Michal Sevruk

"They were building a circular northern railway line through the Darnitsa district, the line went through Kiev Petrovka, Serec and to the main station, the northern line. And they were bringing sand, they were making an excavation under the line and they were taking sand and bringing it from the Serec settlement on horse-drawn wagons. Even today it's called Serec, during the war there was a concentration camp there, it was called Babi jar. They took sand from there, and they saw that special troops were taking half-alive people there on cars and wagons. And these half-alive people were farmers from the villages that came to Kiev. Most of them were where Khreshchatyk begins - at that time there was still a statue of Lenin opposite, now it has been taken down - and the whole square next to the Bessarabia market was occupied by these half-dead people who were swollen, their hands and feet were swollen, nobody could help them. He said that every day these special squads would go and pick up the half-dead people and take them there, and we would see them in the sandpit. And even though they weren't dead, they were automatically buried..."

"[My father] said all my life, 'I was born at such a time - my father was born in 1909 - that when I was a little boy, the First World War started. Then the Revolution, the civil war in Ukraine, then the Russians started occupying Ukraine in the 1920s, the Soviet Union, collectivization, they took our land, our houses, threw us out on the street, famine, repression under Stalin, World War II... We saved our Jewish relative, and then after World War II we saved our German relative, who also hid with us, who cooperated with the German government. And then again repression, children and illness. Only now under Brezhnev things have calmed down a bit.' And under Gorbachev he died. He was seventy-seven years old..."

"Since I was a child I had a double life and a double view of culture and history, because we knew it differently from our parents than from school. That was false. Just like in '68 there was an occupation of Czechoslovakia and Moscow TV and radio lied to us that there was going to be a NATO army coming in and there was going to be an occupation of the brotherly Czechoslovak nation from Germany and they needed to be saved. We knew it was false. And the same falsity was in the books and history books and we knew it and felt it. Every man was divided in two. I think it was the same in Czech at that time."