Categories: Parents, Eugenia Begetskaya

Where are you from?

I am from Navagrudzki region, from village Orkavichy... There lived our grandparents and great grandparents, so in general, the whole our family comes from this place, all generation of our parents. You see.

And what do you remember about your parents?

My father was at the army front some time ago, he had been in Germany as a captive for four years. My father. Well… The Germans came here again, and as he had been there for four years he could speak German well. After they wanted to shoot him, they took him and driven away, but he told them something in German and they let him free. But those two people who had been taken with him were shot.

Our mother died when three of us were very small, I was the eldest, I was three years old, and the youngest brother was three months only. And the middle brother was over a year. You see. What a childhood we had. Not very good. We had been grieving for all our life (starts weeping)... And when we got older we started to work. Our father came back from this, oh (sigh)... I was taken for works to a man from Lithuania. He was a serviceman, and his parents had been carried away from the home country at that time, and later they came back. So they hired people. And he hired me. I worked for him. I was thirteen years old. So I was milking cows. I milked twenty cows. You see what my hands look like now. (showing her hands). That was before the war. When still being in Poland. But during the war everybody was at home already. But we have seen nothing good at all. You see.

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Researcher: Наталья Иващенко, кандидат исторических наук, ГрГУ им. Я. Купалы, Ксения Адасик, ГрГУ им. Я. Купалы