We packed everything up in the car, said our goodbyes, and headed off. We had our papers, stamped and with the details of where we were going—everything like it was supposed to be.”
But as they neared the border, their confidence was shattered. Their car was stopped by Soviet soldiers.
“‘What Czechoslovakia? What are you thinking?!’ the soldier yelled in Russian,” the old man recalls. “I replied, ‘Why, what am I thinking? We have all our documents, my parents packed for a permanent move, we have everything we need.’ The soldier trotted off to the sentry box and I heard him saying, ‘Comrade Colonel, sir, these people are going to Czechoslovakia! What should I do?!’ I think to myself, here we go, that’s it. ‘Alright then. I understand, I understand,’ I hear the soldier say. ‘Look,’ he comes back and says to me as if I’m a kid, which I still was then. ‘If you encounter military vehicles, don’t get in their way. Or you’ll find yourself in a ravine!’ We’re driving on, and, just as he had predicted, the Carpathians are full of tanks.”
Yosyp and his parents did make it to Czechoslovakia in their old GAZ. But there, everything was peaceful: People didn’t even suspect what was being readied for them on the Ukrainian side of the Carpathians.
“We arrived in Chmel’ov. My parents settled in, but not in their own house, with my father’s sister. Saying goodbye was hard—because I had married here in Hrushvytsia Persha, had built my own house; I couldn’t just leave. And so the border divided us. My mom and dad both died there in Chmel’ov. I too used to say that I wanted to be buried there. Now I myself don’t know.”
Mikula and Zuzana Mihalčin were far from the only ones to return. After Stalin’s death the laws were relaxed and thousands of former resettlers from Slovakia were given the opportunity to move back. Out of the twelve thousand people who’d left Eastern Slovakia in 1947, by 1967 barely half remained in Volyn. Even with the rocky soil and the more poorly built houses, people felt better on their native land. For most of them, Volyn never did become a motherland.
But for Yosyp it did. What’s true, he saw his parents seldom after 1968.
“How many times did we go there—five? maybe seven?” he asks his wife Valentyna. “We visited Chmel’ov and then another time I was in Prague. That was it, because it cost a lot of money. But there’s plenty to see in the Czech Republic. In 1986 I rented a Zhiguli there, a sixth-model Lada. I was shocked to see car tunnels seven kilometers long there. And specially constructed overpasses on the highways for animals because the highways are walled off—so that not a deer, not a rabbit get run over. You could see that people were working. Maybe our grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren will live to have the same? It’s right next door: How far is it to that Uzhhorod? One of my grandsons bought both an apartment and a car there, and he wants to live there permanently. I didn’t ask about the details, but his life’s good.”
Relatives and friends from Slovakia have also come to Hrushvytsia Persha on more than one occasion.
“We’ve even had people visit us from America—with my godson, Štefan Kruško’s son, who speaks English. They rented a car in Munich, filled up the tank to not have to buy gas here, and drove over. Those were distant relatives! I too had an aunt living in America, my mom’s sister. But I have more ties with Slovakia.”
Yosyp sighs. After a long workday, he still putzes around the house a bit, but finally sits down: His back hurts. The man’s appearance is calm, but there seems to be something pounding inside him, as if trying to break free.
“We have grandchildren and great-grandchildren both here and there. And my parents are there,” he says, and I watch his eyes grow moist. “How many years have passed and I still can’t forget that ‘Forgive us’ of my father’s as we said goodbye.”
“Forgive us, son, for leaving like that. Forgive us,” he kept repeating.
***
“Lord,” Yosyp peers into an old well by the Czech house. “I was down there a few times: One time a rooster fell in, another time a hen. As the lightest kid, I’d get lowered down in there in a pail, and I’d fetch them,” he laughs. “Lordy Lord, my dear little house. God, our childhood took place here! There’s even water in that well still. Two rooms, a stove, a closet. And then, when you headed down into the cellar, it said ‘Jozef Gavliček,’ like I mentioned. It’s a shame I didn’t bring any matches, or I’d light one so you could see.”
Yosyp picks apples in the old garden. He stuffs his pockets full, till the apples are almost falling out. He laughs. He utters not to me anymore, but somewhere past me, in the direction of the door: “Look at this home of ours, Dad.”
© Roman Potapenko
IN A RACE AGAINST WAR
І. Dün, or Yesterday
It’s minus nineteen degrees Celsius. Rivulets of February air glide over my fingers—numb with cold—mercilessly drying my silky skin into crumbly parchment. Barely maintaining our balance on the icy road, we stop in front of a low house with lit windows.
A burly man in a dark jacket comes up to the gate. “Hello,” he greets us warmly in Russian and extends his hand to keep me from slipping.
This is Jasim. Jasim Yasinovych Iskondarov is the head of the community of Meskhetian Turks in the village of Vasiukivka outside Bakhmut. He ushers his unexpected guests inside and invites us into the living room. His family has been living in the Donetsk Oblast for twenty-eight years already. It’s here that Jasim found shelter when he was fleeing from pogroms in Uzbekistan, where his parents had moved to after their deportation from the Meskheti region of Georgia in 1944. This house became a home for his three children and fifteen grandchildren.
I hear muffled clattering in the kitchen. Jasim’s wife, fifty-eight-year-old Marpula, ties up the checkered headscarf on her head and carries tea and sweets into the room. We sit down cross-legged at a low traditional table, a sofra, decorated with images of the moon and stars against a red background. Now and then younger women from the family join us.
“Meskheti,” the man begins the story and for a moment holds his breath. “That’s what our land is called.”
This cultural and historical region on the border between Turkey and Georgia has been divided between the two countries since time immemorial. In 1921 the Armenian, Azerbaijani, and Georgian Soviet Republics on one side and Turkey on the other concluded the so-called Treaty of Kars, as a result of which a portion of the Armenian territory went over to Turkey and five Turkish regions were incorporated into Georgia.
“Yes, my parents were born in the already Georgian Meskheti,” Jasim explains, “but in 1944 Stalin got the idea of relocating us because of a concern that our people could collaborate with Turkey.”
And he relocated them.
On the basis of a State Defense Committee resolution, on November 14 Jasim’s people were herded onto freight trains and taken across the Urals.
“The journey to Central Asia took forty days,” Jasim describes, his eyes seemingly blacker than soil. “People died in the train wagons. Children cried. How many people died? No one knows and no one counted. Some say 100,000, others say 120,000.”
This same story is recounted by both children and grandchildren in every house.
“Would you like to go back to Meskheti?” I ask.
“I’ve wanted to my whole life!” Jasim replies without a hint of hesitation. “And my parents wanted us to return there their whole lives. I remember how in 1966, when I was seven, my uncle traveled to Georgia, to Tbilisi, but that was as far as they’d let him go. He wanted to take a look at his motherland. In 1989 Moscow also dismissed the idea of the Meskhetian Turks returning home. Last year my brother was driving to Turkey and stopped by the neighborhood