lost childhood

Iryna Lashchevska (Lukashevych)

“Tomorrow” lasted 25 years

 

Iryna (Orysia) Lashchevska, maiden name – Lukashevych, was born on February 24, 1945, in the village of Soroky-Lvivski (now Pustomyty district of Lviv region) in a large family of Greek Catholic priest Denys Lukashevych and Sofiya Lukashevych.

 

The family had eight children: Oleksandr (born 1928), Myron (1929), Ilariy (1931), Dariya (1932), Vira (1934), Lida (1938), Zynoviy (1943), and Iryna (1945). The family lived in the parish house. 

 

 

At the end of October 1949, the Soviet authorities arrested the older brothers Oleksandr, Myron, and Ilariy, who were connected with the OUN armed underground movement. They were charged with the murder of the communist writer Yaroslav Galan in Lviv on October 24, 1949. Ilariy was sentenced to death as an accomplice in the assassination of the writer along with Mykhailo Stakhur. Other brothers were also shot. A little more than a week after the high-profile assassination that shook the whole of Western Ukraine, on November 3, 1949, the entire Lukashevych family was deported to Khabarovsk Krai. Father Denys Lukashevych was arrested and was under investigation. Later he was sentenced to 25 years in prison, he was serving his sentence in the camps in Vorkuta and Inta. 

 

(photo: Kindergarten, 1938)

Iryna Lukashevych, who was only four years old at the time of the eviction, recalled,

 

“We were taken out on November 3, and before that, they did a search – they tore the floor. They tore the floor in one room, the other, and threw carpets away. They made a terrible mess. Dad was taken, arrested, dad wanted to say goodbye to all of us. And Zenyk, my brother – my mother said that he was somehow tangled in baby linen so much that my father could not find him, he didn’t know where Zenio disappeared. He couldn’t say goodbye. Dad said goodbye to me, and I said, “When’s dad coming back?” – That’s what I remember. And dad said, “Tomorrow.” “Tomorrow” lasted 25 years. I saw my dad 25 years later.”

During the search, which began at 3 am, the family managed to collect warm clothes and food. Before deportation, the mother and five minor children, including Iryna, were detained for four months at a transfer point on the territory of the Lviv transfer prison No. 25 on Peltevna street. In February 1950, the family was evicted to Bykyn, Khabarovsk Krai. The journey in a сattle-box car lasted one month.

Iryna recalled her childhood experience of prisoner transport: “I remembered from living in the train car that my sister slept close to the car’s side and her hair froze in the morning. It was cold. There was a makeshift stove in the middle of the car, and also a parasha (a close stool) near the door. The makeshift stove and… We cooked food there, mom was warming up some food for us there. They gave us very little to eat, they gave us some… On some stations, they gave us a bucket of water and some soup. (…) The food was bad. I was constantly crying for some reason. I was frightened by this roar in the middle of the night, I must have had big stress.” 

 

(photo: Bikin, Khabarovsk Krai, RSFSR, 1951, Orysia and Zenko)

It was very difficult for the Lukashevych family to live at the special settlement in Bykyn. They were housed outside the city in the barracks of former prisoners. Her mother could not find a permanent job, she was often ill, the family was starving, and her older sisters, Dariya and Vira, were involved in hard work in logging. Locals helped them with warm clothes. The exile undermined the health of her mother, who had heart disease and epileptic seizures. In 1956, the family moved to Inta, Komi Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, to finally reunite with their father. 

 

Iryna Lukashevych recalls a touching moment of a meeting with her father:

 

“The next day we went to my dad there under that barbed wire in the camp. I haven’t seen those camps yet, and these wires. There were camps everywhere in Inta, it was a terrible city – barbed wire, towers, prisoners walked down the street all the time, those guards barked at them like dogs. In short, it was a horror for the children to look at it. And so we approached the iron fence, my father came out to us, I remember, he was wearing a black robe. He had a robe, a suit – a jacket and satin pants, black satin – that was a work suit, as they say. Dad looked all tired and skinny in that robe. Of course, everyone cried for a long time, even strangers cried. This picture was very touching.” 

After her father’s release from the camp, the family continued to live in a special settlement in Inta for some time. In January 1957, Father Denys Lukashevych was re-arrested in the case of Galan’s murder and sent to a camp in Vorkuta. 

 

Iryna still remains convinced that the murder was organized by the Soviet secret services, and that the family was unfairly blamed for the writer’s death. 

“Galan’s case was so confusing, well, they made it confusing, in a nutshell – they did it. Because the whole of Lviv was buzzing that this was a provocation, that it was the KGB that had killed Galan, and that the culprit had to be found. So they found him.”

 

After another separation from husband, her mother soon became ill with heart disease and died in August 1957. The following year, Iryna Lukashevych, together with her sister Lida and brother Zenko, moved to Kolomyia to visit their maternal grandmother and aunt. She graduated from school there. Together with her brother and sisters, she visited their father in camps in Mordovia. Denys Lukashevych returned from the camps to Kolomyia in 1976. He died in 1993, already in independent Ukraine. 

 

(photo: father’s birthday)