Beggar, slave labourer, refugee and widower: Sergi on a childhood stolen and 100 years of solitude

Sergi Andrijenko’s old eyes light up when he speaks of the great spreading tree that stood outside his childhood home in a coal-mining village in Ukraine.

A century ago, his father built a wooden platform in the tree’s branches.

Sergi Andrijenko, survivor, turns 100 next week, but doesn’t call his life a celebration.Credit: Eddie Jim

It became Sergi’s dreaming place in his too-short childhood. Up there, he hovered above the troubles that would soon consume him.

He speaks of the tree often as he recalls the events of his long life, as if seeking relief from grimmer memories.

It was Sergi Andrijenko’s great misfortune to be born in 1924 and raised as a child in what was then the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Aged six, he became a beggar to survive Stalin’s policy of starving millions to death.

In his teens, he was transported to Germany to become a slave labourer of the Nazis.

At 20, he was dreadfully wounded when escaping his German captors. With World War II over, he escaped again, this time from a Soviet Union forced labour camp.

He finally made it to Australia in 1948 as a refugee. He cut cane in Queensland and worked as a saw miller before training as a railway guard and building a life in Melbourne.

He married twice, to Lilly and Gerda, both gone. He and Gerda were parents to a daughter, Larissa, killed in a car crash in Sale in 1993, and a son, Ron, who died of leukemia.

Sergi Andrijenko, alone for years now and living in an aged care home in North Croydon in Melbourne’s outer east, has his 100th birthday on March 30.

He doesn’t use the word celebrate. Nor does he thank God for his long life.

“There is no God,” he says. “I wouldn’t want anyone to have a life like mine.”

Sergi’s first vivid memory is of watching his father beaten to death in a potato field.

He was six years old.

It was 1930, the first year of the Great Ukrainian Famine which led two years later to the Holodomor, a Ukraine word meaning “killing by hunger”, or simply, genocide. Depending on who is doing the hideous estimating, no fewer than 3.9 million and as many as 10 million Ukrainians died from starvation deliberately inflicted by the policies of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

A monument in Kyiv to the victims of the Holodomor.Credit: AP

Sergi’s father, in search of work, moved his little family when Sergi was a baby from the village where he was born in the Smolensk Oblast, a Russian region about 380 kilometres south-west of Moscow, to Vetka, a coal-mining area of Ukraine on the outskirts of what was known then as Stalin City.

(Stalin City, or Stalino, later changed its name to Donetsk, and has recently been all but destroyed during the Russian invasion ordered by the latest tyrant, Vladimir Putin).

The family lived in a makeshift house constructed from scrap by Sergi’s father.

Scarce meals of weeds and foraged mushrooms were supplemented by starlings and their eggs collected from a network of traps masquerading as nests built by Sergi’s father in that big tree outside the house.

Ukraine was – and remains – one of the world’s leading grain-growing nations. But under Soviet dictate, agriculture was “collectivised” – all produce belonged to the Soviet state. Starvation was used by Stalin to punish Ukrainians for wanting independence.

All cats, dogs, mice and rats disappeared, skinned and eaten, Sergi remembers.

Determined to feed his family, Sergi’s father took his son to a collective farm to search for small potatoes left in the ground after a harvest.

They half-filled a sack after a long day’s work. The political chief of the collective farm spied them and demanded they hand over the state’s potatoes. Sergi’s father refused. The official beat Sergi’s father with the heavy fork he’d used to dig for forbidden food, smashing his arm and his skull.

Little Sergi vomited in shock and ran to the village, screaming for help. A horse and cart were dispatched. But his father died.

‘I was now the head of the family. I was six years old. I became a professional beggar.’

Sergi Andrijenko

“I was now the head of the family,” says Sergi. “I was six years old. I became a professional beggar.”

His mother, he says, could neither read nor write and was disabled from untreated childbirth injuries. There was a younger sister and a baby brother to feed. Sergi suddenly understood the Soviet slogan, “He who does not work does not eat”.

“We could have starved, but I was a good beggar,” he says. “I went door to door with a bag on my back, begging for a piece of bread, anything people could spare, from morning to night.”

He was required to start school at the age of eight, but his need to beg robbed him of lessons.

Sergi Andrijenko, once a child beggar, reviews his long life. He turns 100 on March 30.Credit: Eddie Jim

At 12, he took to jumping goods trains, travelling further and further on begging expeditions.

In Taganrog, a city on the Sea of Azov in southern Russia, he fell in with an adult pickpocket. Sergi’s job was to take the contents of a picked pocket and disappear into crowds, and to meet the light-fingered thief later, who let the boy keep 30 per cent of the take.

Each night, he crept into an empty garden shed, burying his loot.

The pay-off, once the pair moved cities, was huge. The pickpocket lifted a briefcase in the Russian port of Rostov, but was recognised and arrested. Sergi disappeared, the briefcase hidden beneath his bulky overcoat. It turned out to hold an assortment of jewels, a bar of gold and several expensive watches. There was also cash: 2800 roubles.

Sergi turned over the jewels to his pickpockets’ relatives, but kept the cash. Fearing being robbed, he sewed the money into his coat and returned to his village.

It was not a happy homecoming. Sergi’s mother, overcome with grief and passion, beat him with coiled rope.

In Sergi’s absence, his brother, aged 10, had tried to emulate his exploits on the railways. The little boy fell in the village rail yards and was killed by a train. He was buried two weeks before Sergi returned, unaware of the tragedy.

Sergi spent some of his money on surgery his mother had needed for years.

Soon enough, World War II broke out. In 1941, Germany invaded Ukraine’s territory. Within a year, about 2.2 million Ukrainians were rounded up and moved to Germany as slave labourers.

Nazi soldiers operate an antitank gun in the streets of Mariupol, in southeastern Ukraine, in October 1941.Credit: AP

Sergi, aged 18, was crammed into a railcar and taken away, too.

He was put to work in a factory initially, threading steel pipes, and fed 400 grams of black bread a day, sometimes accompanied by a bowl of swede soup so thin that “you could see a piece of swede chasing another around the pot”.

In late 1944, Sergi says he was put to work digging deep anti-tank ditches on the Siegfried Line – known to Germans as the West Wall – near Saarbrücken, close to the French border.

Sergi, learning American forces were massing across the border to storm the Siegfried Line’s defences, decided he’d had enough of slaving for the Nazis. He fled towards France.

He does not know whether it was a bomb from a plane or an artillery shell that landed next to him, spraying him with shrapnel. But he was fearfully injured, his pelvis split asunder.

He crawled all night through snow and was found the following morning by an American tank crew. He was taken to a US military hospital in Nancy, north-eastern France, where he spent the next four months.

He was keen to return home to his family in Ukraine when the war ended in 1945.

He never made it. He would never see his mother again.

A US Army truck took him and other would-be returnees as far as the Elbe River near Berlin.

Once across the river, Sergi and his comrades had to walk, with no choice but to discard most of the goods they had scrounged for their journey. He kept as many clothes as he could carry – including a blackmarket American army uniform.

No triumphant homecoming ensued.

Sergi and those with him were sent by Russian authorities to a labour camp east of Berlin, where they were forced to disassemble German industrial plants and send the parts by train across the Soviet Union.

Their treatment was not unusual: millions of other returned slave labourers were shunned and some were sent to the gulags of Siberia, or simply disappeared. The paranoia of Stalin’s regime judged those who had been forced to work in Germany as possible Nazi collaborators.

Sergi wasn’t about to accept his fate. He and a friend absconded.

They had their black market American army uniforms, and they headed to Potsdam, not far from Berlin. There, they took up residence atop disused trains stacked three high in a huge building, and foraged in gardens at night.

Eventually, they screwed up the courage to tackle the bridge out of Potsdam.

An American soldier guarded one end, a Russian the other. Astonishingly, the uniforms did the trick. Sergi says the American soldier stood aside for them, and the Russian followed suit.

Later, amid a series of close shaves, Sergi made it to a displaced person’s camp in Germany’s west, where he “acquired” the identity papers of a man who was leaving for America. He travelled to Belgium and worked in a coal mine before authorities jailed him on suspicion of stealing the documents.

He was freed after a month, and returned to the displaced person’s camp near Bremen, in Germany, where he applied to the International Refugee Organisation for immigration.

On May 8, 1948, he boarded the SS Svalbard at the northern German port of Bremerhaven. He arrived at Princes Pier, Port Melbourne, on June 30, 1948.

Sergi Andrijenko’s identity card, issued at the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre near Wodonga in 1948.

He was taken to the Bonegilla Migrant Reception Centre outside Wodonga, and a week later, was sent to spend a year cutting cane around Childers, Queensland.

And so, the former beggar boy from Ukraine slowly built a new life. He saved hard enough to build a house in East Ringwood in the early 1960s, and then to buy two adjoining blocks, subdividing them into 10.

He never forgot his little family in Ukraine, and helped distant relatives send their children to university.

“Somehow, I always had enough money to keep sending it back to those I had left behind,” he says.

As the years rolled by and his mother died, he paid to bring his sister, Katya, to live with him and his family in Melbourne.

He says he sent thousands of dollars only a few weeks ago to a great-nephew in Ukraine to help him survive the war.

“I don’t understand why the big shots keep pulling the world apart,” he says.

“You can’t fix things up by tearing things down.”

And then Sergi Andrijenko, survivor of a tormented century, retreats to his dreaming place, chuckling about climbing with other village children to the tree-house platform his father built for him, and “standing up there and pissing down through the leaves, like we were little princes”.