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Svetlana Ahijevych Research Paper

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My grandmother’s friend, Svetlana Ahijevych, was born in Russia in 1938. She lived with her parents, Mykola and Maria, and her brother in a one-room home. Svetlana recalls the family garden, her mother scrubbing their clothes by the river, and her father working on the farm and working as a carpenter and blacksmith. Their family had a pig, a cow, and chickens. She and her family were servants to a farm. “They were happy times. We had a comfortable living.” Svetlana recalls.
All of that changed in 1942 when Germany invaded Russia when World War Two first started. Soldiers forced the family and all their neighbors onto freight cars to be taken to German work camps. Svetlana was only four years old at the time, but she remembers the night well. …show more content…

It smelled bad because there was no place to go to the bathroom-just the straw and they’d shovel it out and put new straw in,” Svetlana remembers, “Sometimes you’d hear guns and they’d stop the train and search.”
The Ahijevyches were housed in barracks, with several families in one room, in a work camp near Hanover, Germany. Svetlana’s family members that were old enough to work were sent to work from early morning to late at night in an ammunition factory. Svetlana and her brother were left alone every day with the other kids too young to work. Svetlana’s brother was so young, that her mother was afraid he would wander off. Maria tied one end of a sheet around his waist and the other around the bed frame so Svetlana could watch over him.
At noon each day, Maria could come back to the barracks and take her two very young kids over to the next building for lunch. The meal was generally turnip or cabbage soup and rarely a piece of bread. It was their one meal of the day. “We were so hungry,” Svetlana said. “There were guards all the time around the camp, but sometimes my mother would try to sneak under the fence into the nearby communities and we would ask people for food. If she had us with her, sometimes they felt sorry for

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