Serafima suffered under two dictatorships in her life. Stalin took her parents, Hitler took her childhood. Our colleague Anemone Rüger and her colleague Alina from Ukraine visited Serafima in northern Moldova and encountered a woman with a remarkable presence.
Serafima is all alone. Her hair is pulled back tightly with a headscarf, but her gaze is clear. "I am not alone," she says as I sit down beside her and take her hand. "God and I live here."
She was born in 1934 in a small village near Vitebsk in Belarus. The village didn't even have a name, it was so small, Serafima says. Information about her family of origin is scarce. "They were resettled when I was little," Serafima says when we ask her about her parents. "They apparently had a little more than others, a cow or a small farm. I don't know exactly what it was."
Only after being pressed did Serafima confirm the terrible suspicion: Yes, they were "repressed." In other words, Stalin's henchmen took them away and deported them to a Gulag from which they never returned. At first, Serafima stayed with her grandmother. When her grandmother died, she went to an orphanage. She prefers not to talk about that time. Perhaps she's still afraid of saying the wrong thing.
“Judge for yourselves,” she says cautiously, “how we were treated. I was seven when the war began. They evacuated us. All of us into one carriage, standing. There was no room to sit down, to sleep. We traveled like that for two months. Judge for yourselves… Along the way, our train was attacked repeatedly. They pushed us out of the carriage, then the chaperones threw themselves over us to protect us.”
At departure, there were 75 children being evacuated to the east of the vast Soviet Union. Along the way, the train stopped repeatedly to pick up more orphans. In the end, there were more than 200. "We were hungry, that's always there in my memory," Serafima recalls. "We received food according to priority. First, the children who were close to starving got something. The stronger ones came later."
After arriving in this foreign land, the children were abandoned in a village near Chkalov. "No one helped us," says Serafima. "There were no men. Everyone was at the front. They gave us a piece of land and said, 'Here, make something of it.' At seven years old, I already had to work hard, just like the other children. Some didn't make it."
When the war ended, the director of the children's home disappeared. "They left us there," Serafima recounts. "Everyone was on their own. Then I was assigned to the linen processing plant. It was a kind of punishment. I've struggled my whole life, always looking for something better. That's how I ended up in Belz."
When asked about other relatives, Serafima has to admit she doesn't know. "I never knew my grandparents. They disappeared into the Gulag because they owned some property. I never knew any grandparents or any other relatives. I was like a severed finger, like a leaf torn in the wind. Who knows what I would have done without God? He always helped me. Later, I became a cook here in Belz, and I also got married. Now I'm all alone."
We wrap Serafima in a beautiful scarf and speak to her the words of the prophet from Isaiah 62:3: “You will be a crown of beauty in the hand of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of your God.”
