“My father served in the Tsarist army and when Ptljura was building the army, he went there. That’s why he did not like Poles, because Pilsudski betrayed Petljura. They fought well with Petljura and they chased the Soviets, but then the Soviets saw what was happening and they gave western Ukraine and Belarus to Pilsudski, and that’s why he betrayed Petljura.”
“We were constructing a railroad. Then they transported us even further north and we were building the Stalin’s railroad there. We were working on the construction of the railroad which was called Stalin’s railroad. Then suddenly, I don’t know what happened, but they transported us to the Irkutsk region. We worked with wood there.”
“Our father was teaching us that we were Ukrainians already when we were little children and when the Bandera’s rebellion started, we joined the resistance movement as well. At first we were gathering materials and preparing food supplies. They needed young people like us.”
Valentyna Platonivna Denysjuk was born on November 16, 1929 in the village Tarakaniv in the Rivne province in the then Poland. While living in western Ukraine she experienced both the Soviet (1939-1941) and the Nazi (1941-1944) occupation of Volhynia. During the Nazi occupation she actively served as a messenger (zvyazkova) for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. She was distributing pamphlets, preparing food for the fighters and relaying messages among the individual insurgent groups. After the liberation of western Ukraine by the Red Army in 1944, Valentyna Denysjuk was arrested in 1947 and interrogated and interned in the town of Dubno. She was sentenced to a total of ten years of imprisonment and in 1948 she was transported to the Soviet labour camp (gulag) Pechora in the Komi Republic in the north of the Soviet Union. She was working on a railroad construction there and in the early 1950s she was transported to the Irkutsk area, where she was logging wood in the forest. She was released in 1954 and after her arrival to Dubno she worked in a machinery factory where she was eventually promoted to a position of an accountant. Her sister Nadja and her husband Onufrij Mychajlovič (1927-1990) were arrested for their support of the Ukrainian insurgents as well. Her husband was interned in the gulag Norilsk in the Krasnoyarsk region. At present Valentyna Denysjuk lives in Dubno in the Rivne province in western Ukraine.
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