´As I say, there was freedom in the camps after Stalin's death. For example, a warden who supervised where he worked, where the forest was cut down, said, 'Come here. I came and sat on a stump. ‘And he said, 'Stay seated.‘ And they went to the village for a hundred grams of vodka.'
“I have always climbed up and tied the ropes so that the [wood] is pulled and laid down. To keep it from falling. To be where it was needed. There was such a situation that as Stalin died there it was [freedom].”
“But they found nothing near me. They found a single sheet written in German. That was a joke: Es lebe meine liebe Alina. It means: Long live my beloved Alina. And the KGB said: 'Translate it to me.' I translated it and he said, 'How could you write such stupidity? Decrypt the code correctly.‘ I stared, I didn't understand, it was just a joke. The KGB came to my house, checked everything at home, messed it all up, but I didn't have anything on me.”
Nadija Andrijivna Baranovska was born on October 18, 1933 in the village of Verba in Western Ukraine in the then interwar Poland. She attended elementary school in Verba and then joined the Business and Economics Institute in Lviv. Her further studies were completed in 1953 when she was arrested by the KGB and sentenced to ten years in Rivne prison. The reason for the arrest is still unknown to her, but she was probably reported by a friend because of anti-Soviet verses or a letter written in German. After her conviction, she was taken to the Irkutsk region to a Soviet labour camp (Gulag) in Tajshet, where she cut down and processed wood. In 1955 she was released at the amnesty and subsequently allowed her to graduate from the Institute of Business and Economics in Lviv. After graduation she got married and worked in the Volyn region in the Rožyšče village. He currently lives in Verba, Rivne region in the Western Ukraine.
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