‘If Russia invades, my family will be torn apart again’

Ukrainian who fought for Stalin fears war on the streets once more.

Zigmund Venglovsky, 97, with his medals at his home in Zhytomyr, west of Kiev.

The old soldier was a boy the last time an invading army attacked his city. The shock to a population oblivious to impending war was so absolute that, even now, aged 97, Zigmund Venglovsky recalls the disbelief he felt.

“I was in a classroom in my college,” the veteran said in his ground-floor apartment in Zhytomyr. “We had just been handed exam papers. The window was open as it was hot. Then a boy rushed in and said ‘War! Don’t sit here doing exams! The Germans are invading!’ I said: ‘Go away and don’t disturb me with your bullshit.’ We had no sense that war was so imminent. But when it happened, it happened so fast.”

Reflecting on that June day in 1941 when word of the German invasion reached him, he wonders whether war will come to Zhytomyr again. The city, 140km west of Kiev, was recently named in US intelligence assessments as a possible axis of advance for Russian forces if they invade Ukraine.

Straddling the main highway from western to eastern Ukraine, flanked by open ground and uncongested by forest, Zhytomyr is a strategic asset to any modern invader intent on capturing Kiev, just as it was to the Wehrmacht.

“It is painful to even consider that I may see war on these streets once more, especially one fought between Russian and Ukrain­ians,” he murmured. “I have a son in Moscow; a daughter in Zhytomyr; grandchildren and great-grandchildren in Poland, Russia and Ukraine. If war happens, my family will be torn apart.”

Venglovsky’s recollections of World War II were a warning of the scourge of armed conflict, as politicians and diplomats seek to head off a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine.

“War begins as a surprise, then with more speed than is imaginable it ruins everything around it,” Venglovsky said.

Part of Ukraine’s ethnic Polish minority, Venglovsky was raised in the Soviet system. His father, a wealthy peasant, had been deported to Siberia in 1930 when Venglovsky was five years old as part of Stalin’s agricultural collectivisation policy under which “kulaks” were stripped of land and possessions.

Venglovsky joined the Soviet army in 1944 and has fond memories of his service.

“It was years before I learnt my father’s eventual fate,” he told me, leafing through a photo album until he came to an image of himself as a child with his sister and mother. “Though in 1936 we received one letter from him, written from the gulag. Fifty roubles were enclosed. He asked for a copy of this photo of the three of us.”

He recalled seeing the first German soldiers and tanks ­approach Zhytomyr, hearing machine­guns, and seeing “three Soviet soldiers burning in their overturned vehicle”.

He studied at university in the city as the countryside around it became subsumed by bloodshed. The Nazis murdered the city’s 3000 Jews, fought with partisans and members of the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA, who were themselves involved in the massacre of Polish communities. In 1943, German and Red Army units fought two big tank battles around Zhytomyr, which served as Heinrich Himmler’s Ukrainian headquarters, until the Germans were finally driven out in December that year. Immediately afterwards, aged 18, Venglovsky was conscripted into the Soviet Army’s first Polish division, and served in an artillery unit fighting in Warsaw in 1944.

“It was not a matter of choice, it was a matter of survival,” he said. “Part of war is lack of choice.”

Yet the Soviet system that had sent his father to a gulag found the undernourished young soldier a bright and capable asset. As the war concluded, he was sent to military academy and became a first lieutenant in a tank unit, and talks with pride of the T-34 tanks that were the mainstay of Russian armoured forces. Rising through the ranks to colonel, he spent his career in tank units and his small apartment contains models of armoured vehicles and tributes to Soviet tank-making factories.

Though bonded to the Soviet ideal, he never forgot his missing father and while still a serving officer in Moscow in the early 1970s, he asked for access to his father’s death certificate. “Twice the authorities told me my father had died of a heart attack,” he said. “Finally they handed me a document confirming my father had been shot by a firing squad at the gulag in 1938. I travelled to Irkutsk twice to find his grave. I never did.”

A widower who has lived alone for 30 years, he sits watching the TV news as the Ukrainian crisis unfolds. “Though war may happen with the same suddenness as before, I have made no preparation to leave,” Venglovsky said.

“My life is spent. I will face my destiny as it arrives.”

The Times