That the Ukrainian people took up arms was only said in the context of defending the land of Soviets. A hairsplitting reader will take me up on this, for there were Ukrainian heroes and, what is more, heroines. Were Uliana Hromova and Lialia Ubyivovk not household names? Their names stood side by side with that of Zoya Kosmodemianskaya... Later on, Nina Sosnina from Malyn was also canonized as heroine. That’s all. But who will say how many exactly were there heroines who laid down their young lives for Ukraine and our freedom?
Yet, history is gradually opening its secret pages and revealing new heroic figures. Olena Teliha, who was tortured to death by the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv in 1942, has been taking, little by little, her proper place in the Ukrainian pantheon of glory during the past decade. Her life story was until recently unknown to the general public, as was that of her comrade-in-arms Mariya Savchyn whose name was revealed in the fall of last year in A Thousand of Roads, a book of reminiscences published by Smoloskyp.
I do not intend, God forbid, to pit these heroic figures against each other, for I think history will hold enough place for all, be it Uliana Hromova, Lialia Ubyivovk, Olena Teliha or Mariya Savchyn, an underground resistance fighter, who fought from 1944 through 1953 in Lviv oblast, beyond the Curzon line, in Poland, Volyn, Polissia, and Podillia, went down thousands of fiery roads, was three times caught by NKVD butchers but still managed to stand her ground and survive, showing heroism not only in her war exploits. For her idea of heroism and self-sacrifice was not confined to war and death only — it also included the continuous overcoming of difficulties, dangers, and fear. “It was also heroic to believe in our truth in the times of unbelief,” Mariya Savchyn writes today, “to believe in a radiant future when each of us knew that he or she had no future, that fate had already decreed the number of months or even days in your life.”
Fortunately, although she had to walk down hard life-and-death roads, fate was merciful to her. Having endured all physical and mental tortures, she survived and published, in the twilight of her life, her memoirs that testify to the grandeur and heroism displayed by underground liberation fighters during and after World War II.
When you read the memoirs, you heart moves with pain. How could she manage, while writing, to make her bleeding heart live again all through what she had endured and what still keeps her awake? How could she manage to live through all losses and pains and bring back to life all those she walked down the fiery roads with, so that they resurrect, rise from the graves, and talk to us? But for Mariya’s retentive memory, many of them would have remained nameless not only because they died in NKVD dungeons and were buried in mass graves but also because many surviving victims had to conceal other fighters’ graves so that nobody could guess who lay in them.
Here is an instance. The Tsuman Woods, a brief rest. Orlan (Sea Eagle), Mariya, and several messengers huddle around a campfire. A fighter named At is standing aside and opening a just-received envelope with literature. Could anybody have foreseen that the enemy would take advantage of this communication and send a letter bomb that went off in At’s hands? “We found a headless, armless and legless body with a ripped-off chest at the place where he had sat,” Mariya Savchyn remembers. “We buried him, without leaving even a knoll. We also put some oak leaves above, so that the enemy could not defile the insurgent’s body.”
But for this reminiscence, we would know nothing about this fighter, a well- mannered and God-fearing person, who held no high office but was doing the modest work he could do. At was in charge of the technical side, organized a print shop, and helped edit the journal, Za voliu nadiyi (For the Freedom of Hope). “Is this the end?” Ms. Savchyn’s bleeding heart ask, unable to resign herself to this. “The man laid down his life for others and has vanished altogether. Even the triumphant enemy will not record his death. Nobody will ever find his grave, bend his head over it, and pray for his soul. What cruel injustice!..”
She was first arrested by Communist Poland’s UB (Urzad Bezpieczenstwa) and Soviet MGB (Ministry of State Security) agents in Krakow, where she and her newborn son had just settled in the parish of Father Grab. Once, sitting before the baby carriage, she hurled a damaging reproach at herself, “How did I dare to have a baby? What will happen to him?..”
“It’s none of your business. We’ll take care of him,” an MGB officer said.
She fell into the MGB’s clutches for the second time after the war in Lviv, following a betrayal. She had already had a second child whom she wanted to name Tarasyk, and she was on the way to her parents’ place to see him. But she was betrayed by her best friend. Arrest, interrogations... And a proposal: it is time she thought about her child, husband, family, and helped them all live a normal life. How? Intending to capture Orlan and knowing about Mariya’s power to influence him, the MGB sent her to him with an instruction to persuade him to cooperate with them. This occurred in 1949 and forced her to embrace the underground movement wholeheartedly. As she was no longer clandestine, Orlan was not in a position to use her as a messenger, and all contact with the outside world was out of the question. Yet, mixing with people allowed her to see what great impact the underground struggle had on the populace. “No underground literature convinced me so much in the firmness of people as did my presence in their midst,” Ms. Savchyn admits.
In July 1953 the field commander Skob led them from Kremenets Woods to Podillia... right into the hands of MGB agents. This as done in surprise — nobody had enough time even to destroy documents. Another encounter with the MGB, this time in Kyiv. No, they were not in for a firing squad, they were called upon — even by State Security Minister Strokach himself — “to take a realistic look at life,” which meant that Orlan had to collaborate with the secret police. As the MGB had failed so far to entrap Lemysh (Vasyl Koval), one of the architects of long-term underground resistance, it kept Orlan and Mariya “in reserve.” The MGB was in bad need of contacts with the OUN-UPA leadership abroad, so it nurtured the idea of sending if not Orlan himself then at least Mariya with a “message” from the latter.
It would take a long time to tell about this cat-and-mouse game, threats and pressure, promises and temptations. So it is better to read about this in the book. I will only say that both Orlan and Mariya made a wise and heroic decision. Ever since then Orlan missed not even the slightest opportunity to tell Mariya about the events, facts and, details which he would have never divulged before because of secrecy. Now he wanted her to memorize and bring all this to the outside world. And what about Mariya? “I would go out not to fulfill the KGB’s tasks but to do what Orlan instructed me to and what I personally wanted to.” She was well aware that by doing so she imposed a harsh sentence on her relatives, that she was leaving prison above all at the cost of the life of her husband, son, and the rest of the family.
Can we today reproach Mariya Savchyn and her comrades-in-arms Natalka, Uliana, Bohdana, Oksana, Mariya and many others that they — aged eighteen or nineteen and staying underground for years — fell in love, got married and had children in shelters? They loved. “Somebody will call my love irresponsible and reckless,” Ms. Savchyn muses, “but I, and not only I, believed in it. There were very many instances of this kind in our times, in our history... I was unable to keep myself going with just hatred for he occupier. True, this hatred mobilized me for the struggle. But love was stronger than hate, and it got the upper hand. If we had lost love in the heat of struggle, we would have turned into beasts and degenerated.”
Having overcome a major mental crisis and regained herself at liberty — first in West Germany and then in the US, where she still lives — Mariya Savchyn managed to muster the remaining fragments of her broken life. She was aware that she had done her duty to the end: she handed down ample evidence of the UPA’s self-denying struggle for independent Ukraine as well as of her great love.
She was the last to tell the foreign land the truth about the struggle. Having included her “testimony of the last witness” in A Thousand Roads, she also returned this truth to her homeland. She had nurtured this intention throughout her trying lifetime. “I felt,” she writes, “it was no accident that fate brought me, the last living eyewitness, to the free world. Fate vested me with a heavy duty to preserve the memory of our liberation struggle, especially of its final period. I must tell and, moreover, write everything down.”
She did preserve and tell it.
Fate spared Mariya Savchyn by giving her life, an undyingly young heart, and strength to fulfill her intention. She set no other goal than to bring to the public her evidence of the heroic struggle. “What tormented my mind during MGB interrogations,” she writes, “was that our death would throw a very important part of our people’s history into limbo... The dusty archives will rot away, the last forest shelters will grow over with grass, and the people will little by little forget us and will not even know where we lost our last trace. Although our struggle is over, let it linger in the historical memory of the people... It was very important for me to preserve — at least in the occupier’s archives — and leave for history some specific facts of the liberation struggle. Those facts threatened no one, they belonged to the past: somebody was dead, somebody was in Siberia. One day, God knows when, this prison state will tumble down, and then historians and new generations will learn about our struggle from the records of our confessions now kept in KGB safes.”
Let the archives tell us about the destiny of those who fell in the struggle without a trace and remaining in the public memory as just Kruch, Moroz, Kateryna, Zina... They deserve our grateful memory.
