When Halyna Semibratska, now 101, first heard that Ukraine was under attack by an invading army, she was confused.
“We were not attacked by Germans?” Ms. Semibrazka asked. “No,” her 72-year-old daughter Iryna Malyk replied. This time it’s their neighbor Russia.
This is shocking.
Ms. Semibratska is one of a small group of elderly Ukrainians who have lived through not one but many invasions.
As children and teenagers, they saw their land and people ravaged in World War II. In 1941, German troops and tanks swept across Ukraine to seize it from the Soviets, who were already viewed by many Ukrainians as an occupying force. The Soviet Union reconquered it in 1943 and 1944.
War has once again devastated some towns since 2022, and Russian forces are now making new gains in the north and east. As in the 1940s, the invaders established new governments in the occupied lands, seized food and other resources, deployed secret police, kidnapped community members, and instilled torture and fear.
For some Ukrainians, it all happens in a lifetime – reliving childhood in old age.
Speaking from her home in the port city of Kherson, which was occupied by the Russians in 2022 and liberated later that year, Zinaida Tarasenko, 83, told how her mother Protected her from the German occupation of the village of Osokolivka. She was still a baby, but the violence she saw still appeared in her dreams.
The Germans used the home as a medical clinic: “My mother was pregnant. The Germans forced her to shine her shoes and wash her uniforms. They drank wine and sang songs.”
When Russian troops occupied Kherson two years ago, it was Ms Tarasenko’s turn to protect her daughter Olena, now 46, who was kidnapped from her home by Russian soldiers.
She searched frantically for a week, traveling across the city and going to a different prison every day to get news about her daughter. Then Olena came back. “She was scared. I didn’t ask her much. Just: ‘Did they hit you?'” But, she added, “She wouldn’t say much.”
After Kherson was released in late 2022, two other women, both World War II survivors, found themselves in hospital beds a few feet apart and quickly became friends.
One of them, 94-year-old Halyna Nutrashenko, said a Russian rocket destroyed her home and she was “left under the rubble in the house” and was eventually transported Admitted to a hospital in Kherson. “I once had a house, but not anymore.”
More than eight years ago, she witnessed the brutal Nazi occupation of her hometown in the Odessa region. She remembers avoiding German soldiers; she saw them beating children. They forced her father to work as a metal worker.
Many others were taken away, including all the local Jews. In total, approximately 1.5 million Jews were killed throughout Ukraine in the Holocaust.
“There were thousands of Jews in Odessa,” Ms. Nutrashenko recalled. “They gathered and shot them. Some were shot and thrown into the river. As children we were curious and looked everywhere. My mother kept warning me not to go there: ‘The Germans will kill you too!'”
The life of Yuliia Nikitenko, a neighbor at Kherson Hospital, had been affected by violence even before World War II. When she was two years old, during Stalin’s Great Purges, the Soviets took her father away and executed him.
“I grew up in Velyka Oleksandrivka during the occupation,” she recalls, referring to a village in the Kherson region. “The Germans expelled us. We had a simple little house in the center. They lived there. We moved to another house near the forest.”
Eight years later, Russian soldiers came to her home. “They asked me for my passport,” said Ms. Nikitenko, now 88. “I went to find it. Someone opened it, looked at it, and said, ‘Get a Russian passport.'”
She refused. “I love Kherson and Ukraine.”
She did accept money from the Russians because she no longer received a pension. She said it made her feel like a traitor, “but how else would I survive?”
During World War II, the city of Kharkiv in northeastern Ukraine changed hands four times in fierce fighting, destroying much of the city. Now, as Russian army shelling continues, many buildings are once again in ruins.
Anna Lapan, 100, a Jew from Kharkov, was 18 when the Germans first attacked the city. After the explosions began, she and her family fled east on a cattle train. In 1943, her father was drafted into the army and killed near Stalingrad. Later that year, after the Germans were permanently expelled, she returned to Kharkov.
In 2022, a Russian attack forced Ms. Lapan to flee the city again. Her sister moved to Israel. Ms. Lapan sought refuge in western Ukraine for three months before returning to Kharkiv.
Her home was damaged and some scars still remain. “The house still has cracks that we haven’t repaired yet,” she said.
Ms. Semibratska was just 18 when Nazi troops entered her hometown of Nikopol in southern Ukraine. She remembers that day: August 17, 1941.
“Their whole platoon drove down a wide street,” she said, adding, “My grandfather dug a big trench in the backyard and we spent the night there.” One night, a shell hit the trench, but the family People survived.
At one point, a front line between Nazi and Soviet troops near Nikopol stretched along the Dnieper River. Today, the same river separates Ukrainian and Russian armies. Ms. Semibrazka remembers those nights when German artillery fired from one bank of the Dnieper and Soviet artillery fired from the other. “There was a lot of destruction.”
As she spoke, Semibratska sat on the bed in an apartment she shared with her daughter in Itsium, in eastern Ukraine, where she moved after World War II. When Russian troops began shelling Izium in 2022, days after the invasion, Semibratska lay in bed, paralyzed by fear and too weak to move to the basement.
“I couldn’t lift my mother, so I sat under the load-bearing wall in the hallway,” said her daughter, Ms. Malik, now 72. “Everything was shaking.”
Ms. Semibrazka could not believe that her homeland had been invaded again, this time by a neighboring “brotherly” country. In a way, it made this war seem worse than any she’d experienced before.
“I understand, even though I’m old,” she said. “I preserved my memory. I remember a lot. But now I can’t understand what happened. This was not a war. This was not war, but annihilation.”
Ms. Semibrazka said that during the five months Izium was occupied by Russia, they had “no water, no heating, no electricity.” Windows were blown out and “we put on coats, scarves, hats, everything we had.”
Unlike the Germans who occupied Kiev, the Russians were driven out of the capital. But the once-quiet nearby town soon became world-famous for the terror inflicted by Russian troops.
Yahidne, north of Kiev, was captured on the first day of the Russian invasion. A Russian soldier forced 87-year-old Hanna Skrypak and her daughter into a school basement packed with more than 300 people.
“I couldn’t go there because my leg had been broken before and I had back problems,” Ms. Skripak recalled. “He grabbed my arm and pulled me over there. ‘What are you doing? I can’t walk! They pushed me over there anyway. There was no place to sit or lie down, nothing.”
She was held in the basement for several weeks. “There was no fresh air. I didn’t go out,” Ms. Skripak said.
She had experienced wartime occupation before. Ms. Skripak was just 4 years old when German troops arrived in Krasny, her birthplace. Krasny is a neighboring village to Yahidne. She said she would hide in a corner above the stove when her mother would go out.
Her 17-year-old brother Ivan was taken to a forced labor camp in Germany. “He starved to death there.” Another brother fell ill and died at home during the war. Many residents are missing. “Some people are hiding in the swamp.”
During the Russian occupation in 2022, 10 people died in the school basement, including another World War II survivor. This makes Ms. Skripak the oldest resident of Yashidne and the last person to have memories of both wars.
