Natalia Duchnitch was born into the Halan family on June 20, 1930 in the village of Tsjetoolya, Jaroslav county, Shesuv district, Poland. Her father was Mihail Stepanovich Halan, born in 1905 and her mother was Katerina Matveevna (Bila) born in 1900. Tsjetoolya was a mainly Carpatho-Rusyn village of approximately 2000 inhabitants, but about 30 of them were Poles. Although Natalia Duchnitch's parents belonged to this Polish minority, they were indiscriminately given the same treatment as the Carpatho-Rusyns in the village and forced to resettle to the Ukraine in 1946.

During the years 1945 and 1946, our village was frequently attacked by groups of Poles, who ran off with our cows and horses. We knew that the inhabitants of some of the neighboring villages had already been moved off to Ukraine and then their houses were burned down so that they couldn't return. So we were always ready in case they came and took us away, too.

In the forest, near Tsjetoolya, there were groups of Banderovets (1). Whenever the Poles attacked the village to steal our stuff, the Banderovets protected us. The villagers were so afraid of the Poles that they went to bed in their daytime clothes. At night people were afraid to sleep, always ready to run off if there was an attack. Whenever someone saw Poles approaching the village, we unhitched the horses and cows which wandered off towards the river and we ran off to hide in nearby farm buildings.

In April of 1946 the Polish army surrounded Tsjetoolya and gave the people twenty-four hours to get ready to evacuate the village. The day that the soldiers arrived some of my friends and I had gone off to a nearby village to get some lime so that we could whitewash the houses for Easter. When we returned home we saw that the army was in place around the village. We ran home to tell the others what was happening. The soldiers saw us running and thought we were trying to escape so they started to shoot. But we managed to reach the village which by that time was already full of Polish soldiers. We were arrested and they didn't let us go until our parents came to get us.

The next day we left the village. They had sent for wagons which took us to Jaroslav. On the 18th of April they packed us into railroad boxcars, the cows and horses, too. There were three or four families in each boxcar. They took us to the Sichiv railroad station in Lviv. After we arrived they gave us evacuation documents and a little money.

They promised to give us shelter in the village of Sokilnik in the Pustomitovski district, but there there Poles still living in the houses there. So there was no place for us to go. We made lean-tos out of branches at the railroad station and that's where we lived for three weeks.

We had arrived there at the Sichiv railroad station just before Easter and we were living under those lean-tos made of branches so we couldn't bake any Easter bread. But we were able to buy a bit of pumpernickel bread and a few eggs and that's the way we celebrated Easter in 1946.

Half the people from Tsjetoolya were finally resettled to the village of Glibovich in the Peremishlyanski district and the other half was shipped off to Semenivka in the Pustomitovski district. In these villages there had previously been many Poles which had been taken to Poland and our people were put into their deserted homes.