Anna Stepanova Shostak was born on 20 March 1920 in the village of Peregrimka, Jaslo district, Krakow region.

When they resettled us from Poland to Ukraine, I was 25 years old. That was in May of 1945. Some people that called themselves "delegates" came to Peregrimka and tried to convince us to move to Ukraine. That was the new way things should be then after the war they said - Ukrainians in Ukraine and Poles in Poland. At first the choice was voluntary. But they came back to the ones that wanted to stay and forced them to change their minds. They even had rifles with them! There were a lot of Poles then that had no homes after the war and they were out hunting for places to live. And if a Ukrainian had a farm, well it was just too bad for him - he had to leave everything.

They gave us three days to get ready. We had to gather up our possessions and put them on wagons and cart them off to the railway station at Jaslo. All they let us take were the cows and some clothes. In Jaslo we had to wait two weeks for the train. I milked the cow and we had a smoked leg of lamb or something and some bread. So we didn't starve there in Jaslo. But the people were crying, not knowing what was awaiting them. At last the train came with box cars and they put one family in each car and we started off to the Avdejevka railway station in the Donetz region. When we got there we spent a whole month at the freight yard in the open air, in the rain and the cold, because they couldn't send trucks to get us.

After a month it dried up enough that some trucks got through to us and took us to the "Red Star" collective farm. There at the collective farm were homes that belonged to Germans and those homes were being distributed among the new arrivals. But all the Germans hadn't been evicted yet (see note below) so we had to move into a house where Germans were still living.

Everybody had to sign up and register themselves as collective farm workers and then go to work. And that's the way we lived.

But life was very hard and we wanted to return to our village, Peregrimka. We got train tickets and returned to the Polish border. But they wouldn't let us through so we stayed in the Lviv region. Here in the town of Pustomyty we found a small house, Three families had to live in that house. We slept in the attic for two years.

We went to work on the collective farm here and kopeck by kopeck we saved up enough money to begin to build a house of our own. We have gone through much grief and misfortune, but when you have your health you can survive anything. When you are young you feel capable of doing everything and your effort pays off.

Note: There were many colonies of Germans living in southern Russia. Invited by Catherine the Great, thousands of Germans emigrated to Russia between the years 1763 to 1767 and settled in the vicinity of the Volga river. For this reason, they are often referred to as Volga Germans. Despite the fact that they had been living in Russia for a hundred and fifty years, they were declared to be enemies of the state at the outbreak of World War II and subjected to persecutions and evictions.