“Hello, dear... I am in Bessarabia. I’m alone. My comrades aren’t with me... I think a lot about Ninka, I dreamed of her... It’s a pity that I left such a little orphan...” – wrote the fighter Oleksandr Lisetskyi, a native of Berezhanka village in Khmelnytskyi region.
Museum staff found the “little orphan” Ninka. A woman told about her father оn the phone. In 1941 he took part in defensive battles on the Soviet-Romanian border. He was captured near Mykolaiv, was a prisoner of concentration camps in Poland and failed to escape several times. He returned home in 1945.
Nina remembers with sadness that when her father returned home he was given a military ticket. Soon he was called to the Military Commissariat and the document was torn up in front of him, because “he did not fight, he was a prisoner”. The man was offended until the death that occurred in 1999. The daughter remembers that usually on May 9, a wagon drove with gifts for veterans through the village, and their house was always bypassed because his father was in captivity. The Soviet authorities believed that he did not deserve either a kilogram of groceries or a few kind words. Every time former soldier had streaming tears because of the humiliation of human dignity.
His only consolation was a large family. His wife and he raised five children. For Nina and her sisters the dad’s letter from the collection “Unread Letters of 1941...” was an unforgettable gift. Museum researchers handed it during their business trip to Khmelnytskyi. This letter had a long and difficult way of 77 years so that they could gather together once again, remember their childhood and read their father’s letter with excitement.
Zlatko Zlatanov
Senior Researcher at the Scientific and Exhibition Department of Socio-Humanitarian Components of War