Ninety-nine years and eight months old, Anna Bahatelya has survived every ordeal a tumultuous century of Ukrainian history has thrown at her.
Born in August 1922, four months before the proclamation of the Soviet Union, Bahatelya lived through the Holodomor, when Joseph Stalin’s regime visited an artificial famine on large areas of Ukraine by confiscating its grain stocks. She survived the second world war, even after spending two years in a Nazi slave camp in Austria.
She has outlived the Soviet Union and then made it through the difficult 1990s, when the Ukrainian economy left many in poverty. This January she survived a vicious bout of Covid, despite being unvaccinated. Now, four months short of her century, she faces yet another challenge: Vladimir Putin’s war on her country.
“Now again, the people are suffering,” she said at her home on the outskirts of Kyiv, where she lives with her 69-year-old daughter, Olha Punyk.
Speaking loudly, with an imploring tone and the cadence of poetry, Bahatelya gives sharp and clear recollections of the various ordeals she has been through, but grew angry when asked about the Russian president, making a rude hand gesture and calling him: “The worst man in the world.”
Her hearing these days is not so good, but even she can hear the loud booms coming from Brovary, just a few miles from her home on the edge of the capital, which was pounded by Russian strikes in the first part of the war.
Punyk taped over the windows in her mother’s room and has brought dark curtains for the windows, but said the renewed military action has brought back traumatic memories for her mother. Most people over 80 in Ukraine have lived through a lot. One historian has termed Ukraine and the wider region “the bloodlands” – the territories caught between the violence of Hitler and Stalin that saw terror, war and the Holocaust in the mid years of the 20th century.
Sometimes, the most practical option has been to try to shield older people from the realities of the new war to prevent the traumas of the past returning. At one old people’s home in Kyiv, the director has spent the past weeks doing everything to shut out the fact that life outside is in any way different. “A lot of my people have absolutely no idea what is happening outside the fence,” said the director, who asked not to be named.
Some elderly people are all too aware, however. Anatoliy Ruban, 84, lives alone on the far western outskirts of Kyiv, just a short distance from the Russian forward positions outside the city. There has been constant shelling nearby since the war started. “I hear everything: the explosions and the sirens. When it’s loud, I sit in the bathroom until it’s finished,” he said.
Ruban was a child during the second world war in Kyiv, but he remembers it vividly, and the recent action has brought the memories flooding back. “I remember my mum put me on a cart and we rode out of the city, and I remember bullets flying around above my head,” he said.
After the outbreak of this war, Ruban declined the suggestion that he should leave Kyiv for a safer place in western Ukraine or Europe, and indeed has still been going to work for the past month, working 24-hour shifts as a janitor at a youth sports hall. “I take it all calmly, I’ve seen war with my own eyes before. A person is forced to adapt to everything. I refuse to go anywhere, and nobody is waiting for me anyway,” he said.
Ruban served in the Soviet army in the late 1950s and used to count Russians among his friends, but said he was now disgusted with the neighbouring state and particularly its leader. “Putin is the scariest man in the world – I just hope that lunatic doesn’t press the nuclear button. That’s what I’m really scared of,” he said.
Bahatelya is also aware of what is happening, though her daughter does her best to shield her from the worst of it. “I try to turn the television off when there’s news about the war – she just gets very upset and starts talking about the last war,” she said.
In June 1943, after the Nazis occupied Bahatelya’s village, she was sent along with millions of other women to be an Ostarbeiter, the term the Nazis gave to civilians captured in occupied territories and forced into slave labour inside the Third Reich.
She spent two years living in a camp in the small Austrian town of Ternitz and working in a factory there. “We had a quarter loaf of bread in the morning and a thin soup twice a day, then potatoes on Sunday,” she recalled.
When the war was coming to a close, as Soviet soldiers moved westwards, Bahatelya went the other way, walking to Budapest before journeying home by train to find her whole village destroyed. Back then, she considered herself a patriotic Soviet citizen and the Russians to be a fraternal nation.
Her daughter said: “She told me that when Stalin died, she cried. She cried sincere tears, because they thought it was a tragedy. They were zombified back then, just like the Russians are zombified by their propaganda today.”
Asked what she would like for her 100th birthday, Bahatelya said she had one wish: “I’d like him to die,” she said. It was clear who she meant.
