To Ukraine with Love

THE incredible life story of a Deganwy woman’s mother has inspired her first novel. Olya Martin has based most of her book on her Ukrainian mother’s experiences during World War II, when she was kidnapped by the Nazis as a teenager and transported across Europe to be a slave labourer in war-torn Germany.

To Ukraine With Love - written under Olya’s pen name of Czarina Daria - describes a trip made by a mother and daughter to communist Ukraine in 1968.

The ending of the story is the product of Olya’s imagination, and her mother has been given the pseudonym Anastasia, but the details of her wartime experiences and the later trip to Ukraine are all true.

Olya, 63, who grew up in Yorkshire after her mother moved to Harrogate following the war, said: “There’s romance at the end. I felt there had to be a happy ending to the story, but the trip happened and the experiences of my mother in the war are real.”

Her mother - now 87 and suffering with dementia - was snatched by Nazi troops in 1942 from the town of Akimovka in southern Ukraine, along with her brother Micha.

Olya said: “They swept through all the villages and took all the young ones, starting from 14 or 15 onwards - those that were able to work.

“They snatched them away from their families and they were thrown into cattle trucks.

“They were transported and, along the way, they would stop at more villages to collect more youngsters. There were no toilet facilities or anything like that, and there was a mixture of boys and girls.

“My mother said she was on that train for two weeks until it arrived in Germany. They did stop at Warsaw and there was a delousing and they were segregated.”

In Warsaw, Anastasia and her brother were separated. She would not find out his fate until she returned to her homeland and learnt he had been executed for a murder he didn’t commit.

Upon arrival in Germany, Olya’s mother had no idea what would happen to her, but was given a stark warning by the Nazis about the fate which would befall anyone who disobeyed their captors.

Olya said: “The first thing that the Germans did when they arrived was gathered all the people in the market square.

“They chose six 16 and 17-yearolds and they said, ‘to teach you a lesson, so you obey us, this is what’s going to happen’.

“My mother said they shot everyone, strung them up and left the bodies there.

“These were 16- and 17 year-old boys and they just left them there to rot.

“They were just left there hanging as a warning. As a child, I can’t imagine what that must have been like.”

Anastasia was put to work in a Munich munitions factory. When the factory was bombed during an Allied air raid, the injured teenager was rescued by an old German man and nursed back to health before being freed by the Americans at the end of he war.

Olya said: “As I got older and listened to all the stories which are in the book, I thought this was a story that should be told.

“Millions died and millions had stories to tell, but how many sit down and put the story to paper?”

To Ukraine With Love by Czarina Daria is available on Kindle from Amazon.