Two Patches on the Asphalt

During WWII, the Glazers, like many Jewish families in Deliatyn, suffered their share of tragedies but their daughter Pepina miraculously survived. This is her story as told by Andriy Mysiuk and translated by Lidia Wolanskyj from the original Ukrainian.

1980

Clickety clack, clickety clack, clickety clack. The fast rap of wheels on the track. The Lviv-Rakhiv is taking me home.
Outside the window, spring landscapes flash by, ponds of melt water gleaming in the sunshine, newborn leaves of bushes and trees bathed in the first tender green, fields already sporting early flowers. Further from the tracks, people are already working the dark stony soil while birds whirl around in the sky above their heads.
My heart should have been happy to see my parents, my friends, and so on, but my brain was filled with just one thought: if I failed the spring session, I’d be expelled from the institute. My knowledge and achievements as a student at the “Stump Academy”—as we called the Lviv Forestry Institute—were hardly the worst among my fellows. Still, because of my big mouth, I ended up in a conflict with the descriptive geometry guy, Professor Korolevych. He was Jewish, a decent teacher, but we thought him a hyper demanding department head.
At one of our applied sessions, not seeing that the professor was standing right behind me and watching how I was doing his assignment, I grumbled to my benchmate: “That Jew gave us a much too complicated assignment to do in such a short time.”
Korolevych immediately stood before me and asked angrily:
“Who was that you were talking about?”
I swallowd hard and thought, “I’m dead!”(1) Caught on the spot, I blurted:
“Er...that’s what I call my friend.”
I had just made the situation even worse. But Korolevych had already returned to the board where I heard him loud and clear: “See you at the exam!”
A day or two later, I heard a similar warning from the chemistry teacher, Professor Khaikina, who was also Jewish. And my chemistry marks were already borderline. I don’t remember any more if we had another Jewish teacher in first year. Possibly. As exam time drew closer, tensions were on the rise.
On the dating front, things weren’t a whole lot better. The only girl in our group that seemed to expect special treatment from me was one that I had zero interest in. Inna was pretty, nice and smart, studying at the Polytechnical Institute, and she had chosen me as her love interest. But I had no romantic feelings for her at all. And I didn’t want to lead her on.
By contrast, the girl who was the second focus of my youthful passions was very very slow to respond to my eagre letters.
On top of it all, there was yet another girl who was almost 30, whom I couldn’t disuade from choosing me. I had met her completely by accident at someone’s wedding. She seemed to have decided I was her Last Chance for Romance and had been attacking on all fronts.
To call my situation messier than a tossed salad would be putting it mildly.
And so, here I was, riding a train home and the six hours just flew by. At seven-thirty we were at the Deliatyn station. I got off. I suddenly realized that two of my friends had jumped into the same car I just left and were shouting at me out the window:
“Catch up to us on the Yaremche bus. There’s a volleyball game on at the tourist camp and a discotheque afterwards. Pakhmutova (2) will be there.”
Dashing through our neighborhood’s back yards, I was home in five minutes. My parents were happy because I didn’t often come home—about once a month or six weeks.
I tried to save up the not very substantial cost of the trip and sometimes, thanks to my friend Ivan, I was able to make 8 or 10 rubles under the table on a Sunday night at LAZ(3). It was a serious amount of money relative to my upgraded student subsidy of 57 rubles.
Not being a big spender, at the end of every month I had extra money, some of which I spent on inexpensive, exotic coins for my collection.
Just before the train home, I had dropped in on Nadiyka, my buddy’s girlfriend. She happened to work at the nearest grocery store and there I bought my parents butter, mayonnaise, condensed milk and other products that were in short supply at home. What there was no “deficit” of was Lviv beer, Avrora cigarettes, Troinoi eau de cologne, and the paper “Warsaw Live.” These I bought at the train station in Lviv.
Now that I was home, I grabbed something for supper, answering a barrage of questions between mouthfuls. The last bus was at 20:10, going from Deliatyn to Yamne, the southern end of Yaremche. I had to make it. I changed clothes in a flash, while my mother tried, without any real hope, to hold me back. On my way out the door, she shouted: “Take care of yourself. Don’t stay out too late.”
I sprinted down to the main road and jumped into the bus just as the driver began to swing the door shut. What a great evening! I managed to play two glorious rounds of volleyball on the tourist camp’s paved court. Afterwards, the guys drank beer in the smokey kolyba and the evening ended with the promised discotheque. This time I was not in a mood to try to get “serious” with any of the girls—there were already too many complicating my life!
I found the guest composer was unimpressive. She came out, a plump little woman, on the balcony over the dance floor. Next to her towered a man, either her husband or her lover, a good two heads taller than she was. He disappeared first and Pakhmutova followed.
The discotheque was still jumping when I said bye to my friends and ran to the bus stop. The last local for the day got me back home just around midnight, which pleased my parents.

In the morning, feeling physically energized but mentally a bit dead, I went for my usual visit to Father’s sister Magdalena—Aunt Magdunia as we called her in the family. She lived alone in a huge old house across the road from our place, in the company of a similarly elderly grey and white cat called Miniusko, and Asyo the poodle. Her barn housed a goat called Bazia and a dozen hens.

The constant stream of visitors meant the doors to my aunt’s house were never closed because this kindly elderly widow had something good for each one of us. I think people were drawn to her precisely because she compensated the lack of nearest and dearest by very welcoming towards strangers.
As family, we nephews luxuriated in Aunt Magdunia’s bottomless love. She could be a friend, an advisor, and even a lawyer when conflicts arose in our family. After the least quarrel with my father, I would go to Aunt Magdunia to be comforted. She would determine that I was not at fault and would always march over to her brother with persuasive observations. He was none too pleased about this, but I was very happy.
When I stepped out of our yard into the street, my aunt was already at the gate, leaning her elbow on a fencepost, watching me and other passers by on a sunny Sunday.
I was about to cross the road, when I saw a bicyclist rapidly peddling towards me from the direction of Luh, so I stopped. Catching sight of my aunt, the cyclist slowed down without stopping, and raised his cap, exclaiming:
“Glory to Jesus Christ, Aunt Haidesova,’ Haides being her late husband’s surname.
“Eternal glory to Holy God!” my aunt responded even as the rider rushed on.
Now I crossed the street. Aunt Magdunia opened the gate in a welcome manner. I greeted her with a hug and gave her the oilcloth bag with “gifts” from Lviv. She looked inside curiously, where there were four packs of the Avrora that Auntie smoked half at a time through an antique glass cigarette holder, a bottle of cologne water, the Warsaw Live paper, and a package of butter. I would bring my favorite aunt this kind of assortment of “presents” about 3-4 times a year.
Aunt Magdunia thanked me and invited me into the house. As we walked, she noted:
“Did you know Slavko was your third cousin?”
Slavko was the man who just a few minutes earlier had ridden by on his way to Mass. My father had told me we were related, but given his age, which was about 60 at that point, it was hard to think of him as a cousin. Aunt Magdunia went on to explain that his grandmother Ruzia and my grandfather Andriy were sister and brother. OK, so that made sense.
We went into the old house together. After the sunny morning outside, I felt the cool shock of semi-darkness in the room that served as a kitchen, dining room and bedroom, not only for my Aunt but for Asyo, Miniuska and, occasionally, even my sister Laryssa.
In fact, from the day the Haides marriage took place to the day her husband died, the house had never been electrified: the insulated wiring wrapped around porcelain insulators, light switches, sockets and even lamps with sooty lightbulbs had probably been there for a century at this point, which suggested that electrification had taken place under the previous owners. Given my voracious curiosity, I don’t know why I never asked about this odd phenomenon while my parents were still alive. In any case, I didn’t ask Aunt Magdunia, either. My aunt got her light from two kerosene lamps, one in the hallway and one in the main room, and an old “battery,” meaning a lantern on a large flat battery.
Aunt Magdunia’s knowledge of the outside world came from various papers and magazines, a shortwave radio, and passers-by when she hung out by the gate. The radio allowed her to follow the Mass at the Vatican—being a staunch Greek Catholic, she refused to go to the local church(4) on principle—and to listen to various “suspect” broadcasts, like Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, and Radio Free Europe.
Her main room smelled of a heady mix of tobacco, Troynoi cologne, the poodle, the cat, dustballs that had accumulated in inaccessible corners over the decades, and the aroma of fried potato so familiar to all students. Auntie took the frypan with the day’s fixings off the heated metal plate of her wood-burning stove, placed it on a wooden coaster on the table, and put all my little presents away.
“Have a seat and help yourself,” she said.
I did not need to be asked twice. I ate the slightly oversalted potatoes cut into chips and washed them down with natural sour milk. Life was getting better already.
“So, how’s Lviv?”
“Lviv’s Lviv.”
“How’s college?”
And I proceeded to pour out all my troubles on my Aunt Magdunia’s nicely combed silver head, ending with:
“I’m dead, Auntie!” I said, trying no to wail. I had completely lost my appetite now.
“Eat up,” my aunt said very nonchalantly as she nibbled on her own potatoes. We ate in silence. I could hear Asyo snoring, the cat purring on my aunt’s lap, and a persistent housefly repeatedly attacking one of the windows.
My Aunt took a half-Avrora out of her silver cigarette case, put it into her holder, snapped a match, lit the tobacco and tossed the dead match into an ashtray made of a large seashell. Releasing half a cubic meter of fragrant smoke after inhaling a good long draught of the Avrora, she finally spoke:
“I’ll bet that Jew isn’t from Lviv because if he were, he would not have been offended. It’s only the easterners who have heart failure over the word ‘Jew.’ But don’t worry just yet. You are capable and you will finish the semester just fine. So that the rest of your problems don’t torment you, when you get to Lviv, write these words on the wall above your bed: “IT WON’T ALWAYS BE LIKE THIS!”
“And then?”
“And this will help!!”
“How?”
“Like this: when you feel bad right now, things will get better after a while, and then it’ll go the other way, but not the same as it was, that’s for sure. Life keeps changing all the time and you have to get used to it.”
She smoked a little more.
“And then everything depends on God’s will, too, because He is very high and sees very far! That’s why you have to pray, ask God for a good fate for yourself and all people.”
I felt a real easing at that moment and from then on, whenever life drove me into some kind of dark hole and I upset myself and those around me (I’m a Scorpio after all!), I imagined this phrase again: “It won’t always be like this!”
Suddenly a spring rain began to rattle on the tin roof and water dripped from the eaves trough outside the window. I didn’t feel like going home at this point because I’d get soaked and besides I had plenty of time on my hands.

While my aunt was reading her paper, I took a look around the room. In addition to the beechwood chair I was sitting in, with its arched spine and round seat, a tall table with a drawer covered with an oilcloth stood next to Aunt Magdunia’s heavy oak chair. Behind her chair was a wooden bed painted white with tall bedposts.
Above the bed hung a holy picture. Below that picture were two large portraits of men in cardboard frames. One of them was a curly-haired blond, her husband Andriy Haides. The other, dark-haired, was Uncle Vasyl, her and my father Ivan’s brother.
Over the headboard were photographs of the family and other relatives, and on a corner shelf a white figurine of the Virgin Mary stood out among the various items.
In the other corner, standing with its back to the window, was an old creaky couch that served as a welcome bed on stormy nights for my sister Laryssa, who came without invitation because our aunt was terrified of thunder.
To the left of the doorway was a small but efficient whitewashed wood-burning stove. On the wall next to it hung a white wooden construction consisting of screening with metal hooks and two drawers below. All manner of pots, sauce pans and frying pans, cups and mugs hung from it, while the top shelf held a variety of tea tins still with their Polish labels. A bunch of match boxes lay on the left shelf above the drawer, one of which was enormous. On the right shelf closer to the stove was a metal mug for water, while the pail with well water stood on the bench. A specially-made contraption attached to the wall between the door and this shelving held the lids to all the pots and pans. The largest ones were at the bottom and the lids got smaller the higher they stood. To the right of the door was an old wooden wardrobe.
Above Asyo’s little doghouse hung a hundred-year-old oil painting of a winter landscape. At that moment, Miniusko let out a long meow, interrupting my examination of the room.
“Let him out.”
I went out of the room, opened the door to the veranda and the cat followed. Stretching slowly, he ran under the overhang into the stable.

Coming back into the main room, I went through a fairly large corridor. In addition to a huge baking oven in which the previous owners had once baked more than a hundred loaves of bread a day, there were several wooden lockers and a table with a stool. I also remembered the small potbellied cast iron stove that had cracked at some point and been nicely patched up. This served for cooking food in a hurry or heating up the kettle during the summer, when there was no reason to fire up the bigger oven in the main room.
Through the left door in the hallway was a large bedroom, and through that were the remaining rooms of the house, where the semi-darkness maintained an ambience that was probably left over from the previous owners. They had abandoned their residence some 40 years earlier, but it looked like it could have been yesterday. For sixty-three-year-old me today, 40 years seems such a short slice of time, but how long it seemed for 18 year-old me in 1980.
Having gone through all the rooms in this grand house that seemed mostly like an abandoned museum with a broken electrical system, I went back to my armchair with the rounded back.
“Aunt,” I said, breaking the silence, “tell me how you came to have this house. What happened to the previous owners?”
“If you have the patience and the time, listen carefully.”
I agreed and arranged myself more comfortably, leaning back in the chair.
Aunt Magdunia began her story slowly, bringing up events of the past from her own memories.

1946

In the summer of 1946, my husband Andriy and I lived in the Mysiuk family home. Ours was a large family, and the house was not small. Beside the two of us, there was your grandmother Marysia who ran everything, my sister Kateryna, her husband Mykola and their little daughter Olya, your father Ivan, and even a boarder, a soviet officer of the railroad police.
“The thing was that the police officer was there for the security of the family. The soviets had returned to Deliatyn while your uncle Vasyl was still alive, and he died on Rizdvo in January 1946. There was a real threat that our house would be confiscated and the family carted off to Siberia as kurkuls. It was Vasyl’s idea to take in a police officer who was looking for lodging as a boarder. And it worked. They left our family alone. Then your father returned from the war as a frontline solier in the soviet army and this also made a difference. Soon afterwards, your father announced that he was getting married.
There just wasn’t enough room for so many. Meanwhile, the communal housing service of Deliatyn began to sell off empty houses that had, for a variety of reasons and cicumstances due to the war, been abandoned by their previous owners.
Some had belonged to ethnic Ukrainian families who had begun to disappear during the first soviet occupation in 1939, as well as during the four-year war. Quite a few homes were abandoned by Deliatyn’s small Polish community, who had fled the soviets even before they showed up. But the majority of homes stood empty because the Nazis had slaughtered more than 2,000 Jewish residents over 1941-1942.
Now, buying such a house was not that simple. First dibs went to the russian functionaries, bureaucrats and teachers who had flocked by the hundreds in the wake of the ‘liberators.’
My husband was a good specialized mechanic and, together with his father, had done a tremendous amount to restore the ruined lumbermill. He was given the right to choose an empty house to buy for himself. And there was one just like that across the road from the family property. It had belonged to the Glazers, a local Jewish family. The parents died under horrific circumstances the first year of the war. Your Uncle Vasyl was able to rescue their daughter Pepina by some miracle, and sent her off to Germany. She never came back after the war.
So we talked about it, waited, but some young soviet couple began to view the house and then my Andriy immediately went to the communal office, showed the paper that indicated he was in line for housing, and with the help of a little “gift” to Tarakhanov, then Deliatyn’s lawyer, he bought the house for a goodly sum. We kept hoping that when Pepka was found we’d be able to come to terms with her. Two years later, Haides died and I’ve been here ever since. Pepka did eventually track my mother down through a letter and these days they are corresponding.

1980

I basically knew all this, but I was never interested in the details because other things were on my mind. this time, my curiousity was engaged.
My aunt lit up another half of an Avrora. Outside, you could still hear the rattle of the spring rain.
“Tell me more about how Pepka was rescued.”
“That was a long business.”
“I’m happy to listen. I’m not on my way anywhere.”
“OK, I’m in a recollective mood today.”

1917-1938

When Itzko Glazer returned from World War 1 with a back injury, he tried to pick up the studies that the outbreak of war had disrupted. His landed him the nickname “Shtuder,” meaning student. Itzak was a native Deliatyn boy while his wife was from Kolomyia.(5)
After getting married, the well-to-do young couple lived on the southermost plateau of Deliatyn, known as Horysh, in a house that had been built in 1858.(6) They kept hoping to have children, but for seven years, nothing happened.
Meanwhile, tragedy struck the older brother’s family. His wife suddenly died of an infectious disease and not long afterwards, one of their two daughters also died. In despair, the brother abandoned his surviving daughter and fled the family home.
The young Glazers quickly adopted the still-recovering niece. It’s possible that this act was rewarded when Sofia Sisel Fan finally became pregnant and gave birth to a baby on September 22, 1924. The newly-minted parents named their daughter Pepina.
The girl grew up in a family filled with love and abundance. Her father was prosperous, running a popular bus service from Kolomyia to Vorokhta. He also had a coach with a pair of horses, and two passenger cars, one of them a convertible that was rented for weddings and other grand occasions.
The Glazers had two drivers: Shevchuk was from Deliatyn while the driver of the cabriolet was nicknamed Kapeliukh or “Tophat.” The family also had a servant, Paranka from Dobrotiv. Sofia ran a shop and a small café that were both located in the front part of the house. with the entrance on Luhivska.
The Glazer house was shaped like a streetcar making a turn, because the side walls actually form an obtuse angle somewhere in the middle and so even the interior rooms at that point did not have 90 degree corners. At the back, a huge garage had been attached to the wall of the house and all the vehicles fit into it. A stable had been added on to the garage for the horses and the chickens, and, at the very end, there was an outouse. Altogether, this created a kind of complex that was about 25 meters long.
To the side of the Glazer house was the Hlyna property, with not even a fence between them because there was no room for it and, in fact, no reason to put one up. On the southwestern side of the house was a long, narrow orchard, about 6-8 meters wide, where sour cherries and two apple trees grew. This was also where the family’s 6-meter deep well stood. The far side of the orchard ended at the yard of Itzak’s brother Abraham.
To the south, behind the garage and the barn, the family garden extended all the way to the Austrian military graveyard, some 5-6 ares, called sotky in Ukrainian as they constituted 100 square meters. Again, this plot was narrow but long and boasted quite fertile topsoil. Across Luhivska, opposite the Glazer property, was my family home.
As a place to reside, this district was cozy and appealing. Luhivska road went all the way to Deliatyn’s resort hamlet of Luhy. From there to the Doroha-Tsisarka, the imperial roadway,(7) was only 150-200 meters. There, at the ñorner of Holovna—Main Street in English—and Luhivska was a shrine to the Virgin Mary, and the Deliatyn train station was less than 300 meters further.
Life was very good. Pepina was a smart little girl and, understanding the importance of an education, her father was very careful to nurture her learning. In addition to her lessons at the public school, the little girl also went to private tutors for extra lessons in religion, history, foreign languages and math.
After completing the Polish elementary school, Peptsia enrolled in the Kolomyia gymnazia,(8) travelling there every day on her father’s famed bus. When necessary, she would stay overnight with her Great-grandmother Zweig, who was possibly the oldest resident of Kolomyia at that time and lived with the Pepina’s grandmother, Maria Fan. By now, the adopted niece no longer lived with the Fans, having married and moved elsewhere. They never heard from her again.

1939-1942

The family’s idyllic life was destroyed by the bolsheviks. In September 1939, the “liberators” entered Deliatyn: the soviet russian army and administration had arrived. In addition to confiscating the Glazers’ house, they took everything that could be carried away, including the crystal ware. All they left the family was the shop—and that only so that the bosses could come there to drink vodka and have a bite to eat. Still, Itzko expected any day that they would nationalize this last business and at best send them away to Siberia, or, if worse came to worst, execute them, the way a lot of people from Deliatyn had already been executed. He talked about this at length with Uncle Vasyl, whom he considered a friend.
Meanwhile, Sofia took care of the household and somehow managed to keep the shop going, while at the same time helping the neighboring large family, the Hlynas.
After two years of wreaking havoc in Deliatyn, the communist regime began to wobble. Rumors swirled around that soon this regime would be exchanged for an even more inhumane one, the Nazis. What to do? No one knew where to go or how to escape, and no one understood what to expect or to hope for.
As the front drew closer and the soviets began to withdraw from Deliatyn, Itzko decided to go to “town,” as the central part of Deliatyn was called. He wanted to use his remaining soviet rubles, which would soon become worthless pieces of paper, to buy some foodstuffs and household goods. His wife tried to disuade him, saying the money was already almost worthless and going to town at such a time was dangerous.
But he could not cheat Fate. A few minutes after he left the house, a powerful explosion echoed on Horish. Shortly afterwards, the Glazers’ one-time chauffeur, Shevchuk, ran in.
“Where’s pan Itzko?” he asked, gasping for breath.
“He went to town,” Sofia answered uneasily.
“He won’t be coming back,” the man responded and told her that, not far from the shrine on the main road, possibly the one and only bomb the Germans lobbed at Deliatyn at that point had left only part of her husband’s body and he recognized his boss by his shoes and hat alone.
Having barely recovered from the funeral, the grieving mother and daughter found themselves facing a new reality. German occupying forces began arresting Jews. Yet the next blow that the mother and daughter felt came, surprisingly, not from the Germans but from their nearest neighbors. One evening, the Hlyna boys, big bruisers, came into the Glazers’ home and demanded that Mrs. Glazer give them her pillows and comforters, because, they said, with the Germans approaching, she would soon have no need for them. Her requests that they leave at least some bedding were ignored and so the broken family had to sleep on the bare beds.
Things only got much worse. The Germans were patrolling the town now and began to drive all the Jewish residents to the center, where a small ghetto had been set up. Fear spread more and more. Since the neighbors had also taken their chickens, Peptsia and her mother took to sleeping in the henhouse.
Several times, my brother, your Uncle Vasyl tried to talk to those neighbors to ask them to stop robbing the people who had once been good to them, but that only led to quarrels and accusations: the Germans would anyway destroy all the Jews and take their property, but this way at least some poor Ukrainians would benefit by it. Given that Uncle Vasyl’s health was poor—he could barely walk because of his legs and his kidneys were bad—, the fact that he was the only adult male in the Mysiuk family in Deliatyn meant there was nothing more he could do.
At the end of March 1942, the hungry, exhausted mother and daughter were living in the stinky, chilly henhouse. For the third day now, the two had had no food when Pepina said to her mother: “I can’t stand this any more. I’m going out on the street to see what’s going on.”
“Don’t go out. The Germans are not far. They’ve already taken away the more distant neighbors.”
“I’m going anyway. I’ll go see my girlfriend. Maybe I’ll get something to eat and come back.”
“I won’t let you.”
But Peptsia ran out of the horrible henhouse as her mother wept and begged her. That was the last time these two orphaned women ever saw each other. Even half a century later, Pepina regretted that she had parted from her mother with a quarrel, although she also knew it had been the only real way for her to survive.
Running out early in the morning, she rushed down to the highway.. There at the intersection opposite the Jewish synagogue and the Christian chapel stood the huge Fliamer house. Fliamer had set up one of the biggest Horish cafés in part of the house and also offered private lessons in the German language. Since his childen were about Pepina’s age, she enjoyed going there for German lessons.
Fliamer and his kids all turned out to be at home but his wife was not there. Perhaps she had gone to some of the other neighbors to get the news.
Peptsia had barely greeted everyone and said a few words when outside on the street they could hear the voices and shouting in German. Pan Fliamer ordered the children to go down into the cellar, through a hatch in the kitchen floor. They reluctantly climbed down and heard tremendous noises above their heads.
The father quickly pushed the table over the hatch and went to invite the Germans into the house to help him finish off some bottles of strong stuff from the restaurant’s bar. The children could hear the occasional phrase, including Fliamer saying that his wife and children were not at home because they had gone to visit her parents in town.
After a time, the movements upstairs stopped, but the frightened teenagers were too scared to climb back up into the kitchen for a long while. After a few hours, they managed with considerable effort to raise the hatch, knocking over the table with its empty bottles and discovering that the house was empty. In this way, their father managed to save his children and the daughter of his friend, but perhaps only for a while. No one ever found out what later happened to the younger Fliamers.
Pepina returned to her house after dark. The building was empty. She ran to the chicken coop: the door was open and her mother did not answer. Searching all the filthy corners where their hens once nested, she found nothing. At that point the thoroughly terrified girl ran to the Mysiuks. That’s when she learned that the Germans had arrested her mother, betrayed by neighbors who pointed to her hiding place.
Uncle Vasyl, Kateryna and I tried to pacify Pepina for a long time. She couldn’t believe she was completely alone and kept trying to tear away from us to run and look for her mother somewhere. That night she slept at our house and the next day, to make sure everyone was safe, we arranged a hiding place for her in the roomy stable, which had often served to provide sleeping quarters for the multitudinous Mysiuks during summer vacation, when the main house was nearly full with “roomers” or what we call tourists today.
Peptsia spent five weeks with us. The arrests and executions of Deliatyn’s Jewish population continued. Given the kind of neighbors we had, it was getting dangerous for the long-missing girl to stay at the Mysiuks. Uncle Vasyl worked up a deal with the conductor of the Kolomyia train and one evening we sent Peptsia, dressed like a typical Hutsul girl, off to her grandmother’s in Kolomyia.
A few weeks later, she showed up again one evening, exhausted, at the Mysiuk place. It turned out that the Germans had taken her grandmother and uncle even before she got there and shortly afterwards issued a decree: All Jews remaining in Kolomyia must gather at the market square at a certain time. Her great-grandmother, who was then 110 and still walking, tried to convince the girl that they must do what the Germans ordered, even if it meant death. “That’s our Jewish fate,” she said, “to sacrifice ourselves for the benefit of future generations.”
The 17-year-old girl had already suffered so much in the previous three years that she was not willing to agree to such a prospect. Once her elderly relative willingly went to her destruction, Peptsia could not stay in Kolomyia, so she went back to Deliatyn.
At this point, Jews were not provided with any identification, without which she could not buy a ticket and so Peptsia had to return on foot, hiding constantly from the police and military patrols. The 30 kilometers took two full days and every last bit of her strength and nerves.
And so Peptsia Glazer was once again at the Mysiuk’s. My parents told her that her boyfriend, who had wanted to flee Deliatyn by train, somehow managed to get a seat without even a ticket. But German soldiers shot him right in the car and threw him out even as the train was moving, not far from Deliatyn. Fate had struck her yet another blow.
After a month of basically living in hiding, Uncle Vasyl and a neighbor came up with a new plan to save the girl. Across the fence from us, a train engineer lived in a room at my cousin Olya’s place. He would come from time to time from Stanislav(9) to work a multi-day shift, as his train route began in Deliatyn and ended in Rakhiv. His parents lived in Stanislav.
After a frank discussion with my uncle, he agreed to secretly take Peptsia in the locomotive with his workmate to Stanislav and settle her in with his parents. In a big city, it would be easier for her to remain unnoticed.
They were soon able to put a plan into play. Life in the city did not last long. In the neighborhood of the engineer’s parents a pair of young Gestapo officers were quartered. When they happened to see a pretty young neighbor, they suggested going to the theater the following Saturday. She agreed but she was unable to go because even her fairly good German would likely reveal her origins and that would be the end of that. Fortunately the engineer returned to Stanislav just then and quickly arranged for her to return to Deliatyn.
And so Pepina was on her third stay in the underground at the Mysiuk’s.
At the next family council, the Mysiuks came up with a new rescue plan. They had a Kennkarte (10) for our sister, Olya, who had fled to Poland with our youngest sister Maria and their brother, your father, Yanyk even before the soviets arrived. Meanwhile, one of the family’s regular seasonal visitors, Teodor Iliashevskiy, who lived in Lviv and owned a printing house, also knew the Glazer family because he used to go to their little café for a beer and political chit-chat with Itzko and Vasyl. Vasyl was certain that pan Iliashevskiy would be able to arrange a safe place for Peptsia in Lviv.
As it happened, our cousin Fedir was now a conductor on the Lviv-Vorokhta train. Fedir agreed to take Peptsia and even bought her a ticket using Olya Mysiuk’s Kennkarte. Grandma Maria and us girls dressed up the young Jewish girl in Hutsul clothing, so she and Vasyl set off for Lviv at dawn, for all the world like sister and brother.
Once in Lviv, they found the Iliashevskiy home and pan Teodor agreed to take Peptsia in. But again, relative peace—if one could even describe the young woman’s situation like that—was not to last long. Iliashevskiy’s wife grew jealous of Pepina and family scandals began to play themselves out at home. Perhaps there were other reasons for the quarrels as well, but this was how pan Iliashevskiy explained it when he told the young woman that she would have to move somewhere else.
Indeed, pan Teodor had already arranged the next place for her to stay, the house of his printer, pan Hrynishchak. This man lived on the outskirts of Lviv with his family, but Peptsia had no choice and gladly agreed to the proposition. Within a month, her life finally grew more-or-less stable.
Yet this arrangement, too, foid not last long.
One day, Peptsia went into town, wanting to buy something and to stroll around. She had just walked into the central market when she heard someone shout in Yiddish:
“Peptsia, what are you doing here?”
She turned to see a Jewish acquaintance came up who had spent her vacation at the Mysiuks a few years earlier and the two girls had become friends then.
They had just hugged warmly and exchanged a couple of phrases when someone grabbed Pepina roughly by the elbow. She turned around and froze. A tall German was holding her by the arm and asking where was the yellow patch like the one her girlfriend was wearing on her back to indicate she was a Jew.
“I’m Ukrainian,” said Pepina in German, swallowing hard.
“How do you know Yiddish?”
“I like to study different languages.”
“Where are you studying?”
“At the university.”
“Where do you live?”
She unhesitatingly gave the address where she was staying. The German wrote it down. “Where is your Kennkarte?”
“I forgot it at home."
“You will bring the document to the Comandant’s office tomorrow and show it to me,” the German said more quietly and hurried to catch up to the older colleague waiting for him under the street lamp.
“Phew, that was lucky,” Pepina thought but she still felt alarmed. She said her good-byes with her acquaintance, who was also thoroughly frightened watching the scene that had just taken place.
Just to be on the safe side, Pepina did not return to her residence but went to the Iliashevskys feeling depressed and worried. Happily, the owner was home. He advised the girl to stay there and the next day pan Hrynishchak brought her things over. And so Peptsia once again boarded with pan Teodor and his wife. He ordered her not to go out of the house. The one joy for the girl was the owner’s huge library of Ukrainian books.
In the meantime, pan Iliashevskiy devised a new plan. They needed to find reliable documents for Peptsia and send her as a Ukrainian Gastarbeiter (11) to Germany. She would be much safer there. The girl found this prospect scary, but she had little choice.
Iliashevsky then sent a letter to Vasyl in Deliatyn through their usual conductor Fedir, and Vasyl went to talk to Father Zakhariy Zolotiy, who had saved more than one Jewish person in a variety of ways. Together they came up with a solution.
At the time, a more distant neighor, Anna Zhdan, helped with our livestock and gardens. She was almost Peptsia’s age, but because she was slightly slow, she had never gone to school. Vasyl was going to talk to her mother about giving them her Kennkarte and when the “operation” was completed, the mother would inform the administration that her daughter had lost her document. Meanwhile, the prist was going to make a birth certificate for Pepina under the same name, Anna Zhdan.
Everything went smoothly and in no time Vasyl was in Lviv with the documents. They decided to go to the “Ukrainian Committee,” the local organization that was able to issue special certificates confirming the loyalty of the person to the German government. With that document, Pepina would be able to find lighter work.
After the committee interiewed the girl, they realized that with her education she would be more useful for Ukrainian affairs in Lviv, but Vasyl insisted that he and his colleague were sending her to Germany for a special underground mission. Iliashevskiy added his statement and Pepina went to the recruitment office and happily with a party of Halychan girls like her she was soon off to Germany.

1980

“About Pepina’s further fate, your mother knows more from their letters and I’ll relate whatever I can remember. But right now it’s time to feed the baby goats,” said Aunt Magdunia.
I got home before lunch. My head filled with this story about the Glazers, I wanted my parents to tell me what happened next. So the minute I crossed the threshold, I said to my mother, who was busy preparing varenyky with cheese for lunch:
“Mam, tell me what you know about Pepka.”
“What do you want to know that for,” my father interjected. “Did the KGB interrogate you about her or something?”
“What does the KGB have to do with anything?”
I knew that, from time to time, the county office of the State Security Committee would require him to show up in Nadvirna. They would then question him about American relatives and correspondence with them, and kept badgering him to stop accepting packages from America. These packages were from his sister and contained kerchiefs, jeans, other clothing, embroidery thread, sometimes even foodstuffs and odds and ends. Tato would then sell off the kerchiefs, jeans and bolo raincoats half-clandestinely at the Kolomyia bazaar—income that provided a major boost to our family budget.
“They called me in not long ago,” Tato continued, “and asked me for the umpteenth time to tell my sister not to send me any parcels. For the first time, they mentioned letters from Yugoslavia.”
“And what next?”
“I told them that Mama’s friend from school days has been writing letters and there’s nothing anti-soviet in them.”
“Auntie told me a super interesting story and I wanted to know the rest. How did Pepka find you?”
At this point, my mother took over.

1954

Around the end of 1954, a messenger came fom the village council and announced that Ivan Mysiuk was to go to the council because a request had come from a Pepina Glazer in Yugoslavia. I was very happy to get this message and could barely wait for my husband to come home from work. Tato gathered the family together to decide what to do. The times were uncertain and outside contacts were not very welcome. Father said that he had to go, but Aunt Magdunia was categorically against. She was afraid that she might lose the Glazer home that she was living in and because she had spent the gold coins Pepka had left behind when she went to Germany. This money had gone to pay for the house and for her husband’s funeral.
After a tempestuous discussion, the sisters left and Tato decided that he had to go, after all. The next day, I was sent off because Tato could not get time off work. They gave me the request to read, which contained Pepka’s address, a bit of information about her, and a question about who of the Mysiuks was still in Deliatyn.
Although the brief said nothing about me, but the very fact that after so many years, my schoolmate showed up, someone everyone had prety much given up expecting to hear from, was real cause for celebration. Feeling overjoyed, I even spent my last pennies on a “voluntary/mandatory” government bond.
I quickly wrote back a long letter filled with emotions to my coleague, but I had to wait a long while for an answer. Pepka’s response came only in spring the following year.
At this juncture, Mama briefly went into the bedroom and brought back an envelope green with mould and read us the long, heartfelt letter. The return address on this letter was: Ana Ristic, Erdevik, Yugoslavia.
That’s how we began to correspond regularly. In time I received a letter with a photograph, in which I discovered that my friend lived in a small town with her lovely family—a husband and two sons. I couldn’t imagine the circumstances under which she worked hard on a farmstead: at home in Deliatyn, her parents blew any dust off her and the girl’s only duty was to learn.
Pepka, too, was amazed that I had become a daughter-in-law to this family that saved her from the Nazis. Given the censorship of the times, neither she nor I could write openly and some questions inevitably remained unanswered.

1980

The year before last, we received an unexpected telegram in the summer, coming from Hungary saying:
“Come to Uzhhorod, Karpaty Hotel, Peptsia.”
The telegram was delivered in the evening and the next day I excused myself from work. By the time your father and I made our way to Uzhhorod via Rakhiv by bus, it was night. At the hotel, we were told that foreign guests by the name of Ristic had left that morning for an unknown destination.
And so our first meeting never took place. By the way, Pepka had not given us any notice about this trip. Afterwards she explained briefly in a letter that due to circumstances, she could not come all the way to Deliatyn, while at the same time, they were not allowed to stay more than two days in Uzhhorod.
We pretty much guessed why the trip proved so unsuccessful. Because there was a military base near Deliatyn, not only our town but the entire oblast was closed to foreign visitors. The rare bold traveller managed to break through to their own home region.
“What about the rest of Pepka’s letters” I asked my mother.
“Tato burned nearly all of Pepka’s together with our American letters after the latest call from the KGB. That took place not that long ago.”
Mama went up to the sideboard and took an envelope with blue and red stripes around its edges from the top drawer. Inside, I found a letter written in good Ukrainian, greeting the recipient for Easter and providing some short updates about children and grandchildren. The letter ended with an apology for any mistakes and for her “bad” Ukrainian. I was astonished.
“How did she write so well in Ukrainian?”
“She was probably the most talented pupil in our class and spoke several languages fluently.”
While I looked over the letter and the Ristic family photo, the varenyky were done. Since I had promised, I went off to meet my school mates. Youth must have its way and this intriguing story about the past was shunted to the back of my mind—in order to be reborn in the future.
First year ended, as did my later studies in university, not without their “adventures” but positively. But that’s a different story altogether.

1998

Eighteen years later.... Ukraine had stood up on its feet. One summer evening, I returned to my newly-built home after work. At this point I was the commercial director of an oil company and still we spent five years building this house. The initial capital for construction was the 5,000 rubles that I received as compensation for the demolition of the Glazer-Haides house, which Aunt Magdunia had bequeathed to me as her favorite nephew. In its place, a nice kindergarten was eventually built.
Where the houses of our two neighbors once stood, all that remained were two patches on the asphalt that appeared when the parking lot was being restored. In the neighborhood, the stone well that belonged to the two Glazer brothers also remained.
Bañk at the house, my wife Halya and my two hildren, Ivasyk and Lidochka, were waiting for me. We had supper, after which I sat down to watch some TV, where interesting news about how the young country was establishing itelf was provided by several newly-established television channels.
Just at that moment, a taxi drove up to my parents’ house and a lady with a suitcase stepped out of the car. When she entered the yard, she saw my father who was just coming out of the stable after feeding the cow for the night.
Dropping her baggage near the gate, she rushed over to Tato and suddenly fell to his feet.
“Hey, get up, dammit!” my father shouted, taken by surprise and thinking that this was a beggar. “What do you want from me?”
“Yanyk, it’s Peptsia!” the woman answered in tears.
In a second, Tato was down on his knees, too. It was 54 years since the two neighbors had seen each other, separated by the hardships of war.
My mother called me and I immediately drove over to their house, where I found my flustered father on the balcony. Finishing the cigarette he was smoking, he gave me an emotional description of their meeting. In a minute, we went into the house together. My mother and my sister were bustling around and a woman with dyed hair was sitting on the sofa. It was obvious from her facial features that she was once beautiful. Like my mother, she was nearly 74 at that point. We quickly greeted each other and the first thing that struck me about our unexpected guest was her almost flawless Ukrainian. Unbelievable as it was, this woman had last spoken Ukrainian nearly half a century earlier yet somehow she managed to retain a language that was not even her mother tongue for so long.
Initially, I read a few of Peptsia’s letters at random. They were also written in a very decent style. I thought maybe Jews really were the only people who so easily mastered other languages.
When my father asked why Peptsia had not warned us in a letter that she was coming, she admitted that this time, too, she didn’t really believe until the very last moment that her plans would work out and then told us the story of her previous effort to come home. That was about 20 years earlier, whenm the “socialist camp” was still a thing and former Yugoslavia was still part of it.

1974

Her entire family got ready to travel. Yusha, Ana-Pepina, Dobrica and Rodzyo. They crossed the border at Chop in their own car and drove on without further ado. Along the way, they stopped off to have a bite at a café, where they noticed some odd men who hid from them behind newspapers, as though they were absorbed in reading the news.
Somewhere among the fields past Striy, the police stopped them. They checked their documents and asked where they were going. Peptsia answered Deliatyn because her Ukrainian was good.
“You won’t make it. We just had a huge flood and all the bridges and roads in that direction are damaged. There’s no connection right now and there’s no word as to when the links will be restored.”
“What should we do?” the woman asked, not quite believing them.
“Go back to Uzhhorod and send your friends a telegram.”
While all this was going on, three days went by of what was suppoed to be their trip. Moreover, Peptsia wasn’t convinced that the Mysiuk’s would actually get her telegram. She was all too familiar with what the soviet secret services were capable of doing. And that had put an end to their first trip.

1998

Luckily this second trip took place when Ukraine was in the dawn of independence and the only hitch was probably the complete shortage of food. But they managed to find something anyway, and had plenty of homemade food with them. Moreover, the atmosphere of warm memories more than compensated for any minor everyday problems.
Initially, the older folk asked about relatives in Ukraine and Serbia. Then they went down memory lane. Every once in a while, Peptsia would ask a question:
“Who’s left of the Deliatyn Jews?” and added some family names. There was almost no one left in Deliatyn. Some one-time Deliatynites were living in other countries, and indeed Peptsia knew more about them than my parents because it was easier for her to communicate with the outside world than for us.
Luckily, one Deliatyn woman, a common acquaintance—in fact a classmate of my mother’s and Peptsia’s—called Anna Yosypchuk, still lived in Deliatyn. Father offered to go over to her house and arrange a get-together.
This woman’s story was no less interesting. Her real name was Amalia Taubman but she was called Maltsia. She was the only daughter of wealthy Deliatyn Jews. Her father gave private lessons in religion and history while her mother kept a shop. After the Germans killed her parents, she was able to get away. To be more precise, like Peptsia, she simply wasn’t home when the arrest took place. The Yosypchuk family hid the girl from the next German operation until the end of the Nazi occupation. Later, after the war, when pan Yosypchuk’s wife died, the rescuer married the girl they had saved. She converted to Catholicism and took the name Anna and her husband’s surname.
During all this conversation, our guest’s friendly face suddenly became filled with pain and stress. In a changed voice, she quietly asked:
“Who’s left of these people” naming three or four Deliatyn men who were accomplices in the destruction of the Jews although before the war, they had all lived together very well.
My parents began to relate what had happened to them and it turned out that every one of the men had been dead for many years, and none of their lives had ended well, to put it mildly. Even their offspring did not do well. I was deeply impressed by these revelations and began to understand that, sooner or later, we had to pay for everything in this world.
It was very, very late when we finally called it a day.
The next day, I invited Pepina over to my house. After dinner, we found out what happened to her after Uncle Vasyl sent her to Germany.

1942-1965

In Germany, they were taken to the city of Bitterfeld-Wolfen, southwest of Berlin, where a factory was producing x-ray and photographic film. Pepina’s job really wasn’t very hard: her work involved quality control. Still, the manufacturing process itself was harmful and the women who worked directly on the lines tended to get seriously ill and some even died because of the working conditions.
But worst of all was the food, if one could even call it that. the workers got a small ration of black bread every day, coffee made of ground barley, and for lunch, something resembling vegetable soup but mostly consisting of cabbage.
They slept in barracks in a special camp for women. Peptsia was lucky that she knew German and was able to converse freely with the German woman who was in charge of the laboratory and was her immediate boss. In fact, the German woman was quite good to the unfortunate girl, having no suspicion that she was actually Jewish because Pepina did not have a stereotypically Jewish face. After some time, noticing that the girl was growing thinner by the day, the German woman began to bring her canapes and even chocolates from home.
One Sunday in September 1942, her boss invited Pepina to her place and arranged for a brief leave with the commandant of the camp as a reward for the girl’s conscientious work. The German woman herself rented a room in the apartment of some actress. That Sunday, the mistress was away on a lengthy tour, so the woman took a dress and hat out of the actress’s wardrobe so that Pepina would have something decent to wear going to town with her. Other than a robe, the girl had nothing by way of civilian clothing. On their way to town, they went into a photo salon and took a very nice photograph for Pepina.
This photo was kept in the family archives and if one didn’t know the girl’s circumstances at the time, one might think this impressive young lady was very happy. Almost friends by the end of the portrait sitting, the two went off to a café to drink sodas. The minute they sat at a table, a waitress came up to them and asked:
“What can we offer you?”
Just then they heard a loud voice from a neighboring table in the corner:
“How much longer are we going to have to wait?” There were three men at the table. The waitress let them know that their beers were being poured and turned back to Pepina:
“Do you see that tall dark-haired guy? You two would make a very handsome couple.”
The girl barely glanced towards the corner of the room and protested that she was not interested in men at this time.
“Well, well,” the waitress responded.
While they were still sitting in the café, a gypsy came up to them, the establishment’s cleaning lady, and offered to read their palms. Peptsia was against it, but the boss paid the fortuneteller a small coin and almost forced the girl to extend her hand, palm upwards.
“Yours will be along and happy life,” the fortuneteller began.
At that moment, how could this girl who was far from home, caught in the deadly tornado of a war and all alone in the world, believe such words? Still, she kept listening to the old woman’s predictions.
“You will never return to your home, but you will have a new family home and you will have a huge family.”
“It’s all lies,” Peptsia thought to herself, but figured that her boss had arranged this with the fortuneteller in order to pick up her spirits and improve her mood a little. They spent a pleasant afternoon together and then she returned to her camp because it was nearly curfew.
Along the way, the young man whom the waitress had pointed out caught up to her and offered to walk her home. She didn’t protest much because, it being evening in an unfamiliar city, she didn’t actually feel very safe. Of course, Pepina did say that she had no home, that she was living in a camp and was a bonded worker. Her guide responded that he, too, was a bonded worker and lived in the men’s camp next to the women’s.
All too soon, they reached the gate of the camp in which Pepina lived. As they parted, the young man pressed a piece of paper into the girl’s hand. She looked at it and realized it was a bread ration card. She ran after him and cried:
“Is this how you buy all the girls?”
“No, not all of them,” he answered. “I like you and I want to help you somehow.” He turned out to be a Serb called Jovan, nicknamed Joka.
There were more rendezvous after that, accidental at first, and then the two prisoners began to arrange dates. It was easier for Joka to do that because he was a translator and he was in a better position than other prisoners. His good German no doubt helped him gain this position.
Their relationship soon became romantic until suddenly, another unexpected twist of fate nearly ended it all. In the winter of 1943, someone tipped the Gestapo off that the girl was hiding her Jewish ethnicity, so she was arrested and sent to a filtration camp to be checked. Once again pan Iliashevskiy came to the rescue. At the request of the Gestapo he confirmed her Ukrainian ethnicity. Peptsia was returned to the labor camp.

But that was not the end of her troubles. One day, Jovan came to a rendezvous looking very sad and thoughtful.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“I’ll be leaving here soon. My father managed to buy me out of the camp. I don’t know when we’ll be able to see each other again.” It turned out that corruption really was universal—even in the Third Reich. In fact, Jovan never showed up the following Sunday—or two weeks later.
Peptsia had already resigned herself to being alone when she suddenly got a letter from Joka through her friendly boss. He was back in camp and was expecting her at their usual place the following Sunday. It turned out that love trumped freedom. Joka couldn’t bear being separated and voluntarily returned to the labor camp. At first he was punished. The overseer who let him go illegally was actually shot.
Meanwhile, the front was fast approaching Bitterfeld and, shortly afterward, the plant was bombed and the workers all ran off to wherever they could. The two of them decided to return to Jovan’s homeland. While waiting for transport to Yugoslavia, on June 21, 1945, the young couple got married in Bitterfeld.
Their road was long and difficult, but the two former bonded workers finally made it to Serbia.

There, in the little town of Erdevik in the Srem district, not far from Novy Sad, the Ristic family, the parents and three sons lived on a large farmstead with a lot of land. The oldest son already had a family, but they all lived together in one house.
Jovan introduced Pepina to his family as his wife. But the parents insisted that their marriage had to be confirmed in Yugoslavia. This was done in a local government office with the help of testimony from two campmates with whom he had returned from captivity, including one from the young Serb-Ukrainian family that Pepina had mentioned in her letter.
At first, no one but Joka knew that Pepka was Jewish, and even he only learned this just before they left Germany. For a time, the in-laws were a bit skeptical of their son’s bride, but once they got to know her better, they welcomed her into the family and loved her like their own, regardless of where she came from. They celebrated a modest wedding and thus began the everyday life of a rural family. Working on the land and taking care of livestock was not easy, and at night every housewife was expected to take a turn baking bread or preparing meals as well.
And now it was time for Ana—as Peptsia was called ever since she had worked in Germany and so remained for the rest of her life—to bake the bread. The day before, she began to worry how she was going to take on this complicated and unfamiliar task. After all, at home in Deliatyn, Paranka was the one who did all the bread-making and most of the cooking. Now the new young housewife had to keep up appearances and not look like she was used to wearing kid gloves.
Night approached. Her mother-in-law came into the kitchen with a measure of flour for the bread and went off to bed, leaving her daughter-in-law all alone with a task she was not prepared for. Heavy-hearted, Ana lit a fire in the oven and began to look around the kitchen for where to start the bread-baking process. Not a single logical thought arose to help her and she was about to start weeping when Joka’s older brother came quietly into the kitchen. It was he, and not her husband, who felt sorry for the novice housewife and decided to help her learn this important skill. The two bakers were soon steaming away. Ana helped knead the dough, picking up the other skills at the same time, for she was a capable student in everything. They set the dough to rise and then formed the large loaves. Once the loaves were in the oven, her husband’s brother talked to Ana about when she needed to take the bread out and quietly left to go sleep.
In the morning, the young bride placed six golden loaves of bread on the table and even received praise from her mother-in-law for their good quality. She had earned her place in the family.

Life under one roof wasn’t entirely comfortable, as there wasn’t room enough for all of them. Ana and Joka really wanted their own cosy retreat. By now, two little boys had joined the young family: Dobroliub and Rodoliub, nicknamed Dobrica and Rodyo by their parents. The children grew quickly but the house remained the same. Even Joka understood at last that something had to be done about their living conditions. But there were no resources to do anything. Nor did his elderly parents want to lose two pairs of hands in the fields.
Still, Lord Chance, or, if you prefer, the Hand of God, looked kindly upon them. Some neighbors who lived not far from them had decided it was time to move to a bigger town and put their house up for sale. They had already all moved to the city. After a while, the elderly mother came back and announced that she was not moving from her house. At first her children protested, but they understood eventually that nothing would happen to their mother and began to look for tenants who would take care of the property and their mother in lieu of paying rent and inherit the house when she died.
Ana immediately understood that this was a great opportunity and began to persuade her husband to accept the proposition from their neighbors. After thinking about it at length, he agreed, thinking that since the older woman was already 67, soon he and his family would have full rights to the property. Life, however, had other plans. The older woman lived another 25 years. She proved a real help in raising the children and was an excellent source of advice and assistance in all kinds of household affairs.
In time, Joka found work at an insurance company while Ana went to work at the local school, teaching German and Russian. The family now had some money and was able to bring their home up to scratch.
Meanwhile, the children had grown up and their mother arranged for them to study foreign languages while their father taught them the work on a farm. Rodoliub was good with languages and picked them up easily. Dobrica, on the other hand, was fascinated by machinery and disappeared for hours at a time in the cooperative garages, fiddling on tractors and combines. One time he even brought home some parts that he wanted to build something of his own with. The supervisor had a serious talk with Joka about his son...
Rodoliub meanwhile became fascinated by the local doctor who always sat at his medical post smoking a cigarette while passers-by greeted him with respect, saying “Good day, pan Doctor!” and raising their caps. To this little ritual, the doctor would nod his head in acknowledgement, looking very dignified. Other doctors were simply addressed with a “Good morning!”
One time, Rodzio looked into the treatment room and saw that it was in perfect order, with gleaming instruments. This only increased his interest. Suddenly the doctor appeared and asked:
“So, you find it interesting?”
“Yes!”
“Here’s some money. Go to the store and buy me some cigarettes and buy yourself some candies.”
From that time on Rodoliub decided that he wanted to be a doctor. And he started studying more earnestly.
Rodyo’s mother helped with his studies. The time came when professional teachers with specialist diplomas began to be sent to the school. The principal called Ana in and said that she would have to go for some courses at Novy Sad for at least a short period. The government was beginning to require that, although he personally considered her qualifications as a teacher more than adequate.
This led to a serious discussion at home, after which Ana resigned from the school: her husband refused to let her go to the big city to study. It seems he was jealous. At this point, Ana was at the peak of her womanly beauty and even in Erdevik, men noticed her.
The boys were growing up and time came to choose a profession. Joka categorically insisted that the boys should stick to farming and expand their farmstead. They needed to buy more land and some equipment. Ana, however, did not see this kind of future for her children. The arguments started now.

1965-1974

Meanwhile, Ana-Pepina’s uncle was looking for her. He had somehow survived nazism in Germany, even kept his business. Ana decided to visit him. He was her mother’s cousin and sold fabrics. Being childless and feeling the end drawing near, he began to look for relatives who might take over his business. Unfortunately, his wife was much younger and obviously had plans of her own for the inheritance. And so, after her uncle’s death, the only thing Ana inherited was his car.
But to inherit even this was a great luxury. Among the entire population of 4,000 in Erdevik, this was the first private car. Joka’s pride knew no bounds.
During her visit with her uncle, Ana had also found out that she could sue for compensation from the nazi regime in a German court. Because the Glazer family had suffered considerably under the Nazis, Ana decided to try being a plaintiff. Once again her German came in very handy.
Over the course of a few years, she presented her own case in the court, without a lawyer and basically without documentary evidence, and finally won the legal battle in Germany on her own. One witness from Deliatyn did, in fact, corroborate the loss of her family home, and that was Roman Hlyna. She told us about this with considerable pride and confidence the first time we met again. The German government awarded her a lifetime pension as compensation.
At this point, Ana’s children had finished high school. Their father said that they needed to attend a professional college for agrarians but their mother was against this. So Ana went to Novy Sad on her own and submitted her sons’ applications to the university. She wanted Dobrica to study at the Polyechnical Institute and Rodoliub to become a physician. Ana went ahead and organized an apartment for the two students.
All of this required money, so she went for the gusto and sold the car despite her husband’s protests and inevitable quarrels. At one point, Joka even threatened Ana with a mental institution, but she refused to stop. She was so determined that her children have a decent future that she was even prepared to sacrifice her own happiness.
Somehow the couple were able to come to terms with the situation and began to work more intensively to support their sons’ studies. They kept dozens of pigs, hundreds of chicken and turkeys. They sold most of the livestock and poultry, keeping a small number for their own needs. And so the student years passed. The boys completed their studies, Dobrica becoming a refrigeration engineer.
One summer day, a car with government plates stopped in front of the Ristics’ home.
“Some government bigwig is visiting us,” Joka said nervously to Ana, who was fussing with the hens. The two went out to meet the car.
“Are you the parents of Rodoliub Ristic?”
“Yes,” they answered in unison, not understanding who this was and why they had come into their yard.
“I’m the rector of the medical university. Your son is the most successful graduate from our institution and we have an opportunity to send him to the university in Vienna to complete his studies. This won’t cost you anything. All his expenses will be covered by the state of Yugoslavia. All we need is your written agreement.”
Both parents froze to the spot, unable to say a single word. Suddenly the grey-haired Jovan turned, hugged his wife and burst into tears over what he had just heard.
“We agree,” the overjoyed parents replied together.
When it was time to send their son on his way to Vienna, the father pressed 1,000 Deutschmarks into his hand and said: “Buy yourself a nice suit and other clothes so that you look like a son of the Ristic family in Vienna!”
He then turned to Ana: “Please forgive me. You were right to fight me for the future of our sons!”
For the mother, this was the ultimate happiness.
In time, Rodoliub became a cardiologist. He worked in a number of different countries, even in the Soviet Union, where he kept accumulating experience in different cities. Finally, he got married and settled down in Beograd.
Interestingly, much like his parents, he met a older woman in Beograd with her own house. Initially, she was his patient, and later she bequeathed her building to Rodoliub. Over time, he reconstructed the building and opened a private cardiological practice and eventually an entire clinic.

1998

Over the next few days, we were busy taking Pepka on excursions to Kolomyia, Yaremche, Vorokhta, and Rakhiv. Everywhere we went, she regaled us with memories from her own life. Sadly, she could barely find any of the old buildings still standing. Nor could we find any archival testimony about her family or her school years. Deliatyn’s archives, like many others in the region, were almost completely destroyed during the war and the post-war period, offering as they did irrefutable testimony to the many war crimes committed by the two invaders.
All I remember today is her story about Yaremche. We were standing by what was then the Hanus Restaurant—it now houses the City Council—and Pepka recounted how her father’s chauffeur, pan Kapeliukh, forgot her there when she was very small. Left alone, she cried her eyes out in the square in front of the train station, until some people picked her up and calmed her down, saying that someone would soon come for her. And so it was: in a short while, her worried father rushed up from Deliatyn in a car and took her home. The careless driver nearly lost his job over this incident.
In Dobrotiv, just east of Deliatyn, we also tracked down Paranka’s daughter. Pepina chatted with her for a long while and left her some gifts. But the most interesting event was the Sunday get-together of the three classmates: my mother, Peptsia, and Maltsia Taubman, who came with her sons, one a doctor and the other Deputy Mayor of Deliatyn.
The women recollected how very tolerant the various ethnicities were at the school. For instance, there had been a ritual at the start of every school day. Before the lessons began, a pupil from one of the different nationalities would come up to the board and recite a prayer in their own language, so that if the child was Polish they would say a prayer in Polish, so all the Polish chidren would recite in Polish while all the other children would pray to themselves in their own language. The next day, a Ukrainian child would lead in Ukrainian, while the day after that a Jewish child would pray in Yiddish, and then again Polish child and so on. It left a strong impression.
Amalia remembered some boy from Zarichchia by the name of Klymiuk who was extremely talented in different subjects and drew very beautifully. One recess break before a lesson with the physics and maths teacher, Professor Franta, this boy drew a huge, remarkably accurate portrait of the teacher in chalk on the blackboard. When pan Franta came into the class and asked, “Who did this?” the kids were all silent.
“I did,” Klymiuk finally admitted, standing up.
The teacher called him to come to the front of the class. The other pupils were sure he was going to be punished. But after a long pause, Professor Fanta announced that this boy was unusually talented and that he would be a great man someday. As it turned out, during the war, Klymiuk joined the Ukrainian underground and was unfortunately killed, possibly at the hands of the Germans during the campaign in Zarichchia. Peptsia then asked:
“Girls,”—a term that might have seemed inappropriate, but was rather cute when applied to women over 70, and these days people use it for all women—“do you remember the old Jew who had a small shop down from the church? Whenever we went home from school, we would stop in there on purpose and greet him loudly, and he would answer: ‘What nice children! Here are some candies.’ What was his name? Do you remember him?”
“I forgot his name,” Mama answered.
“How about you, Maltsia, do you remember that nice old Jew?”
“He’s not a Jew,” Amalia answered. “He’s a Hebrew."
“He’s no Hebrew,” Peptsia objected. “There were almost no Hebrews in Deliatyn, Tato said that the only Hebrew was the man who repaired bicycles. And a few of the Old Believers, but I didn’t know them.”
Amalia’s sons moved restlessly in their chairs, while my mother diplomatically shifted the conversation in another direction.
Later that evening, Peptsia asked Mama why Maltsia did not acknowledge Jews. “Could it be because she was christened?” Mama explained that in the Soviet Union, the word “Jew” was considered pejorative, although she never understood why, as it had not been an insult in western Ukraine. At the time this all looked rather strange to Peptsia. But when we finally visited Erdevik for the first time in 2013, she tended to use the word “Hebrew” interchangeably with the word “Jew.”

The week of visiting flew by and we bought a suitcaseful of gifts for Peptsia to take back. We had quite the time when it came to getting her seated on the Moscow-Beograd train in Lviv.
Two weeks later, a letter came from Peptsia, telling us how when she had to switch cars in Budapest, to go from one car to the next—we never did understand what that was all about—her luggage was stolen along with her documents. Rodoliub ended up having to drive all the way to Budapest to take his mother home after going through an endless round of red tape. Luckily, some of her more important personal items, including an old Jewish prayerbook, a golden signet ring with her initials, PG, and a mezuzzah (12) that my father had held on to, survived.

2013

When Ana-Pepina invited us to visit her and my wife Halyna and I came to Erdevik for the first time, we saw for ourselves just how the predictions of the old gypsy fortune-teller in Germany had turned out. The ample estate reminded us a bit of the old Glazer place: the same extensions added on one after another, a bountiful garden and orchard—several times larger than the Deliatyn ones—at the far end of the property, and the wall of one outbuilding serving as a fence. It was remarkably like what Peptsia’s family had had in Deliatyn. Moreover, where the façade in Serbia advertised an insurance company, in Deliatyn, it had advertised a shop.
Of the farmstead, at this point in time, all that remained were the chickens and the various vegetable beds, and fruit trees selected so that every kind fruit was available during the entire season: early, mid-summer and fall apples; early, mid-summer and fall sour cherries—and sweet cherries, apricots, peaches, pears, even walnuts.
Possibly the only spruces in all of Erdevik grew next to the Ristic house, a reminder of the Carpathians. A family of owls lived in an ancient mulberry tree, quietly sitting on its branches like a set of fluffy statues during the daytime. The tall linden was home to squirrels. Below the trees was a mass of flowering bushes and other plants.
In short, it was an idyll. When the entire Ristic tribe descended on this Eden on Sunday—two sons, one daughter-in-law, three grandchilden and their spouses, and four great-grandchildren, one of whom, incidentally, had been named Vasko in honor of Uncle Vasyl who had saved her—Pepina seemed to blossom and even grow younger amid this abundance and love. She sat in her chair on the terrace like a queen, as though she was taking in reports, one after another, from each of her descendants. First, the sons told her how they had spent the previous week, then her daughter-in-law, then the grandsons.
Then came the turn of the great-grandchildren. They received the most attention and the main conversation was about what the littlest Ristics had learned in foreign languages. The idea was that, once they knew many foreign languages, they would be like Grandpa Rodoliub, but if they didn’t study, they would at most be engineers like Dobroliub and would not even have their own car.
In fact, Dobroliub’s mother often reproached him: “You didn’t want to study languages, so don’t complain about your miserable pension now.” Dobroliub accepted this criticism very mildly and readily agreed with his mother. In fact, all the children did the same because no one wanted to rouse their mother’s or grandmother’s wrath.
Pepina also recounted how, when the Balkan war began, she sent her granddaughters to study in Israel and they mastered modern Hebrew rather well, in addition to remaining safe during wartime. After all, Peptsia knew very well just how bad war was.

The family supper was a grand ritual. When the weather was good, everyone sat around a large table in the orchard. The table was beautifully set and the cuisine was the work of the lady of the house. She was assisted by a Slovak woman called Ana, who also helped around the garden. At dinner, the conversation was about the family and about the international political situation.
After the table was cleared, everyone went off for an after-meal siesta. Some headed for the hammocks or the lounge chairs in the orchard, some went into the house, but everyone, without exception, was expected to take a nap, as if we were all under mother’s orders.
The siesta ended with a late afternoon coffee and after that the children all headed for their various homes.
Grandma Pepina had baskets of fruit and vegetables from the garden and a separate box with eggs for everyone. Since the household had only a handful of hens at this point, we were surprised that Pepina gave away a large quantity of eggs. It turned out that she bought them up from various neighbors—but told everyone that her own hens had laid every one of them! Of course, the family all knew the truth but no one let on, respecting their hostess’s pride, going back to a time when they had hundreds of poultry and livestock. Grandma also gave out a few hundred dinars to the kids “for good behavior,” so that they could buy themselves some candies.

Late in the evening, after everyone had left, the only one who stayed at Pepina’s house while we were visiting was Dobrica. True to his name, he was a very kindhearted man. He never let Halya get close to the kitchen and always prepared really tasty dishes for us. Only once during the course of the week, were we able to talk him into letting Halya make mushroom soup out of the Carpathian boletus that we had brought with us. And even then he only agreed to it if Halya would turn it into a master class for him.
Dobrica worked every day, all day, in the yard and in the evening we would talk about Ukraine and everything in the world. His dream was to see Greece. Dobrica also took us around Erdevik and its surroundings. It was once the cradle of the Yugoslavian partisan movement and later Josef Tito himself had a dacha not far from the town.
We drove to that dacha on purpose to find some Serbian police officers because we had to get someone to stamp the talon given to us at the Croatian-Serbian border. However, the police were busy getting drunk and did not have any stamp with them. It was Friday, the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, so Erdevik and the nearby villages were basically left without any police on duty. As to this talon, or whatever they called the document, that was a whole other story.

This was our first trip abroad, ever, thanks to the Hungarians, whom I had helped in their search for soldiers of theirs who had died during WWII on Ukrainian territory. It was also just before our son’s wedding in July 2013. I must have been very useful to the Hungarian search team, so after completing digging up one of the abandoned graves in Deliatyn, and finding the remains of some unteroffizier or NCO, the team leader Ronald, a highly placed official in Hungary’s Defense Ministry, said:
“How might we thank you for this?”
“Can you arrange an invitation for us so that we can get Schengen visas?”
“Oh, that’s easy.”
He arranged things very quickly and soon afterwards we found ourselves with our visas in shiny new Ukrainian international passports at the Ukrainian-Hungarian border. The crossing was quite stressful and had we not had the letter from the Defense Ministry, which I showed to the Hungarian border guards, our trip might well have ended then and there.
When the time came tocross the Hungarian border, neither of us understood any of the orders that the Hungarians issued, and on top of that I had incorrectly filled out the form that the border official handed to us—also in Hungarian—confirming that we had fuel. Eventually things worked out and we were pleased to cross all of Hungary in half a day.

Meanwhile, there were also problems with the GPS a friend had given us. Since it was programmed for short trips it kept talking us on short-cuts and finally, after we found ourselves in the middle of a cornfield in the midst of a thunderstorm and barely missed hitting a combine, I somehow got us back out on a highway and turned it off. Since then, we’ve driven over almost half of Europe, but I’ve never used GPS again—on principle.
Idling for a bit at the Hungarian-Serbian border because we had no Hungarian transit visa, we were glad to be finally driving to Serbia to visit Peptsia, who had invited us repeatedly over the phone and in writing.
It was turning dark at this point and Halya began to badger me to turn on our electronic “guide” again. I agreed to some short-term aggravation from the russian-speaking device. And, once again, it reliably took us off the good highway and through some fields. After about half an hour, we saw a sign saying “Granica” meaning border. I went up to ask which border and the Serbs told me it was the Serbo-Croatian one. I asked them why the GPS device would have sent me here. Some of them answered that they had no idea, but one smart aleck piped up: “If your GPS says go there, that’s where you should go.”
So we drove up to Croatian customs. The Croatian border guards looked at us as though we were aliens from another planet, carefully examining our passports, then handing them back and wishing us a happy journey—without having checked the car or our trunk. We found out later that this barely-used customs control point had just been established that day and the young officers were not entirely familiar with procedures.
After a few kilometers of roadway in Croatia, we saw a second border crossing, this time Croatian-Serbian. I hand over our two passports and heard someone asking:
“How did you get here?”
“Across the border a few kilometers from here.”
“Where’s the stamps in your passports?”
“I don’t know. We gave them our passports at the border...”
One of the border guards called his colleagues to confirm, quickly stamped our passports incoming and outgoing, apologized and wished us happy travels.
At the Serbian border, more adventures: on the right on a small rise stood two huts, one larger and one smaller. A pair of stray dogs slept outside the smaller one. A boom consisting of a piece of piping lay across the road, resting on a crate for grapes. It would have been no trouble to simply drive around it, as there was no one to be seen other than the dogs.
I stopped the car and went to look for someone official. The dogs started barking but no one came out of the hut. Through the window, I could see two men absorbed in a game of cards. When I knocked on the glass, they reluctantly came out.
“What do you want?”
I handed over our passports and they went inside again.
After a minute, one of them came out and said:
“You have a problem. One of the passports is a fake.”
“Which one?” I asked.
“I don’t know which one but the passports are supposed to be identical whereas one of yours is red and the other one’s blue. Something’s not right.”
I patiently told him that my passport was the older variety and that was why it was red. If one of them was fake, how was it that we managed to cross four border points with them?
The border guard thought a moment then proposed going in to the supervisor—who was asleep in the larger hut. The sleepy officer listened to our arguments, saw mine as more logical, but asked in a severe tone:
“Why are you driving to Serbia?”
“We’re visiting Dr. Ristic.”
“To Ristic himself? Why?”
“Our mothers are old friends and so are we.”
The officer’s face loosened into a friendly smile and he quickly stamped our passports, wished us happy travels, but nevertheless on parting gave us the useless talon that we were supposed to take to the local police and hand in when we crossed out of Serbia again...
And so that Friday, July 12, because of St. Peter, we weren’t able to get this dratted talon stamped, then it was the weekend, and we had to be on our way home on Monday before sun-up.
The next morning, Saturday, Rodoliub came by and Dobrica explained our dilemma to him. After making a phonecall, Rodzio told us: “Get in the car” and we took off for Beograd. Ignoring all the speed signs, the Mercedes flew at nearly 200 kph to the capital. Along the way, we glimpsed Beograd and found ourselves stopping outside the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Apparently, Rodoliub had called minister himself from Erdevik, and the latter had ordered his underlings to resolve our problem.
At the entrance to the very soviet-looking ministry building, we were met by the duty officer who asked us to wait and within minutes brought us the stamped talon. After this, the doctor took us on an interesting excursion to his heart clinic and then around downtown Beograd. In the evening, we returned to the Ristic home very relieved. I wasn’t sure how happy Rodiliub was to have had to rush between Erdevik and Beograd twice in one day, either.
On our way home later, I had to persuade the Serbian border guards for a long time to take the talon because they had no idea what it was for. In the end, they did take it, but it turned out I could just as easily have kept it as a souvenir.

2014

My next trip to Erdevik was in early May 2014. this time. howevr, it was not just a visit or vacation: I was coming to see Peptsia’s cardiologist son, not his mother. My heart had been bothering me for five months at that point.
In addition to all the stress that the Maidan had wrought the winter of 2013-2014, both in Kyiv and in Deliatyn, the heating broke own at our house. The pipes had frozen when the furnace shut down. I drove to a repair man in Nadvirna on what happened to be St. Nicholas Day. The man agreed very reluctantly and insisted that I bring him home very quickly because of the holiday. He fixed the furnace, we drove back to Nadvirna and just then someone called me to say that without me they weren’t going to hold the next Deliatyn maidan.
I barely persuaded the repair man to wait for me in the car a few minutes: he was agitated, I was agitated. I returned after a short while and when we were on our way, I suggested to him that an old classmate, our veterinarian Bohdan, drive to Nadvirna and back for the company. At first, the repair man objected but in the end he agreed and we drove off a threesome. In Nadvirna, I went out with the repair man to his company office where I got a replacement stabilizer.
When I got back to my car, I went to grab the doorhandle and realized that I wasn’t reaching it: my head was spinning and there was a lump in my throat. I tried once more to grab the handle, but nothing happened. By now, I was gasping for breath and signaled to Bohdan to open the door from inside, but he didn’t understand me. Suddenly he realized something serious was going on and dashed out of the car. Fortunately, we were not far from a pharmacy and he was a physician, even his patients were not two-legged.
In a flash, he was back and placed a nitroglycerin tablet under my already numb tongue. My breathing normalized instantly but now I had a splitting headache, so Bohdan gave me some validol and something else and we finally made it home. I tried to find a way to get an ECG, but my family doctor said it would be better to go to a cardiologist, so I headed back to Nadvirna.
My heart was still straining in my chest. We replaced one prescription with another, but nothing was helping at this point. Another friend recommended his hospital in Ivano-Frankivsk. I drove there and the first thing they asked was “Where do you work?” Apparently I failed the test for a nice payment under the table. As a museum employee, I didn’t have much to spare. So the diagnosis appropriate to the situation was that it was my spine, not my heart—determined with a stethoscope, without even looking at the ECG.
At this point, I decided to go to a different cardiologist at the cardio dispensary. I told them that I was a businessman and immediately a series of prescriptions was written out that also did not provide any relief. Another cardiologist told that I was lucky to be alive because I’d already had several infarcts. That was too much for me and I decided to turn to Dr. Ristic, Peptsia’s son.
When I called him and told him what was going on, he agreed to treat me. I did the 1,200-kilometer trip in a single day of driving. When the doctor heard that I had done that by myself, he said I was perfectly healthy and didn’t need him to check me out. But the next morning, Dobrica woke me up and said not to have any breakfast because we were going together to Beograd.
Rodoliub had sent a car for us so that I would not have to strain myself behind the wheel. At the same time, Dobrica needed a check-up because he, too, had not been feeling very well and kept putting off a visit to the doctor. Now the opportunity was there.
In the morning, the two of us gave blood samples at the Nasha Clinic and were sitting in the enormous reception area waiting our turn to see various doctors. As it happened, all the Rodoliub Ristics worked there. His wife was a cardiologist, as were his daughter and daughter-in-law, while his son had a dental office on the second floor.
The entire clinic boasted cutting-edge equipment. The waiting room was filled with patients and conversation turned to the Maidan. People were very curious. Among the patients were not just Serbs but an international clientele for this was a highly-reputed clinic.
When we had been in all the rooms where the various diagnostics took place, from ECGs to a treadmill with dozens of sensors taped to our bodies, Rodoliub invite us to lunch in the clinic’s modest but cozy dining room.
Over lunch, the doctor asked me whether the Ukrainian ambassador had spoken to me in Ukrainian. It turned out that he, too, was sitting in the waiting room but he never spoke a word. I thought to myself, if all our diplomats are like that, what’s the point of maintaining them abroad?
Afterwards, the results were broght in and entered into an entire book. The doctor looked them over and said that I had a mitral valve prolapse, a weakness that I had been born with that was not fatal. The more serious issue was congested bloodvessels going into my brain.
“You have to bring your cholesterol level down and try not to overexert yourself, physically or emotionally,” he warned. He then gave me a prescription for a minimal amount of medication and I left with Dobrica for Erdevik feeling reassured.
Dobrica was not so lucky: they found cancerous cells in his bloodwork and he had to go for observation. The older brother did not tell his younger sibling just how serious things were, but rather tried to ease his fears. In the evening, we returned to Erdevik and chatted for a long time with Pepina.
I stayed in Erdevik for another two days, during which I managed to visit the cemetery where Jovan Ristic was buried. When we came back from there, we also passed the old Jewish cemetery along the road. Pepina noted that the grass hadn’t been cut. When we got to the house, she immediatly called the Mayor of Erdevik and complained about the state of the Jewish cemetery. He promised to take care of it in the morning. The following day near evening, Pepina sent me to check and I reported to her that I had found the entire cemetery taken care of. Everything was good.
Later that evening, an older Serbian woman came to visit Peptsia. She had come back from Germany, where she made a little money and wanted to buy a small parcel of land on which to build. She was looking for some advice about where it would be best to buy. Ana-Pepina carefully listened to her and proposed that she buy a plot on the norrh side of Erdevik because the outlook for tourism was better there, and land was still cheap in that area. She then point-by-point criticized the plot that the visitor was thinking of buying. “There’s a goat farm not far from it which is likely to expand in the future and the air will not smell good,” said Pepina.
The lady thanked her, left a package of coffee for Señora Ristic and went home satisfied.
Not for the first time, I was captivated by the clear mind and logical thinking of this 90 year-old grandmother. Different people came to her all the time for advice, comfort or even financial assistance.
The day I was to leave, they brought in the mail. Among the newspapers and letters was a journal, possibly a quarterly, called “A Jewish View.” That was what Pepina picked up first, quickly opened it to about the middle and began to read, commenting quietly about herself. After three or four minutes, she cried out: “Oh what a nasty man, what a liar!”
“Who?” I asked.
“The journalist who interviewed me. Look what he wrote!”
The article was entitled, “Only a prayerbook was left” and told Pepina’s life. The title referred to the remnant of a Jewish prayerbook that my father had kept and returned to Pepina when she visited us the first time. Among other things, the journalist had written:
“SS teams entered Deliatyn in September 1939 and took and destroyed all the Glazers’ property.” In reality, all those terrible things were done by the soviet “liberators” and it was they who came to “bring cheer” to Halychyna in September 1939. But of course a journalist in Serbia, the great friend of “the russian people,” could not possibly write about that.
After reading the article to the end, Pepina phoned Rodoliub and told him never again to send such a devious journalist to her. I asked if pani Ristic could give me this journal. She gladly agreed and even signed the last page for me, “in gratitude to the nephew of her savior, Striyko Vasyl.”
The four sentences of gratitude, written in a couple of minutes, were in perfect literary Ukrainian. Of course, Peptsia then pointed out that she had made a couple of mistakes, adding that she was not going to correct them. This journal now has pride of place in the Deliatyn museum in the section on the town’s Jewish population.
For my trip home, I was given fruit and sandwiches and left, never suspecting that the next time I came, Dobrica would no longer be among the living. Sadly, even in a serious match with a great physician, the cancer proved victorious and his brother’s dream of Greece was never to be.

2019-2023

As it happened, my next visit with Peptsia, in 2019, was very short, taking place, like the first one, on the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, July 13. Grandma stayed up for us, even though it was quite late by the time we arrived, because we got lost once again when we turned off the main highway to Erdevik.
We shared with Pepina our impressions of the Plitvice Lakes in Croatia, which we had seen the day before. They were a real paradise, something I had rarely seen in this world. That evening, the kitchen chat included Zorka from Bosnia, Anna from Slovakia, we Ukrainians, and Pepina. As usual, I was amazed by how instantly Pepina switched into Ukrainian and how easily she maneuvered on a conversation among people who spoke several different languages. She addressed each person in their own language, in-between which she called her son and spoke to him in Serbian.
But this last time, our friend’s memory was starting to let her down and several times she asked my wife Halya who she was, although she had no trouble remembering events and people from 60 years earlier.
We stayed the night and said our farewells. Honestly, I did not have much hope that we would visit Pepina again, given her age—95. Over the following year, I tried calling Erdvik several times, but no one answered. Once again, we travelled that summer to Rovinj, a resort town in Croatia where we had spent vacations in the past. I had decided at last to put Pepina Glazer’s life story down on paper and with the help of the best hostess in this resort town, Dragana, I phoned Pepina again.
Within a minute, I heard the bright voice of our now 96-year-old señora.
“Andriyko! Where are you? Is everything ok at your end? When will you visit me?”
We chatted for a few minutes—as always, in Ukrainian. I wished Pepina the best of everything and decided to pray to God to give her many more years to enjoy her nearest and farthest cherished people.

Postscript

It’s our last day at the seaside this year. Yesterday I finished writing the story of Ana-Pepina Glazer’s life. Not the full story, of course, buxt the fragments I knew, in the hope of providimg a partial portrait—and only in black and white—of this amazing woman. The reality, I know, was a thousandfold more complex, emotional, painful, and colorful. But this is what I knew and what I could write, not being a professional.
We never talked to Ana-Pepina again. On November 10, 2023, Rodoliub phoned to tell us that his mother had died on November 2nd, just shy of her 100th birthday. She lived to the same age as her beloved husband Jovan, who had died 14 years earlier.

September 2, 2018 at Rovinj, Adriatic Sea, Croatia - January 2, 2025, Deliatyn, Ukraine


Endnotes:
1 Polish and Ukrainian both historically used the term “zhyd” for a Jewish person, and Polish still does. Under the soviets, the russian taboo on the term “Jew” spread to Ukraine and “Jew” was deemed as bad as calling someone a “Yid” in English. The proper term was now “yevrei” or “Hebrew.”
2 Alexandra Pakhmutova is a russian composer who liked to use the trumpet.
3 The Lviv Autobus Plant
4 At this time, the only “church” allowed in the Soviet Union was the Russian Orthodox Church, whose clerics violated the secrecy of confession and informed on their faithful for the KGB.
5 A much larger town some 30 kilometers east of Deliaryn, Kolomyia was considered the capital of Hutsul country and boasted some 39 print houses prior to the russian takeover during WWII.
6 The age of the house was determined by a coin found in the basement when the house was taken down in 1988.
7 This highway extended from Vienna to Chernivtsi.
8 A gymnazium is an academic-track secondary school.
9 Ivano-Frankivsk today, 60 km north.
10 The Kennkarte served as the basic identification document issued to German nationals from the age of 15 onwards, with place of residence or permanent residence in the territory of Germany during the Third Reich, and extended to include citizens of German-occupied territories.
11 “Guest” or migrant worker. Depending on where the person was placed, they could be treated as slave labor or treated reasonably humanely, although the work was always hard. Those who survived until independent Ukraine were later compensated by the German government.
12 The mezzuzah is a Jewish parchment scroll with a fragment of the text of a prayer that is placed in a special pouch and attached to the doorframe.