The Grandson Of A Slave - December 5th 2024
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It is December 5. I am the grandson of a slave. My grandfather, after whom I was named, was a slave. A real one. He was born a freeman. Not in a modern sense, of course. Ukraine was when occupied by the Bolsheviks and people had almost

No rights. When my grandfather was a very young man, Second World War began. Very soon he was drafted into the Red Army and sent to the front. After a few months he was captured by the Germans. At first he was held in a prisoner's camp, but later he was sent to work at a factory in Germany.

That was when he became a slave. The Third Reich was built by slaves. People stripped of their rights, forced to work under inhuman conditions, beaten, killed at any moment and left with no chance of freedom had the Nazis won the war. There were millions of such slaves: Jewish and Roma people, Soviet prisoners, homosexuals and anti-fascists.

All of them worked day and night, waiting for a horrific death by starvation, beatings or complete physical exhaustion. But my grandfather was young, intelligent and brave. Realizing he had no chance of surviving in slavery, he decided to escape. And he succeeded. A miracle, but miracles do happen from time to time.

After some time he rejoined the Soviet army, but for many years he hid the fact that he had been a prisoner of war and forced into slavery. Do you know why he kept it in a secret? Because Soviet soldiers were forbidden to surrender. Surrender was a crime.

If anyone had found about his past as a slave, he would have become a slave again. Not at a Nazi factory, but in a Soviet Gulag. The Soviet Union too relied on the forced labor of millions.

My grandfather was a slave and risked becoming one again. But he lived to see Ukraine liberated from the Russians, to see independence, to see freedom. But the Russians love the Gulag. They are deeply annoyed that we no longer want to be slaves, that we refuse to accept it.

If someone asks me what we are fighting for, I can honestly say that I fight so that my grandchildren, unlike me, will never be able to say their grandfather was a slave.