Ostarbeiter Tetiana Shelestiuk from the village of Dovzhky suffered from Bank Ukrayina bankruptcy
Located at the rayon’s end, the village of Dovzhky lies some thirty kilometers from Slavuta. One month away from her 77th birthday, Tetiana Levkivna Shelestiuk took long to open the door of her rundown house where she lives alone. “Sorry, I was listening to the radio and did not hear that I have guests,” Grandma Tania explained to village council secretary Valentyna Okseniuk who agreed to introduce me to Tetiana Levkivna.
As Grandma’s hearing is bad, she prefers to have the radio turned up. The announcer’s voice telling about election campaign battles shakes things in the living room. Ms. Shelestiuk turns a willing ear to the radio, saying, “There might be something about Bank Ukrayina.”
Much to her misfortune, the pensioner got involved with the bank, and now she has great doubts that she will live long enough to get back her own 1083 hryvnias and 27 kopiykas. That is why she writes appeals to various agencies, telling officials about her advanced age and ills. She mentions that she lost her health when she was taken to Germany as an Ostarbeiter in her youth, adding that her roof is like a sieve and the water gets through it into the house, something that will definitely kill her. To fix the roof she has no money.
Her savings in the bank were due to the compensation Tetiana Levkivna was paid by Germany for loss of health and moral damage. At first, she almost thought she would never get the money, “They promised to pay me 600 marks. I went several times to Hradobank, spending much time in lines, but didn’t get the money. Later they told that some official had stolen the money and fled abroad. I was so frustrated that I got sick and could not go to Slavuta when Bank Ukrayina began to pay compensation. I requested collective farm accountant Lidiya Petrivna to collect the money and exchange it for coupons (Ukraine’s transition currency in the period of galloping inflation – Ed.).”
She tells how she became a client of Bank Ukrayina: “When Lidiya Petrivna brought the millions I was afraid to keep the money at home. A woman nearby was murdered for just 13 hryvnias.” Village Council Secretary Valentyna Okseniuk confirms the story, “That’s right. In Dovzhky an 82-year old woman was killed for 13 hryvnias. The murderer was sentenced to fifteen years.” That is why she helped the Ostarbeiter for the second time, placing her money in two accounts, current and CD. “On one occasion I withdrew one hundred hryvnias, next time two hundred. You have to pay for everything, for getting the vegetable garden plowed, a pail of water brought or a loaf of bread bought by someone as I cannot do these things now. The money in the other account I set aside to pay for my burial.”
The worst blow which crippled her came when she heard an announcement over the radio that Bank Ukrayina had gone bankrupt. “Somebody walked away with the money. This I understood at once. Now I don’t know how to live. The doctor prescribed medicine that costs a fortune. My entire pension of 148 hryvnias and 92 kopiykas has to go to pay for medication.”
Before World War II Tetiana Levkivna went to a teachers college. “I was taking my final exams when the German offensive began,” she recalls. She even began her career, teaching in elementary classes, with her load being increased when she began to teach German.
She could learn German due to her misfortunes, “I was netted by the Germans in their last recruitment of Ostarbeiters. All their earlier attempts failed as every time I escaped back home from Slavuta. The last time, my father wanted to go to Germany instead of me. But when I realized that I would be responsible for three younger sisters and a brother, I decided to go myself. The Germans forcefully recruited 136 villagers, with me being the youngest.”
It makes one’s blood run cold to hear Tetiana Levkivna’s story of what she had to deal with when in Germany. “They brought us like cattle to the town of Holzminden on the river Weser. There was a plywood plant there, with three power saw benches. I and another female Ostarbeiter transported logs by trolley to make boards. Both of us had to load four-meter logs onto a trolley, push it to the bench, and unload. My partners could not stand this work and were often replaced, but I did it, from the shift’s start to the end. The Germans issued us wooden boots, and I wore them out in two weeks pulling trolleys on cobblestone paths. They gave me another pair, and it broke in another two weeks. How could I pull the wagon barefoot? There was a German called Paul, a kind-hearted man. His son fought in France and then in Russia. Paul was sad, fearing that he would not come back alive. I remember when he brought a sack of used footwear, emptied it on the shop floor, saying it was ours. That’s how I could get a pair of shoes”.
She also recalls how the plant was occasionally visited by a farmer looking for farm hands, “We all wanted to work on the farm because the food there was much better.” While working on the farm, one of her friends, Pestina, got acquainted with another Ostarbeiter. “When we were freed she went with her Kyrylo to live in England. She wrote to say that Kyrylo died on the same day when Konstantyn Chernenko passed away (a Soviet ruler in the post-Brezhnev era - Ed.) Like myself, she had no children because we both could not bear children after that hell.” She wrote me a letter, saying there is no one she can leave her money deposited in the bank, and a two- bedroom and two-kitchen house to. She wanted me to send a girl from Dovzhky, promising to bequeath her property to her. One of the girls wanted to go but she was not allowed for some reason.”
The conversation again focused on her worries. She displays her Oshchadbank of the USSR and Ukrayina Savings Bankbooks on the bed, saying, “All the money is gone, no one believed this could happen.” With her weak hands that lost their strength in German slavery she showed me letters from various institutions she received about her appeals, saying “They have promised to give me my money, but I don’t know if I’ll live to see it happen.” She is convinced that her money has been stolen by a fat and greedy person who dares to go to church.
Village Council Secretary Valentyna Okseniuk knows about Tetiana Levkivna’s correspondence with her English friend. Taking no sides in the argument about the advantages of both systems, capitalist and Soviet, she merely points out that as the result of Bank Ukrayina collapse the entire village suffered, “The following day after coal supplies came to a local school and payments for it transferred via Ukrayina, we learned about its bankruptcy. The coal supplier did not get the money, sending his thugs to collect the 3,782 hryvnias the village supposedly owed the firm, threatening us if we did not obey. Other village budget expenditures include food for schoolchildren, a new roof for a local doctor’s assistant office, stationary, and whatnot. We scrapped all these items to pay for the coal. Now we are in low water financially. Let’s go to the school, you’ll learn more,”
Looking tired and overworked, school principal Yevheniya Vaskevych shares the worries of her pensioner colleague, “I am not sure she will live long enough to get her deposits back. She has health problems and needs the money now.” The principal says that there are many gifted pupils among the school graduates but they will not be able to go to college because their parents do not have the money for tuition, “Only highly placed officials send their children to universities for budget money.” That is why it makes no difference who paid for Vitalina Yushchenko’s education, the bankrupt Bank Ukrayina, or Ukraine’s ordinary taxpayers.
Given the lack of adequate food, young residents of Dovzhky are afflicted with beriberi, anemia, and other ailments. “The school had 2,000 hryvnias in its account with Ukrayina, now lost for good. We have to pass the hat, begging local agricultural cooperative for food for our pupils,” Principal Yevheniya Vaskevych complains.
She also comments on the current election situation in Dovzhky, “There’s one family campaigning for Rukh, either Rukh-Kostenko or Rukh-Udovenko, I’m not sure which. They give us with Rukh leaflets, all bearing the Rukh campaign slogan, Deeds Not Words. No one is campaigning for other political parties.”
Unfortunately, this backwater village residents are merely faced with sour deeds, the miserable Ostarbeiter, ailing children, and their exhausted teachers.
The Deeds, Not Words slogan with a portrait of a new financial wizard (Viktor Yushchenko, former National Bank governor and premier - Ed.) can be seen everywhere on the road from Dovzhky to Slavuta, and farther on to Khmelnytsky, on posts, trees, boards, walls of stores, transformer stations, even on bunkers built before the war.
Definitely out of place, the portrait, showing a replete-looking and well-kept dazzler, a cherished dream of many mature women, is also on the wall of a pompous building that housed Ukrayina’s oblast branch now undergoing liquidation. But some with more penetration believe that this is the right place for the portrait.
Inside, the scene resembles evacuation, with piles of broken tables, chairs, cabinets, refrigerators, and what not, but with no signs of a more expensive office equipment. “We have not yet begun sales of property,” Agency for the Issues of Bankruptcies deputy regional authorized agent Yury Opanasenko says, with nervousness clearly displayed on his face. He says that their main worry are the 64,500 individual Ukrayina clients who were affected by the bank’s bankruptcy, not corporate clients. Some live in the oblast capital, some in nearby and distant villages, writing appeals, like Tetiana Shelestiuk from the backwater village of Dovzhky.
Everything about Bank Ukrayina is shrouded in secrecy, the names of individual clients and sale of the bank’s property. However, the agency’s lead expert Olha Stetsiuk who deals with complaints from clients shed some light on the misfortunes of some clients, speaking to The Day, “One woman complained that she could not recover her deposit with the bankrupt bank. The money was originally deposited by her father who had sold his car to get money for his burial. When he died, his daughter borrowed the money to pay for her father’s funeral, but now she cannot repay her debt. Another client lives in the village. She sold her cow to pay at least for her oldest daughter’s education. Yet another client kept in the bank all her savings earned by hard work abroad.”
The lost hopes of clients are stored in neatly-looking files, letters of despair, copies of official responses informing authors that they have been included in the waiting lists of those to whom their now deflated deposits will be repaid. “Those with enough savings to buy a car at the time can now get barely five or seven kopiykas,” Olha Stetsiuk says bitterly. But she is not disposed to talk about those who stole the poor clients’ money, giving education to their children at the expense of the unfortunate Ostarbeiter and Dovzhky schoolchildren. Keeping silent seems best.
