Efrosinia Vasiljevna Hanchjevskaja was born on 27 December 1933 in the village of Dovhe

I was eleven years old when they took us from Poland to Ukraine. I remember that some Poles and Russians came to the village and made a list of everyone living there and then they said that everybody was going to be sent to Ukraine. They said that anybody that refused to leave would be dealt with by the Polish authorities. So we had no choice but to leave.

They told us that we had about two months to get ready before they would take us away. We tried to get ready, collecting clothes and food and loading it onto carts. They said they'd let us take the cow, the sheep and the horses. Anything left behind would be gone forever. So now there is nothing left of our village.

The thing I remember best about all this is the fear, the fear in the eyes of the people. They were leaving behind their homes, their farms and being carted off to a place they knew not where.

We went from Gorlice to the Soviet border in covered wagons and there they loaded us into railway box cars.

It took us and entire month to get to Donetz on the train. The trip was uneventful. When we arrived at a collective farm there in the Donetz region they set us up in living quarters. And there they put us to work.

The year we arrived was a year of good harvest and there was a lot of grain and bread. But the following year there was a drought and the people began to run away. They wanted to return to Poland, but the Soviet Union-Polish border was already closed. So we were turned back at the border and went to Nikolejev. But in Nikolejev we weren't able to find any place to live so we moved on to Pustomyty. There were four children in our family then.

In Dovhe there were two families that had somehow managed to avoid being sent to Ukraine. But Poles came and had driven them out anyway.

So nothing and nobody remained in the village. Everything was destroyed.