Fifty Years of Work Crowned by Street Panhandling

Precisely 55 years ago Ukraine was cleared of the Nazis at the cost of tremendous military efforts and staggering loss of life. Men who miraculously surviving the bloodshed were returning to their families, certain that from now on their children would live a prosperous and happy life under peaceful skies. They had no way of knowing and nor would they even dream that after working half a century for the state they would be practically tossed into the gutter, denied their livelihood, and have either to beg in the street or starve to death.

Pelaheya Chernenko, a 73-year-old homeless woman, must be a familiar sight to many Kyiv residents. For the past four years, she has been playing her guitar and singing in the underpass at the Lisova Metro Station, every day from morning to night, rain or snow, weekday or weekend.

“I was born in 1926, in Semypolky, a village near Kyiv. I was 15 when the Nazis invaded and I vividly remember the way my mother and I were constantly hungry (my father was killed in 1941) and went out in the field at night to steal wheat and rye ears to keep alive. Now and then we would find frozen potatoes. That would be a feast! But it happened very seldom. In the second year of the war [i.e., in 1942] I took seriously ill. Mother hid me in the cellar, but the Nazi-appointed village elder remembered me, pulled me out, beat me up, and sent me to work. After the war the doctors said I had poliomyelitis and said I would suffer the consequences all my life.”

Because of her affliction Pelaheya never married, but she had a strong will and was innately cheerful. She did not regret it much. “I have always dreamed of two things: learning to play the guitar and having children. Well, I did both.” She was 18 when she had earned enough to buy her first guitar (despite her disease and surgery in 1949, she still worked on the local collective farm). Two years later, she delivered her first daughter. “Tamara doesn’t want to see me now and says she has no money for me. I remember she got sick, something in her ears, when she was five. It was from a bad cold probably. I carried her all the way to the hospital. 20 kilometers. After childbirth my legs hurt even more, but I managed. I tied her to my back with a rope and carried her like that. She got well, thank God.”

Because of her affliction Pelaheya never married, but she had a strong will and was innately cheerful. She did not regret it much. “I have always dreamed of two things: learning to play the guitar and having children. Well, I did both.” She was 18 when she had earned enough to buy her first guitar (despite her disease and surgery in 1949, she still worked on the local collective farm). Two years later, she delivered her first daughter. “Tamara doesn’t want to see me now and says she has no money for me. I remember she got sick, something in her ears, when she was five. It was from a bad cold probably. I carried her all the way to the hospital. 20 kilometers. After childbirth my legs hurt even more, but I managed. I tied her to my back with a rope and carried her like that. She got well, thank God.”

After her first pregnancy Pelaheya could not work at the collective farm. She bought a sewing machine and started sewing for her fellow villagers. This lasted over forty years, and she earned enough to support her two daughters (the second one was born when Tamara was 3). She realized that her daughters were growing up and would soon leave her. In 1972, Pelaheya decided to have a third child. It was a boy. When he was nearing three the doctors said he had psychological problems. Yet she helped him finish grade school and then he even worked at the village for a while. About then he met a girl, she was also a mental case and she bore him a daughter, Marina. “That year I got so sick I couldn’t sew or work in the garden,” the old woman recalls. “And the young ones didn’t want to work, and we had to keep the little girl fed and dressed, so I decided to go to Kyiv with my guitar, maybe people in the capital would like listening to my songs and pay what they would.” Marina was two when Pelaheya’s son Oleksandr set fire to the house. The fire was extinguished and an ambulance took the man to a mental hospital. His common law wife and daughter disappeared, leaving Pelaheya with a small barn at the end of the yard. She built a small stove and lived there all last winter, forgotten by all.