Bashchinskaya Inna Iosifovna

Interviewers: Inna Romanova (Russia), Sigrid Rischer (Austria)
Bashchinskaya (Lulevich) Inna Iosifovna (born on 8 June 1926)

9 August 2010

Could you tell us about your family?

I was born in Konstantinovka, we lived there on Tbilisskaya street. My father left us, and I lived with my mother and my three years younger brother. They stayed under the Germans, and I was taken away. We had a good family, my mother had five sisters, they helped us. My mother worked, she went from village to village and exchanged things for food, but she had no education. My brother worked for the Germans when he was 12, and when a horse died, they gave us the meat. Those were hard times. Later they took us away, this seperation was very hard for all of us, and when I returned in June 1945, my mother told me that there wasn't one day that she didn't cry.

Where were you when the Germans came to the town? What do you remember?

Everyone tried to support each other irrespective of ethnicity. When the Germans went to the town I was at home. We lived on a hill, that's why I didn't see anything. Of course it was terrible, we were bombed, and I was still a girl, I was 15. We loved Stalin and we still remember him. He didn't leave us, he was in Moscow all the time, he didn't run anywhere, he supported us, and the soldiers fought for him.

Did you go to Germany on your own initiative or were you forced? Tell us about your arrival in Germany.

On the 11^th of April we were told that we would go to Dnepropetrovsk to work on a kolhos for two weeks, but it turned out that we went to Germany. We were on the train for nine days, slept on straw on the floor and got nothing to eat. If someone wanted to escape they were shot. When we arrived in Germany we were lined up like sheep to be selected by factory owners. At one factory there were about 350 people working. When I was selected I asked them to take my friend as well. At the beginning I worked for two years at a „Sackfabrik“, a factory where bags were made. We had to work 12 hours a day, I don't remember that there were days off. The owner was a good man, nobody abused us. The conditions were not bad except for the food. We got only turnips, one day they gave us a frog leg soup, the French ate it, but we couldn't, we started to swear and it did not happen again. When we arrived we had nothing. Only blue overalls, trousers and blankets. In winter we wrapped blankets around us, looked like scarecrows and wore wooden clogs, when we were walking on the streets we created terrible noise.
When the Americans bombed Bielefeld, when they destroyed the factory, we collected pieces of bodies (Inna Iosifovna was crying while telling this). There I got acquainted with a German woman, she also worked at the factory, she was a very good person and wanted me to stay in Germany. She didn't have children and treated me like her daughter. Every Saturday she took me to her home on her bike, in agreement with a policeman, and it was obvious that she paid him. She said: „Stay here, this will all be yours!“
After this they transferred us to the car factory „Homsel“ . The conditions there were much worse than at the previous factory. The owner was a real fascist. On the advice of Lida Gorbunova my friend and I fled and went to the town Lemsa, and then to Vossheide to a German acquaintance, Else. My friend Milechka also was from Konstantinovka, I have met her here already after the war. We lived in different families. I called all of them Mama, because runaways like us were searched for by the police. My host Walter Fulabe and his family were good people, they gave us clothes, so I was clean and neat. They trusted me. They had a daughter, and once we ran to me at midnight and said that on the radio they played the Russian song „Shiroka strana moya rodnaya“ („Wide is my homeland“). Even now when I just talk about it, it sends shivers down my spine.

Did you consider staying in Germany after the liberation?

No, I terribly missed my mother and brother, we had a good family. My host wanted me to marry her son, but I was very committed to my homeland.

How did you return home?

When we went back, someone wanted to cause a train crash, only thanks to the driver we stayed alive.

What changed in Konstantinovka after the war? Was your home destroyed? Did you find your relatives and friends?

Everything was destroyed, our house too, but my father built a small hut with one room and a kitchen where my mother and brother lived. My father died. My mother worked at the glass factory, and I found a job there too after I finished technical school. My brother graduated from nautical school and received higher education in Mariupol. I married in 1949. My first husband, Fedya, was very educated. For 32 years he worked as head of the factory comittee. He died in 1999, and I got married at his wish. He loved me very much, he carried me on his hands. He was my sweetheart (Inna Iosifovna was crying while telling this). For all my life I had good work, I was always respected.

Which advice can you give the new generations, so that something like this will not happen again?

Love and help each other. When all are like animals, the children will also be like animals.