she just hugged me and pressed me to her, like you press a small child to your chest. I didn’t cry.  The tears seemed to have dried up inside.

There was only an empty, ringing anemia in which there was no pain, no fear, no hope.  The following weeks merged into one endless night.  During the day I worked like everyone else, moving mechanically, carrying out orders, feeling almost no cold or fatigue.  Almost every night I was called to the same stone room.

Sometimes once, sometimes twice a night. He spoke less and less, touched more and more.  For him, it became a ritual, a way to reassure himself that he had not lost control of his life.  For me it was a slow but inevitable destruction. Lydia tried to teach me how to survive in these conditions. “Use it,” she whispered.  As long as he considers you special, he will protect you, give you food, and spare you punishment from others.

Pretend you’re grateful to him. Pretend you believe him not for his sake, but for your own. I tried, but I wasn’t very good at it. Every time he asked me to smile, I felt something inside me break. Every kind word he spoke sounded like mockery, because it was addressed not to me, but to the ghost of his sister.

One day he brought an old doll into the stone room : a porcelain face with a cracked cheek, worn blond hair, a faded pink dress.  “It was her doll,” he said.  “Now she’s yours.”  I took it in my hands because I knew that refusal might make him furious.  But holding this toy was unbearable.  She was a tangible reminder that I was playing the role of a dead child I never knew.

Klaus looked at me with a soft, almost fatherly expression. “Do you look so much like her when you hold that doll?”  – he whispered.  And everything inside me went cold. Soon after, he brought a camera.  an old German camera with a heavy lens and a flash that sent sharp yellow flashes jumping across the walls.

“I want to have something left over after the war,” he said. “Stand here. Now sit down, take the doll, look at me.” Every click of the shutter felt like a gunshot to me.  He didn’t record me, living Olena.  With my fears and memories, he captured the Greta he had created, which he tried to bring to life with my hands and face. “Smile,” he said.

She always smiled in photographs.  “I tried, but it turned out to be something between a smile and a grimace of pain.”  That night, when I returned to the barracks, I noticed that the girls were looking at me differently.  In their eyes there was that very accusation that was not mine, which later haunted me even in freedom.

How did you survive?  What did you do to stay alive?  They didn’t know anything about my nights, but they guessed. Lydia sat down next to him and quietly said: “He will destroy you. Maybe not right away, maybe he won’t kill you physically at all.” But if this continues, there will be nothing left inside you.  We need to wait for the moment. The moment came in the spring.

Winter began to retreat.  The camp was getting dirtier and dirtier.  Streams of melt water mixed with garbage flowed across the yard.  We heard snippets of conversations between the Germans.  They were nervous, shouting at each other, uttering the words front, offensive, Red Army.  We didn’t yet understand the scale of what was happening, but we felt that something was changing.

At night, distant explosions were heard more and more often.  One morning we saw a squadron of planes in the sky, and within minutes the ground beneath our feet began to shake.  They didn’t bomb the camp, but the railway and warehouses in a neighboring town.  But it seemed to us that the sky was falling right on top of us.

The sirens were howling, the Germans were bustling about, shouting, running back and forth. Some tried to drag the boxes, others hid in the basement. Chaos broke out in the camp.  That night, Lydia whispered to me, “If something else happens, if panic starts, we have to try, otherwise we’ll never get out of here.”  I nodded, although I wasn’t sure I had the strength.

A few days later the bombing was repeated.  Closer this time.   The alarm was raised again in the camp. Searchlights darted across the sky.  The dogs howled.  The soldiers ran around the yard, forgetting about our barracks.  Lydia tugged at my sleeve.  Now, together with three other girls who had agreed among themselves beforehand, we slipped to the back fence, to where the barbed wire had already been hung and where the ground had been undermined by meltwater.

Lydia had managed to get hold of a small knife somewhere, and she was feverishly cutting the wire while I looked to see if anyone was coming.  When a wide enough passage opened up , we squeezed out one by one .  I tore my jacket, scratched my hands and face, but I didn’t feel pain.  We started running towards the forest.

Sirens were howling behind us, shouts in German were heard , dogs were barking.  At some point, shots rang out.  I heard one of the girls scream behind me and fall.  The second one stumbled.  They caught up with her immediately.  Lydia grabbed my hand and practically dragged me forward.  Don’t look back, run.

We ran until our lungs started to rupture.  For three days we walked through forests and fields, hiding during the day among enemies and abandoned barns, and at night moving along barely visible paths.  We drank water from streams, ate bark and some roots that Lydia knew how to find.  Her grandfather was a farmer and taught her what she could and could not eat in the forest.

Several times it seemed to us that we heard distant German speech, and we froze in the bushes, barely breathing. Then the voices died down and we crawled forward again.  On the third day, we saw village roofs in the distance and heard speech in our native language. Partisans and Red Army soldiers had already entered that village.

They found us at the edge of the forest, dirty, half-fainting, from fatigue and hunger. A man in a tunic leaned over me and asked: “Are they ours?”  I nodded, but could n’t get my voice out.  They took us to a hut, gave us hot soup, and wrapped us in a blanket.  Nobody asked any unnecessary questions.

It was the first real show of gentleness towards me in a very long time, and I didn’t know how to react to it .  I just ate and shook. Freedom turned out to be unlike any of my childhood fantasies.  I thought that once I got to this side of the wire, everything would go back to normal.  I will become the same , as if nothing had happened.

But when the war began to recede from our area, when red flags were raised again on the streets of Vinnytsia , when people began to celebrate, sing, hug unfamiliar soldiers, I walked along these streets and felt like a stranger.  Inside me there was still the smell of the damp stone room, the creak of the key in the lock, the heavy breathing behind my ear.

The body was free, but inside me everything remained in that camp.  When the front finally rolled back to the west, inspections began. All those who were held captive or forced to work were forced to go through NKVD filtration camps.  Lydia and I were also questioned.  We were asked whether we had collaborated with the Germans, whether we had carried out their orders of our own free will, and whether we had seen any escaped Red Army soldiers.

I sat in front of the officer in uniform and didn’t know what to answer.  I worked for the Germans.  I carried their water, washed their boilers, washed their clothes.  At night I belonged to one of them.  Which of these would they consider betrayal? I said that we were taken by force, that we worked under threat of death.

This was true, but not the whole truth.  I kept silent about the nights in the stone room not only because I was afraid of condemnation or punishment, but also because I couldn’t find the words.  How do you explain to the person sitting in front of you at the table, with clean hands and a pressed jacket, that sometimes, in order to survive, you have to agree to something that destroys you from the inside.

How can you say out loud that you allowed your enemy to call you by the name of your dead sister because otherwise he might kill you?  After the checks, they gave us some papers and said: “You are free.” Lydia left for Kyiv, where she had distant relatives.  We said goodbye at the station, hugged for a second, and she whispered to me: “Don’t forget who you are.

Don’t let them, dead or alive, take that away from you. Even if you never tell anyone, don’t forget yourself.” I nodded, but to be honest, I didn’t quite understand what she meant. I was too tired, too broken, to think about such things. I returned to our village. Our house was standing, but empty. A neighbor said that my mother died in the winter of pneumonia.

She waited for me until the last minute , calling at night. My brother was taken to some distant relatives in another area, and the journey to him took me several more months of searching. When I finally found him in a small town in the east, he didn’t recognize me at first . I was no longer the girl in a blue dress with a braid and freckles that he remembered.

Something settled in my eyes that children usually don’t see in each other.  in a friend. After the war, the country demanded oblivion from us. We had to build, rebuild, work. They talked about heroism, about victory, about feats. They talked about executions, about concentration camps, about crematoria, but almost nothing was said about what they did to people like me.

Girls who returned from captivity or with a German holding a child in their arms became something shameful in our society. They were pointed at , whispered behind their backs . They were a reminder that war is not only death and glory, but also filth, humiliation, violence, which does not fit into any solemn report. I learned to remain silent. When they asked me where I was during the occupation, I said: “In a labor camp.

” When they asked what I did there, I answered: I worked. It was hard, but I survived. People nodded, said something like. Well, thank God that I’m alive. And the conversation  moved on to something else. This suited everyone. They didn’t need to know what exactly I did to survive and what I didn’t do to die. And I did n’t need to see in their eyes that question, not mine, which I feared most of all .

Why you? Why did you come back and the others didn’t? I married a man named Ivan. He was older than me, a hard worker, a widower without children. He was kind, patient and, most importantly, didn’t ask many questions. My general explanation suited him . I was in a camp during the war, then returned. Our wedding night was not a joy for me, but another return to that stone cellar.

As soon as he touched my shoulder, I heard Klaus’s voice in my head. Greta. I lay next to my own husband, who had done nothing bad to me, and I cringed with disgust at myself. Then I learned to separate one from the other, learned to be close to him with my body, without letting go of that small, almost invisible thread that connected me to myself.

We had two children: a daughter, Maria, and a son, Nikolai. I loved them in a way I probably wouldn’t have been able to if I had n’t gone through the camp. I fed them, hugged them, stroked their hair when they slept, and every time I thought, “No one has the right to touch you without your consent.”  Nobody.

” I didn’t say it out loud to them, but they seemed to sense my anxiety anyway. When my daughter brought a young man home for the first time, I almost kicked him out just because he laughed too loudly and stood too confidently in the doorway. Then I learned to calm this panic reaction in myself so as not to ruin their lives.

Ivan died early of heart disease. He never knew the whole truth about me. Sometimes I think it’s unfair to him, but more often, it was easier for both of us. He loved the woman I learned to be with him. A worker, a mother, a housewife, a woman without past nights in a stone cellar. I kept this part of myself, like you keep  a photograph hidden in the far corner of a suitcase, not shown to anyone.

The years went by, the country changed, the union collapsed, new flags and new slogans appeared. People talked about the war differently: sometimes more honestly, sometimes just as one-sidedly. But about people like me, almost  We didn’t talk. It was only in the 2000s that I happened to see a program on TV in which a historian talked about forced labor camps for eastern workers during the war.

He talked about young Ukrainian women taken to Germany, about small camps near factories and farms, and how these camps often weren’t listed in any documents. I sat in front of the screen and for the first time in many years, I felt like someone was talking about me, without even knowing my name.

After some time, I learned that this historian was coming to our city to collect evidence. I went to his meeting almost by chance. I sat in the last row, listening to others ask questions, and felt my palms sweat. After the end, everyone started to leave, but I remained sitting. He noticed me, came over, and asked if I wanted to share something.

And then what I had been afraid of and what I really wanted at the same time happened. I began to speak. At first, it was fragments, snatches of phrases, as if I was translating from a foreign language into my own. I spoke about  The village, the camp, Lydia, the escape. I barely touched on the nights with Klaus.

He listened attentively, without interrupting, only occasionally clarifying some details. Then he said: “Your story is important.  It is very important that it be heard not only for the sake of history, but also for the sake of other women who are still silent.” These words, your story is important, became a kind of permission for me.

Before that, I considered my experience something shameful and unnecessary, an obstacle to other people’s heroic stories. For the first time, someone told me that this is also part of the war. I did not immediately agree to record this story on camera . It seemed to me that as soon as I formulated everything out loud, it would become even more real, as if before that it existed only in my head, and then it would come out and begin to live its own life.

In the end, I thought, I am already 82 years old. I have lived much longer than I expected on those nights in the stone room. How much more time do I have? If I leave without telling everything that happened to me and to people like me, it will disappear along with me. And now I am sitting in front of the camera in my small apartment in Vinnytsia.

Outside the window, a tram is making noise, the neighbors are arguing about something in the entryway. The kettle is cooling in the kitchen . The world goes on as if nothing had happened. But inside me, the voice of the young German soldier who called me by a false name still rings. I can’t forgive him for what he did to me.

I can’t forgive myself for surviving and others didn’t. But maybe by telling this, I can at least reclaim the right to my own story. I’m not asking for sympathy, I’m not asking for excuses. I know that in that war there were no simple roles, no executioners and victims, no heroes and traitors. I know that many men who returned from the front also carried wounds they couldn’t talk about.

But there’s a special silence around what happened to women’s bodies in that war. This silence is stifling. I speak now not only for myself, but also for Hanna, who never returned from that camp. For Lydia, whose fate I never fully learned . For dozens and hundreds of girls,  whose names no one wrote down.

I lived a long life. I had children, I have grandchildren. They remember me as a strict but affectionate grandmother who baked pies and scolded them when they came home too late. When they learn something about me from this story, if they learn anything, I want them to understand the main thing. Survival is not shameful.

Doing what it takes to stay alive, even if it means losing a part of yourself, is not betrayal, it is a form of strength that is not written about in textbooks. If I could speak to that sixteen-year-old girl who walked through the snow from her house to the German cart, I would tell her only one thing: “You are not to blame for what will happen to you.

It’s not your fault that you’ll survive.  And someday you will tell about it, and someone will hear.  Now, at 82 years old, I am finally doing what I promised her, without even knowing about this promise then. I’m telling you, and if you’re listening, it means she didn’t live in vain. Alena Mikhailovna Gritsenko died in 2012 at the age of 85 in the city of Vinnytsia.

Historians estimate that more than 300,000 Ukrainian women were taken to Nazi Germany for forced labor during World War II. Most of them were left without official recognition of their suffering. Her testimony is one of the few that has been preserved and passed on to future generations.