"The village of Lavriv suffered greatly during the war. The village was mainly patriotic, but not everyone was the same. It couldn't be. There were various parties that were already manifesting themselves under Poland - nationalists and communists, who had certain relations with each other. But (there were quarrels - author´s note) ideological and not militant. It started later. It developed during the war."
"After the war only a few locals remained (in the village of Lavriv - author´s note), but as soon as the collective farms began to be organized and the fields were a lot, there was a lot of work, the workers were lacking, so they began to invite other people. A lot of people came to Lavriv from Polesí."
"The village certainly (during the Second World War - author´s note) was very distressed. It was burned down in 1943 during the Nazi occupation. There were a total of nine hundred houses. Can you imagine that? Everything was burned down, just everything, and I think there were nine, or how many, unburned houses left. Or there remained houses that were far away in the field."
Sima Dmytrivna Kordunova was born on February 14, 1931, in the village of Lavriv near Lutsk in what was then interwar Poland. In the village of Lavriv she underwent Soviet (1939-1941) and German occupation of Ukraine (1941-1944). During the Nazi occupation, her home village was burned down by Nazi soldiers in retaliation for the departure of the local Ukrainian police to join the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. During the Nazi occupation, her brother was taken to the Third Reich for forced deployment, and after the re-arrival of the Soviets, Father Dmytro was mobilized into the Red Army in 1944. Instead of joining the front, however, he was probably shot by the NKVD near the Russian city of Ufa. Sima Dmytrivna graduated from the Pedagogical Institute and in 1975 she moved to the village of Polonka near Lutsk. She wrote a book about the history of the village of Lavriv and currently writes a book about Polonka, which is now part of the city of Lutsk. At the time of filming, she was still living in this part of Lutsk in the Volyn region of western Ukraine.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
