Kateryna Sikorska’s family is among them.
German and Nazi are not interchangeable: German and Volksdeutsche refer to ethnicity, not political beliefs. Some Germans and Volksdeutsche who opposed the Nazis became victims too. Others were executed or sent to slave labor camps by the Soviets.
Russian and Soviet are not interchangeable: Russian refers to ethnicity, while Soviet refers to a geographic area controlled by the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union contained many nationalities, including Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, and Germans.
There are thousands of mass graves all over Ukraine, yet while the Soviet Union existed, the people who lived in these terrible times and witnessed what happened during both Soviet and Nazi occupations were not allowed to talk about it. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, researchers were finally able to interview eyewitnesses and begin excavating the mass graves—graves filled with victims of both the Nazi and Soviet dictatorships.
Turn the page for a sneak peek at another lesser-known story of World War II.
The room smelled of soap and the light was so white that it made my eyes ache. I held Larissa’s hand in a tight grip. I was her older sister, after all, and she was my responsibility. It would be easy to lose her in this sea of children, and we had both lost far too much already.
Larissa looked up at me and I saw her lips move, but I couldn’t hear her words above the wails and screams. I bent down so that my ear was level with her lips.
“Don’t leave me,” she said.
I wrapped my arms around her and gently rocked her back and forth. I whispered our favorite lullaby into her ear.
A loud crack startled us both. The room was suddenly silent. A woman in white stepped in among us. She clapped her hands sharply once more.
“Children,” she said in brisk German. “You will each have a medical examination.”
Weeping boys and girls were shoved into a long snaking line that took up most of the room. I watched as one by one, kids were taken behind a broad white curtain.
When it was Larissa’s turn, her eyes went round with fright. I did not want to let go of her, but the nurse pulled our hands apart.
“Lida, stay with me.”
I stood at the edge of the curtain and watched as the woman made Larissa take off her nightgown. My sister’s face was red with shame. When the woman held a metal instrument to her face, Larissa screamed. I rushed up and tried to knock that thing out of the nurse’s hand, but the nurse called for help and someone held me back. When they finished with Larissa, they told her to stand at the other end of the room.
When it was my turn, I barely noticed what they were doing. I kept my eyes fixed on Larissa. She was standing with three other girls. Dozens more had been ordered to stand in a different spot.
When the nurse was finished with me, I slipped my nightgown back on. I was ordered to stand with the larger group—not with Larissa’s.
“I need to be in that group,” I told the nurse, pointing to where Larissa stood, her arms outstretched, a look of panic on her face.
The nurse’s lips formed a thin flat line. “No talking.”
She put one hand on each of my shoulders and shoved me toward the larger group.
A door opened wide. We were herded out into the blackness of night.
Larissa screamed, “Lida! Don’t leave me!”
I looked back into the room, but could not see her. “I will find you, Larissa!” I shouted. “I promise. Stay strong.”
A sharp slap across my face sent me sprawling onto the cold wet grass. I scrambled up and tried to break through the sea of children. I had to get back to Larissa.
Strong arms wrapped around my torso and lifted me up. I was thrown into blackness. With a screech of metal, the door slammed shut.
Blackness.
I dreamed that I was lying in a sea of humming bees. We were swaying back and forth and I sang the lullaby under my breath, imagining that I was being rocked in Mama’s arms.
I opened my eyes. It was so dark they took a few minutes to adjust.
I was crammed inside a hot metal room that smelled like a dirty barn. It was so stuffy and stinky and crowded that I could barely breathe. I realized with a shock that we were moving. This was not a room after all, but a train car—the kind for cattle. It swayed back and forth. The sound was not the humming of bees, but the whispers of frightened children and the thrumming of the train on its tracks. At least the sound of war was muffled out.
“Does anyone know where we’re going?” I asked.
The whispers stopped. A lone thin voice answered. “To Germany, I think.”
My heart sank. If they took me to Germany, how would I ever find Larissa? Wherever she was, she must be feeling so frightened, so alone.
I tried to stand, but with the movement of the car and the hazy light, I fell backward, one of my bare feet landing on a girl’s chest.
“Ow!” she cried.
“I’m sorry.”
It was pointless to try standing, so I sat up and tried to get my bearings. In the dim light I could see a tangle of limbs and tufts of hair. Kids were packed in so tightly that each overlapped the next. Something smelled bad and a sloshing sound came from one corner.
“What is that over there?” I asked no one in particular.
“That’s our bathroom,” said the girl I had stepped on. “A pail.”
I wrinkled my nose. All these people and one pail for a bathroom? No wonder it smelled so bad.
I crawled as far away as I could get from the stinky pail, moving slowly and being careful not to hurt any of the kids who were crammed in my way. When I got to the other side of the car, I saw there was a thin seam of light framing a panel in the siding. It was a door. I pounded and screamed with all my might. The children who were propped up against it scooted to the side.
“It won’t do you any good,” said a boy’s voice. “We’ve already tried to open it.”
I looked over to him in the dim light and saw a silhouette of wild hair. There was a trickle of dark on his cheek. Was he bleeding?
Using the ridges in the siding to help me balance in a standing position, I felt a long lever across the door. I pushed it down hard. It moved and sprang back up, but the door didn’t open.
“It’s locked from the outside,” a girl’s voice said.
I pounded on it again with my fists. Nothing happened.
The wild-haired boy looked up at me and said, “Even if it did open, what would you do then? Fall out onto the train tracks in the middle of nowhere?”
I slid back down and sat beside him, wrapping my arms around my knees and staring at my feet. Was Larissa in a cattle car like this, going somewhere else? How would I find her? What was happening to me?
In the dark monotony, we exchanged names with those who sat closest to us. The wild-haired boy was Luka Barukovich from Kyiv. Sitting beside him was Zenia Chornij, also from Kyiv. The girl I had stepped on was Marika Steshyn, from Babin, not far from my village of Verenchanka.
The thin seam of light around the door frame was my only marker of time. It dimmed, then darkened. I slept.
In that space between day and nightmare, my body swayed with the chug-chug-chug of the boxcar. One girl chanted prayers in a voice hoarse from crying. Gradually, the seam around the door got light again.
Daytime stretched out in endless minutes. I was hungry, thirsty, hot. Weren’t we all?
A second night passed. Would we all die in this cattle car?
A loud screech and we came to a halt. The door slid open. I would have fallen out had I not grabbed onto Marika, who was curled in fitful sleep on my lap. The sudden daylight hurt my eyes and the whoosh of cold filled my lungs with what felt like a thousand tiny pins.
I propped myself up and squinted, trying to make sense of what I saw outside the cattle car. A young Nazi soldier, his face a rash of pimples, pointed a rifle at Luka. I opened my mouth to scream but no sound came out. My mouth and throat were like sawdust.
Behind t
he soldier stood some sort of train depot or maybe a town. I couldn’t tell for sure. There were wooden buildings that were mostly still standing, and sad-looking people milling about. The only signs I could see were written in German.
A high-pitched whizzing sound was followed by a boom. In the distance, a puff of smoke. Bombs.
“Stay in there, Russian swine,” screamed the boy soldier in German, jabbing his rifle menacingly.
Why was he calling us Russian? We were Ukrainian, all of us. And why were we pigs? I didn’t dare ask.
The Nazi turned and motioned to someone we could not see. A door opened on one of the buildings and a hollow-cheeked woman in rags appeared behind him. Balanced on her shoulders was a long stick with a sloshing pail attached to either end. She paused beside him, awaiting further instructions.
He flicked his hand impatiently at her, indicating that she should set the pails inside our car.
“Be useful or they will kill you,” the woman whispered to us urgently in Ukrainian, lifting one pail into our car and pushing it in against our legs. It was filled with water.
“No talking,” shouted the soldier. Why did he have to shout?
He aimed his rifle at the woman.
Her fearful eyes darted to him. She lifted up the second bucket and Luka grabbed the handle. We all pushed back so there was room to set it on the floor. This bucket was filled with a gray watery sludge.
The door clanged shut and we were engulfed in darkness once again. The train jolted, then picked up speed.
I moved on my hands and knees over to the sludgy pail and sniffed—it had a dank smell that reminded me of the rotting vegetable scraps Mama would use to fertilize our garden when we still had a home. In other circumstances, the smell might have turned my stomach, but it had been so long since any food had passed my lips that my stomach rumbled in anticipation. I dipped one finger in. Lukewarm. I tasted it. “This is some sort of soup.”
There were no spoons or bowls, so we took turns crawling over to the pail and carefully scooping out a bit of the muck with cupped hands. In the handful that was mine, I could feel a chunk of turnip with my tongue, but otherwise it was mostly water. I chewed the turnip slowly and swallowed it down, the wet mush feeling like a balm on my dry throat.
My eyes were getting used to the dimness of our car, so I watched as the others lined up and swallowed down their meager share of soup. Marika didn’t get in line. She didn’t even sit up. I crawled over to her and placed my hand on her forehead. It was cool—too cool—to the touch.
“Food, Marika. You’ve got to eat.” I gently shook her shoulder. Her eyes opened slightly, and I thought for a minute that she looked at me, but they quickly fluttered shut.
I went back to the pail of watery turnip soup, nudging my way to the front of the line. “Marika needs something to eat.”
The kids closest to the pail made room for me, and I scooped up as much of the solid bits as I could with my hands. It wasn’t easy getting back, with the rail car swaying, the darkness, and the other kids. But each time I nearly fell, one of the others would steady me.
Luka and Zenia propped Marika up between them. I knelt in front of her and held my cupped hands to her face. Her nose wrinkled. Perhaps her dreams were more pleasant than the smell of these vile bits of turnip. Her eyes opened and she looked down.
“Eat.”
She cupped her fingers over mine and drew my hands to her mouth. She swallowed a piece of soggy turnip and choked.
“Slowly.”
She held my hands close to her mouth as if she were afraid I wouldn’t give her any more, but she carefully chewed every bit of turnip and swallowed it down. She licked my fingers, then pushed my hands away and slumped back into Zenia, exhausted.
There was barely any soup left for Luka, the last in line. We reversed the order for the water, so at least Luka got a few good swallows.
With the little bit of food in my stomach and water to wet my lips, I felt stronger.
“I wonder what that woman meant, ‘Be useful or they will kill you’?” I asked Luka.
“We’re too young to be of much use to the Nazis,” Luka replied. “And useless people are killed.”
The words were like a stone on my heart. If I was too young to be useful, what about my little sister? What could Larissa do to prove herself useful? How could I save her? First I would have to figure out a way to save myself.
“What work could I possibly do?” I asked.
“Figure out a skill,” said Luka. “And say you’re older.”
“How do you know about this?”
Luka sighed. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been caught by the Nazis.”
I AM SO very grateful to have worked with Sandy Bogart Johnston on this novel. It was a tough and emotional ride for both of us but Sandy got me through it. Thank you, Krystia Korpan (nee Sikorska), for opening up your memory to that terrible time and reliving your pain with me. Iryna Korpan, thank you for patiently answering all my seemingly inane questions over the course of several years. Iroida Wynnyckyj and Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk, thank you both for your precise and varied research help. Appreciation to my late in-laws, Dr. John and Lidia Skrypuch, whose terrifying wartime experiences gave me context to understand Krystia’s complex story. A kiss to my husband, Orest, for his patience and encouragement. And a heartfelt thank you to dear departed Orysia Tracz, whose encyclopedic knowledge of all things Ukrainian is unsurpassed. Many times while in the final stages of this novel, I reached for the phone to call her, only to realize yet again that my friend would not be there to answer. Vichnaya Pamyat.
MARSHA FORCHUK SKRYPUCH is a Ukrainian Canadian author acclaimed for her nonfiction and historical fiction, including Making Bombs for Hitler, The War Below, and Stolen Girl. She was awarded the Order of Princess Olha by the president of Ukraine for her writing. Marsha lives in Brantford, Ontario, and you can visit her online at calla.com.
Also by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
Making Bombs for Hitler
The War Below
Stolen Girl
Copyright © 2018 by Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920. SCHOLASTIC, SCHOLASTIC PRESS, and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First published in Canada as Don’t Tell the Enemy by Scholastic Canada Ltd., 604 King Street West, Toronto, Ontario M5V 1E1, Canada
The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
While inspired by real events and historical characters, this is a work of fiction and does not claim to be historically accurate or portray factual events or relationships. Please keep in mind that references to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales may not be factually accurate, but rather fictionalized by the author.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
First American edition, December 2019
Cover art © 2019 by Mike Heath | Magnus Creative
Cover design by Yaffa Jaskoll
e-ISBN 978-1-338-31054-2
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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Don't Tell the Nazis Page 15
