Maria Gil shared her remarkable story at PPh's Founders' Day on November 20, 2012.
Maria Gil is a survivor.
She was born August 12, 1923, in Ukraine to Eudokia and Konstantin
Ripka. Her parents were poor
farmers.
When she was 2 years old, her mother passed away, and
because her father could not take care of her, he wanted to put Maria in a
foster home. Her mother’s parents
adopted her and she went to live with them and the three of their nine children
who lived at home. They became her
sisters and brothers. Maria was the baby
and used to sit on her grandfather’s lap and comb his long hair and beard.
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| Anthony Manzo, David Sine and Maria Gil. |
Maria’s grandparents never told her about her biological
parents, but a next door neighbor child told her when she was 4 or 5 she had
been adopted.
In 1932, when Maria was 9 years old, the Soviet leader Josef
Stalin unleashed genocide in Ukraine.
Eric Margolis, wrote about what transpired in "Remembering Ukraine's Unknown Holocaust," which appeared in the December 13, 1998, issue of the Toronto Sun.
“Stalin was determined to force Ukraine's
millions of independent farmers like her father and grandfather into
collectivized Soviet agriculture, and to crush Ukraine's growing spirit of
nationalism.
Faced by resistance to collectivization, Stalin unleashed terror upon Ukraine. Moscow dispatched 25,000
fanatical young party militants - earlier versions of Mao's `Red Guards' - to
force 10 million Ukrainian peasants into collective farms. Secret police, also
known as Chekists, began selective executions of recalcitrant farmers.
When Stalin's red guards failed to make a dent in this immense number, the
Chekists were ordered to begin mass executions. But there were simply not
enough secret police to kill so many people, so Stalin decided to replace
bullets by a much cheaper medium of death, mass starvation.
All seed stocks, grain, silage, and farm animals were confiscated from Ukraine's
farms. Chekist agents and Red Army troops sealed all roads and rail lines.
Nothing came in or out of Ukraine.
Farms were searched and looted of food and fuel. Ukrainians quickly began to
die of hunger, cold, and sickness.
When the Chekists failed to meet weekly execution quotas, Stalin sent his henchman,
Lazar Kaganovitch, to destroy Ukrainian resistance. Kaganovitch, the Soviet
Eichmann, made quota, shooting 10,000 Ukrainians weekly. Eighty percent of all
Ukrainian intellectuals were executed.
During the bitter winter of 1932-33, mass starvation created by Kaganovitch
and the secret police hit full force. Ukrainians ate their pets, boots, belts,
bark, and roots. Cannibalism became common; parents even ate infant children.
The precise number of Ukrainians murdered by Stalin's custom-made famine and
Cheka firing squads remains unknown to this day, but legitimate sources
estimate between 7 and 9 million people or 25% of Ukraine's population was
exterminated.”
One day, the secret police came to Maria’s grandparents’ farm, searching for
her grandfather to arrest him because he had a farm and wealth and the communists
wanted everyone to be “equal.”
She was
sitting on her hope chest, which contained a pair of boots.
A policeman threw her off the chest and took
the boots.
The next day, Maria was sent by train to live with her biological father,
his new wife and their children.
When Maria went to school, she would sometimes go in the same clothes that
she slept in.
The teacher would monitor
what they brought for lunch to see if their families were hiding food from the
authorities.
When she was 14, she went to work on the collective farm, where she worked sun
up to sun down.
In 1933, they had no
food, soap or salt and had to register every month for bread, butter and
sugar.
Once, her stepmother went to the
city and traded the family’s pots and pans to a farmer for grain, potatoes,
corn and onions.
The Communists closed
the churches.
In the spring, when the grass grew, they would mix it with water and make
pancakes.
Life was not all bad. In the summer she and friend, whose father was a
member of the Communist Party and, therefore, was well off, would take a row
boat out on the Dnieper
River and play the
harmonica and sing songs.
In 1941, the Nazis conquered Ukraine
and Maria was taken to Germany
to work on a farm. After the war Maria was afraid to go back to Ukraine because
she could be called a traitor.
She heard
stories of the police dragging people from trains, forcing them to dig ditches
and climb into them and then shooting them. She learned that her father had
died in a concentration camp in Germany.
In 1946 Maria went to a camp for Displaced Persons operated by the American
Red Cross.
She worked in the kitchen,
cooking for 1,000 people.
They received
chocolate and cigarettes, which they traded in town for butter, eggs, and
bacon. They learned not to take the ferry across the river because the soldiers
would stop the ferry and confiscate the goods for themselves. They received
donations of clothing from America.
Wasyl Gil came to work in the kitchen, lifting heavy food containers, and
three months later they were married in the local sheriff’s office.
Maria learned how to operate a sewing machine
and she worked for the Red Cross making children’s clothes.
Once they were interviewed and photographed
for Life Magazine.
In 1952, Maria and Wasyl received permission to emigrate to America and they went to work for a couple in North Carolina that was
looking for a couple without children who had knowledge of farming and
housekeeping.
The first time the lady of
the house put a vacuum cleaner in front of Maria, she had no idea what it
was.
Not knowing any English, Maria used
hand signals to communicate with her employer.
After a year, Maria and Wasyl moved to Philadelphia
and got jobs sewing in a factory.
They
had a daughter and a son David and several grandchildren.
Maria moved to PPh in January 2005.
She volunteers in the craft room three times a week and recently made
her first quilt with the quilt club.
She
likes taking the van to go shopping at the mall and the Acme and going on the
trips to Lancaster
County.
She says that PPh feels like her second family.
