LYDIA TYCKYJ AND ALEXANDRA HRYHORIJIW

Date of birth – 23 May, 1922; 22 May, 1925 (respectively)   

Place of birth – Cherche village, Ivano Frankivsk oblast, Ukraine  

Place of interview – Toronto, Canada

Date of interview - 29 November, 2015

Video interview

Language – Ukrainian

(Excerpt):

Interviewer - During the German occupation of Rohatyn, who was your father, Yevhen Bachynskyj?

LT - Under the Germans? In Rohatyn, it got to the point where there were no Ukrainians who wanted to be police officers so our father became a police officer.

AH - When the Germans came, the whole city council of Rohatyn was already in place. The Ukrainian intelligentsia spent 2 days in the bell tower of the church arranging for all the positions to be taken. Our father was forced to be the commandant of the county police.

Interviewer - Did he not want to be the commandant?

AH - No. He wanted to be a regular citizen. He knew the Germans really well. Under Austria, he was in the Austrian army and then in the Ukrainian-Galician army.

Interviewer - How do you remember the 'cleanse' of the Jews in Rohatyn?

AH - We were in school. We were coming home and there were a lot of Germans on the street. We asked what was going on. They said that the Germans had come to murder the Jews. Моst of the Germans spoke Polish.

AH - The massacre happened in spring of 1942. I was 17 years old. We were in school. At that time, Roza already came to us daily to work. She was a seamstress. She had a fiancé, who was taken in 1940 to be in the Soviet army. [After the massacre], she stayed with us. She sewed, then after a few weeks she moved to the village to our mother's friend who had 7 children. She sewed there. Then she came back to Rohatyn and stayed with another friend where she also sewed. When we moved away from Rohatyn, she was still there. She did not want to leave because she believed her fiancé would return. And that is what happened. He returned, they got married, and moved to Poland. Then from Poland they went to France, then Israel, then they returned to France and ended up in New York where her father's older brother, her uncle, was a violinist in the New York Symphony Orchestra. When we came to Canada, to Montreal, she would visit us with her husband. They later had one son who finished university and became a dentist. When our father died...Was she at our father's funeral?

LT - No, our mother's.

AH - When our mother passed away she came for the funeral together with her sister's daughter. Her sister also grew up in Bukachivtsi, yes. When our brother lived in New York she was in contact with him often.

LT - I visited her in New York.

AH - She was very, very thankful that the day of the 'cleansing'/massacre on the Jews of Rohatyn she happened to be at our house. 

Interviewer - So did she live with you or did she just come to work?

AH - She started working about a week or a week and a half before the massacre. But after the massacre, she never returned to the ghetto. Very little Jews were left in the ghetto that later came out of hiding....

LT - And I told her take this vyshyvanka (embroidered shirt). "When you leave, put it on". So I gifted her that vyshyvanka.

Interviewer - When you were leaving.

LT - Yes, when we were leaving home.

AH - It was the end of March, 1944. April 1 we were already in Krynytsya. 

LT - I told her - take it, you will need it. Later when she found her husband, I know

they were in France, then from France they moved to America. Once in America, she started looking for our family. She found out mother in Montreal, she found our brother in New York and she started writing to our mother. When I found out that she was in New York, and my husband had family there so we would go to New York on a yearly basis, we would stop by and visit her. When I saw her she told me that she still had the vyshyvanka and when she dies, she will be buried in it.