Three Single Mothers. Three different worlds.

"I and my family, my daughter, son in law and two babies, (my grandchildren) finally got visas, giving us the right to emigrate to America–– after we underwent all the terrors and atrocities of the war, persecution, labor camps, displaced person camps, hunger, repatriation (sending back to Ukraine). For me it meant to live in America, being already a grandmother at age 52 and living decades in Ukraine under the authority of Russian Tsar Nicholas II from 1900 to 1917 ( we used to tell under the boot of the Russian autocratic usurpation and Empress Tsarina Alexandra ( Nicholas II wife) and the infamy and disgrace of Rasputin’s power.) Then in February 1917 to live with and to take part in the so called February “ Bloodless Revolution“ when as if a fresh wind blew from Europe, the hope to get free rose in the hearts of all nations of the Russian Empire,  the Ukrainians, Belarusians, Lithuanians, Latvians , Polish, Georgians and Armenians etc.  The hope rose to return to the historically justified independence, liberty, and renaissance of the ancient, thousand years ago flourishing cultures of these nations.  All these beautiful dreams, expectations and hopes didn’t come through though.  They were crushed, drowned in the ocean of blood, tortures, exiled to the archipelago gulags of Siberia, or to the hundreds of labor camps, covered in secrecy, not marked on the maps, full of horror and torture, greeted with derision and the trampling down the human dignity.  The Communists called “the Bolsheviks” shot all the best of the revolutionaries and grabbed the power.  My motherland Ukraine after the Declaration of Independence in the spring of 1917 had already in October of the same year had to take action with guns in their hands defending against the bands of the Red Gaurdia, called to existence at first in Russia by Lenin and organized later by Trotsky as the Red Army. Only four years, from 1917 to 1921, Ukrainian people relished in understanding the sense of liberty, of being free, independent of Russia's Imperialism. The years 1917 to 1943 were the darkest, most terrible-filled sadness, deepest- grief in my family' life in the years being citizens in the Soviet Paradise."