Ninety-nine years and eight months old, Anna Bahatelya has survived every ordeal a tumultuous century of Ukrainian history has thrown at her.
Born in August 1922, four months before the proclamation of the Soviet Union, Bahatelya lived through the Holodomor, when Joseph Stalin’s regime visited an artificial famine on large areas of Ukraine by confiscating its grain stocks. She survived the second world war, even after spending two years in a Nazi slave camp in Austria.
She has outlived the Soviet Union and then made it through the difficult 1990s, when the Ukrainian economy left many in poverty. This January she survived a vicious bout of Covid, despite being unvaccinated. Now, four months short of her century, she faces yet another challenge: Vladimir Putin’s war on her country.
“Now again, the people are suffering,” she said at her home on the outskirts of Kyiv, where she lives with her 69-year-old daughter, Olha Punyk.
Speaking loudly, with an imploring tone and the cadence of poetry, Bahatelya gives sharp and clear recollections of the various ordeals she has been through, but grew angry when asked about the Russian president, making a rude hand gesture and calling him: “The worst man in the world.” » | Shaun Walker in Kyiv | Sunday, April 3, 2022
