Anna Fiodorovna
Oil on canvas
25x30cm
"We would work 18 hours straight, then as we were getting tired, the next shift would come along and we would work together for another 6 hours"
Anna Fiodorovna
"It has been a busy day today. I am the chairman of a WW2 veterans committee in our area - I organise meetings to discuss issues that we need to bring to attention of the authorities.
There are not so many of the true veterans left, those who took part in action during the War. I was a young nurse when it started. I was studying to become a midwife when we were conscripted to the Front, to tend the wounded. We were young and had no family to leave behind - so we were prime choice for being sent to the hot-spots.
We would work 18 hours straight, then as we were getting tired, the next shift would come along and we would work together for another 6 hours, take a nap for four hours and start a new 18 hour shift till the next person replaced us. After that we would have 10 hours sleep and it would all start over again. There were so many wounded to look after. We had to work really fast, make crucial decisions and operate right there and then in the middle of action in a tent with hundreds of wounded: some recovering, some waiting to be treated.
After the first immediate help, some of the more serious cases were sent back inland to stationary hospitals. I spent all of the war at the front line and we got as far as Berlin when the victory came.
I come from a village in Ukraine called Buturlinivka, now it is part of Russia. It had being given to Russia in exchange for some territories in the Crimea during the Khrushchev time. My great grandfather was originally from Greece. He was an orthodox priest coming to Ukraine to preach. My mother was a very educated woman with a great heart and she was very religious. She had a talent for healing people and had people coming for help from all over the country. She specialised in Osteopathy. She would teach us this skill when we were little, she would put a jug in to a sack and smash it on the floor and we had to reconstruct it from outside, without putting our hands in to the sack. It was a simple but effective method.
We had a large family of twelve children but not many have survived. My father had a large farm, good land and horses to provide food for the family. When the Soviet Rule came the land and the horses were taken away to be added to “collective farms' that were imposed by the state all over the country. The government called wealthy peasants “Kulaks', and considered them enemies of Soviet state.
After my parents lost their means of providing food for the family we really struggled to survive. My father learned a cobbler's skill and earned some money making boots while my mother tended the children and earned money by sewing (clothes etc). I was too small to remember all that. I was the youngest of all the children and we were very poor already by the time I was born.
It was an exciting time for me as a young person – new opportunities and exiting prospects that the new system was offering. In 1963 I followed my husband to the island of Ion in Barentcevo Sea in the far North East of Russia. My husband was a doctor and I worked as a midwife and a doctor with the local ethnic population of Chukchi (the same ethnic group as Sámi people or Inuit's & Evenks - inhabitants along the northern seas, close along the North Pole). They were in an awful health condition when we arrived. The conditions were very harsh to live in and our diet consisted of frozen fresh fish or raindeer meat, and powdered milk.But I really enjoyed working with people, making difference to their lives. We had polar bears outside our hospital windows digging in the rubbish. My daughters both went to boarding school on the island when they were small and later to the boarding school on the mainland for the higher grades. I had a real scare once when my grandson was left to play in the hospital yard and a huge polar bear arrived to scavenge through the rubbish.
I worked mainly with children and in the local hospital and my husband worked as an emergency doctor. He and another doctor would go out in a helicopter or in an all-terrain vehicle to polar stations to help scientists that used to work there. It was a dangerous job. They had to go through shifting ice, and snow storms in temperatures ranging between -40C and -70C to get to the locations. One time he went out on call and their vehicle got caught in a storm. Because of the impossible weather conditions he waited for three days to be rescued - he was barely alive and was taken to hospital on the mainland with hypothermia. His partner didn't make it.
My husband never recovered from his experience and a year later when we returned to Ukraine, he died, leaving me with two daughters to look after. That's when we moved to Moscow, where I have lived ever since. I have a nice flat. My daughter and my grandson, and now also my great grandson, come and visit me here.
I enjoy doing work for our veteran community, and getting organised for Victory Day parades. I received another commemoration medal last year, and a personal letter from the President to greet me on the Victory Day parade, thanking us for our war achievements. After all there are very few of us left, one of my brothers went missing in Japanese war. I have just turned 80 this year.
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