I was born in 1923. I lived in my parents' house in the Dnepropetrovsk region, in Pavlograd, Ozernaya Street No. 53. On the 19.08.1943 our town was liberated by troops of the Red Army. From October 1942 I worked on the former premises of the State factory No. 55, where I performed general construction work. Six of us, as well as the boss were Germans, the remaining Lithuanians and a group of Kazakhs, who used to escort and guard the prisoners of war. The POWs worked on the other half of the territory. We, the workers were not allowed to associate with them. A Russian worked for them as a translator. I do not remember his family name. Tonya Skripnik worked as interpretor for the boss. Her sistser, Maya Skripnik, she was 15 years old at that time, had a job as a controller.
In November 1942 Tonya asked me to help Maya in the morning to collect all the workers' number tags ( for registration purposes; translator's note), put them on the board and hand them out to the workers again when they returned from work in the evening. The next morning I therefore arrived 15 minutes earlier than usual, and, later in the evening, left the place 15 minutes later.
In March 1943 I was transferred to the kitchen-garden unit together with another three women. The garden was situated by the office, which earlier had served as a porter's lodge. We worked under the guidance of a German, who was the commandant of the lodging house at the same time. We laid out patches with onions, leak, radishes, cucumbers, potatos, lettuce, carrots and beets. I worked there until our town was liberated from the occupation troops.
Two weeks later an unknown man knocked at my door and said: " Valya, go and get your guitar - and then come with me. They are going to have an evening-party". He mentioned the house of the Kisloy's, which was situated opposite ours.
But I replied that I did not know him at all, that I did not intend to go with him and that he could play the guitar himself.
In response he began to threaten me, saying that I would never forget him for the rest of my life, provided that I would not lose it prematurely.
He did not take the guitar with him, and I stayed at home.
In September 1943 they served me with a summons. I was to appear before the OKGB (Committee of State security department; translator's note). And there I met this man again, the examining magistrate Yaloze. However, he did not question me. He merely smiled and said that he would keep his promise in any case (which was an allusion to the day, when I had refused to go with him to the party).
He worked hard to produce an abominable action of defamation against me. It took him 1 year and 5 months to prepare the whole file - and so I was arrested on the 31st of January 1945.
They made a false charge against me pretending that once, when sitting together with some other people, I had mentioned pilots, who brought us little gifts from time to time. The even named three witnesses, who I had never seen before - and the forth one was Valya Yemelyanenko, one of my former classmates. However, she had not experienced the time of occupation at all, since she had been evacuated to Kopeysk in time, and only returned home much later.
They additionally accused me of having mistranslated some important information, i.e. of having made a serious mistake when translating from Russian into German, whereupon the master of a joiner's workshop had ostensibly slapped one of the workers right in the face. This was a lie. During work hours it had never happened that a master insulted or hurt any of the workers. They even used to join the workers during the breaks and smoke with them. And whenever any of them wanted to leave a little earlier in the evening they would usually let him go. In such cases they would merely ask him to appear at work in time the next morning.
The fact was that I had principally repeated all sentences they had asked me to translate, in order to see, whether I had really caught their sense. And only then I made the translation into German.
Another fact was that none of the masters in the workshop had tried to express himself clearly. My problem was that I had only learned German at school for about 3 years. I did not remember much more than 70 words in this language.
I started to attend school three years later than the children of my age and finished the 7-class-school in 1941. And in my file they wrote a note that I disposed of a 70% knowledge of the German language. Is that suposed to mean that they considered me as such a clever person that I could have even worked as an interpretor and translator after school.
V.F. Gosteva, 29th of August 1993