Open Writing

In the affairs of men and women, there are times when life is sublime; when the spirit works through and beyond the body. Such a time is when we fall in love.

Olek Fesenko experienced the sublime before he went through the Dark Valley, and grim his Valley was indeed like that of so many of his generation. He was born in Ukraine in 1920 in a village near the town of Zabie on the Rumanian border. Over the mountains was Transylvania, a land at once beautiful and mysterious, awesome yet arcane; the haunt of the fictitious Count Dracula and his attendant malspirits. Yet reality is more terrible than fiction, when the Draculas of this world no longer inhabit the imagination, but meet us face to face with their creeds of hate and terror. Two such real-life Draculas were Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, whose blood-letting wiped out millions. By the time their killings ended, Ukraine and its neighbour Poland had been laid waste.

While all this horror gathered like a storm in the future, Anna Karunavich and Olek Fesenko grew up in their village community. They lived as neighbours and became childhood sweethearts early on. Their love blossomed through adolescence, so by the time they’d reached their late teens they’d vowed to marry as soon as they’d both qualified; she as a teacher, he as an arts graduate at Kiev University. They lived at a turning point in history, straddling an ordered, peaceful world about to enter an age of violence and terror when the Ukraine was savaged by the bloodiest war ever fought. Mercifully they knew nothing of it in the mid-30s, no more than millions of young lovers throughout Europe; and like all youth, they imagined they were immortal – and who knows? Perhaps we really are immortal in ways yet hidden from us.

The countryside round Zabie comprised dense woodland, broken here and there by farmland. The families living there were mixed. There were Jews, Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, even the odd Muslim family – all living peaceably together. Olek’s family were staunch Orthodox Christians, Ann’s devout Jews, and that was the first obstacle to their love. Yet, they overcame it, for true love cannot be crushed; and as they fell more deeply in love, they met secretly in the woods by an old tree, well away from prying eyes.

Daily they met there, hidden by the friendly trees and on the old trysting-tree Olek carved a heart with Anna’s and his name inside. It was still there years later when Olek returned as an old man. But at nineteen and about to leave for university, he bought two gold rings and had inscribed inside them: “Olek-Anna. In love eternal. June 1939.” At the trysting-tree they swore their lasting love as he slipped a ring on her finger and she on his, before returning home at dusk, hiding their rings so no questions were asked. Each time they met they wore them, betrothed to each other.

Then fate intervened, in September the Nazis invaded Poland and began a war which engulfed Europe and beyond. Poland was annexed by the USSR and Germany, and Ukraine was inevitably caught up in the battle for power.

Worse was to come. The Nazis reneged on a pact with the Soviets and invaded Ukraine. Whole villages were burnt to the ground and their inhabitants massacred or sent to death-camps. The dreams of Anna and Olek were shattered, and they were driven apart never to meet again in this life.

When the Nazis invaded, a Ukrainian guerrilla movement started which many students like Olek joined. Cut off from his home and loved ones, Olek enlisted in the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, opposed as much to the Bolsheviks as the Nazis. Along with others, he fled to the dense forests and marshland of north-west Ukraine and fought with the partisans there for three bloody years. He survived but he was a very changed man at the end of it – battle-hardened and old beyond his years.

His love for Anna never faltered; indeed, it was that which kept him going during those bitter years, and mercifully he knew nothing of the horrors she and her family suffered – not until he returned briefly at the end of the war.

When he went back to his village there was nothing there. It had been razed to the ground and its inhabitants killed by the S.S. Only an old woodcutter survived, in his cottage deep in the woods, and it was he who told him of the terrible atrocities the S.S. had committed.

“Like all the other young women Anna Karunavich was raped then shot and her body burned in her own home. Look. That is that is left of the village.” He pointed to mounds of charred rubble. Olek walked to his own home then to where his sweetheart’s home had stood. Somewhere among the rubble was all that remained of his family and her, where weeds and saplings were already pushing through the charred wood and bricks.

The old man also told him what had happened to Anna’s father, Boaz. As the bodies of his family burned inside the house, he’d been crucified to the door and left to burn there alive. It was an atrocity repeated throughout Ukraine as the Nazis advanced; the beginning of the Holocaust when thousands of Jews were sent to Auschwitz to die lingering deaths there or be gassed.

In 1945 Ukraine lay in ruins: a battleground fought over again and again. When his country became part of the USSR again, Olek fled west and joined the thousands of refugees in West Germany, before eventually emigrating to America with a group of fellow countrymen. All he had were two treasured possessions: his love-ring and a photo of Anna he’d carried throughout the war. Once settled in Ohio, he had the photo enlarged and framed and set by his bedside, praying for her each night before he fell asleep.

He vowed he’d never return to Ukraine once he’d settled in the States. Why should he? He’d no family, and had never married. He’d no home to go to, and the country was under the domination of Russia. All he had were haunting memories of their love before the war and the two mementos of that love: the photo and his ring.

However, when he was in his eighties he returned and what drew him back was strange indeed. Each night he’d pull off the betrothal ring and place it gently next to Anna’s photo, a ritual he’d done for years. Each morning on rising he’d replace his ring, but one day to his amazement he saw not his ring but hers, the one he’d given her at the trysting-tree in 1939.

He picked it up tenderly, his hand shaking as his touched it. Then he gazed at her photo – and she smiled! For an instant she beckoned him towards her. Then the photo was as before. He couldn’t believe it, yet there was her ring! This happened for days until he could bear it no longer. He booked a flight to Kiev and went straight to Zabie and booked into lodgings. The next day he took a cab to the edge of the forest where his village had been. There he met the grandson of the old woodcutter, and it was he who told him about a ghost which haunted the woods, and what he said made Olek’s heart race.

It was just after the end of the war the ghost started appearing, a ghost with an anguished face always by the trysting-tree. His grandfather had been the first to see her, but afterwards many others also had seen the agonised young woman, and were afraid to go that way. They brought a priest from Zabie to exorcise the ghost, but to no avail. “She will not go away until she finds peace,” he’d said. And after that, few ventured into the woods after dark. Only the woodcutter and his family ever saw the hauntings, and it was the young woodcutter who narrated the whole story to Olek.

“Folk don’t believe what I tell ‘em. They think I’m simple,” he began. “But you was ‘ere all them years ago when it happened.”

“The war? The killings?”

“Yes, that terrible time – before I was born. There was a village ‘ere then.” He pointed at the mounds, barely visible under a thick covering of trees and scrub.

“Yes, I was here then,” said Olek quietly. “I grew up here.”

The young man shot him a glance. “Then you’d know the young woman who still walks these parts – leastways her ghost does. I seen her often; so did my dad an’ granddad.”

“What…what does she look like?” asked Olek, barely able to breathe so wildly beat his heart.

“Young, dark…beautiful. She was a Jewess, they say. She used to come ‘ere in the woods courtin’ before the war. Her fellow went off to fight, an’ she was dead like the rest when he come back. He didn’t stay. They say he went to America, but he’s never been back, that’s for sure. Me granddad said they kept quiet about their courtin’, she being Jewish an’ him a Christian. Their folks wouldn’t have approved. Courted for years, me granddad said, but the Nazis did for ‘em. They finished off the whole bloody village! Burnt it to the ground, the swine, like everywhere else.”

“I know,” Olek whispered, and the young man shot him another glance. “But tell me, where does the woman appear?”

“Always by that big tree yonder,” replied the woodcutter, pointing down the track. “They carved their names on it. He was called Olek an’ she was called Anna. You can still see ‘em.”

Olek thanked the young man, and they went their ways: the woodcutter slouching down the track to his cottage and Olek hurrying the short distance to the trysting-tree.

When he reached it he stood in silence. The pain in his chest had worsened and he gasped for breath. Tears filled his eyes and he broke into uncontrollable sobbing. “Anna, oh Anna, my love!” he wailed. “Come to me, my darling! Come to me!”

Suddenly a gust of wind swept through the trees and he turned. There, running down the track towards him was his beloved Anna, arms outstretched. He caught her and held her close, kissing her brow again and again, breathing in the scent of her hair. She looked radiant as they set off, hand in hand, down the track towards the sunset filtering through the trees, lighting up their young teenage faces till they were consumed in the golden light.

The woodcutter heard him crying out and turned back to see why the old man was calling. He hurried as he neared the trysting-tree and saw Olek slumped to the ground. Rushing over he asked if he was all right, but his words went unheard for Olek was quite dead.

John Waddington-Feather ©