Nazi camp survivor: 'This life, it is a blessing'

Between 1932 and 1933, an estimated 4 million Ukrainians died from starvation in what is now widely accepted as a premeditated famine perpetrated by the Soviet Union.

Nina Grigg survived it.

But the famine -- the hunger -- was just the beginning of a journey that would take her to a slave labor camp in Nazi Germany before finding family and freedom in America.

"I don't know why God let me live through so much," she says. "But he did. This life, it is a blessing."

Frankfurt am Main, Germany

March 1945

The bombs were coming.

They could hear the roar of the American planes growing louder and louder overhead until nothing, not even their own screams or their hands pressed against their ears, could drown it out.

The girls had nowhere to go. There was no shelter for the slaves.

Nina Zimbalyk ran from the munitions factory where she and 15 other Ukrainian girls had been forced to work for three years.

An abandoned building beckoned. She raced across the field as explosions rocked the fragile structure. She crouched in a corner and cried, hands over her head.

Is this what God planned for her? To die anonymous and alone in a place not her home? To survive starvation at the hands of the Soviets and enslavement by the Nazis only to perish by an American bomb?

Her only glimmer of hope came from a simple, inescapable fact: It would all be over soon.

She would die or be rescued.

Either way, she would be free.

God, she pleaded as destruction rained down. Just give me one thing. I only want one thing.

Let me see my momma one more time.

East Lansing, Present Day

Nina doesn't understand the point of the question.

She looks at her daughter, Linda Grigg-Gerdes, brows furrowed. "She wants to talk about the boat?"

Linda shakes her head. "She's just wondering how you got here, to America."

Nina presses her hand into the sofa cushion. In front of her are a stack of photos, sepia toned and carefully preserved. Not all the memories are so clear anymore, but Nina has the photos.

Sometimes, just when Linda thinks she has seen them all, new ones appear in her mother's hands – new glimpses into an old life she cannot fathom.

"It's OK, Mom," Linda says. "Start where you want. Tell your story."

Nina reassesses with eyes that have seen a lot. Moments pass. Then she nods.

"If you want the real story," she says, voice thick with age and accent, "you have to start with home."

Topolivka, Ukraine

1933

There were rumors about the woman across the river.

They said she ate her children and then died of a broken heart.

Starvation, it makes you do desperate things.

This was the Ukraine she knew, her home. The one of communist rule, where collective farming meant the Soviets got everything and you got nothing.

The one where it was a crime to fish in the river, so her grandfather taught her how to make a secret trap for tiny minnows. When she caught one, she smuggled it home and ate it, bones and all.

Many years later, they would give it a name, this famine that took the lives of nearly 4 million Ukrainians in the early 1930s. They would call it the Holodomor, and many government leaders would argue over who or what was to blame.

But at the age of 9, Nina Zimbalyk knew nothing of politics. She knew only that she was hungry. Everyone was hungry.

Their family home was a two-room structure with a straw roof and an outdoor stove. Her grandparents lived next door and shared what they could.

You will want to eat this all yourself, they would tell her, putting a loaf of fresh bread in her pocket. But you must share with your parents and your sister.

Oh, it was so hard. Her little fingers dove into her pocket and broke off tiny crumbs to savor against her lips. Fresh bread was a luxury.

Whatever they reaped from the soil, they had to give to the government. Men would come in a horse and buggy and take it all. Onions. Cabbage. Sugar beets. Milk.

The government took everything and gave nothing back.

This is important, Nina says. It is important to know how bad things were under the Soviets.

Because only then can you understand decisions she made later.

***

"Mom, what do you remember about when the Germans came?"

Linda gently prods her mother. Nina is remembering something else, something about the painstaking process of making oil from sunflower seeds. It was hard work. Everything was such hard work.

Those were the things her own mother, Paulaska, didn't want for her, Nina explains. Go to school, her mother would say. So you don't have to live the way I do.

She was 18 when the Germans invaded Ukraine in 1941.

Everyone knew war was breaking out in other places in Europe, but it seemed far away from their village.

Then one day she was working in the wheat field, and six of them rode up on bicycles. They approached her house and ordered her mother to cook them a chicken.

Her mother obliged, happily. They were liberators, these Germans in their uniforms. For two decades, they had been under communist control. Anyone, even Hitler, had to be better.

It would only be a matter of days until they realized the truth. The Germans were not their saviors, and war would not make life better.

Because soon the Soviets took all the boys and made them fight.

Then the Nazis took all the girls and made them slaves.

***

Hide them. Hide the girls.

Nina remembers urgent whispers, frantic plans.

Her father was dead, killed in the fighting not far from their village. Her little sister, Maria, was only 9. All through the countryside, moms thought of ways to protect their daughters.

But the Nazis heard the whispers, too, and came around with a warning. If you hide your daughters, we will find them and you will suffer. We will burn your house to the ground.

I have to protect your sister, her momma cried. She's just a child. She cannot survive without me.

Nina, you must go.

The soldiers took her in a sled to a school in a nearby town, where she boarded a train for Poland.

There, they let her take a cold shower and change her clothes. She was given a single loaf of bread. Then she and 50 other girls were loaded into a cattle car bound for Germany, packed so tightly they could not sit or breathe.

The trip took four days, and they were never fed. There was nowhere to go to the bathroom and no heat. She believes some of the girls froze to death, but Nina had her mother's coat to protect her.

Take my coat, her momma had begged when the soldiers came for her. Nina tried to refuse it.

No, momma said, pressing it into her hands. You will need it. Take my boots, too.

Awaiting them in Germany were employers eager to look over the latest shipment of slave labor for their farms and factories.

Nina and 15 others were selected by the manager of a munitions factory in Frankfurt. They were forced to march for miles in freezing rain to a prison camp surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards.

This is where you will sleep, the man told them. It was a chicken coop with wooden, straw-covered pallets for beds. It was winter, but there were no blankets.

She tugged her mother's coat tightly around her.

You will get one loaf of bread per week, they were told. Make it last.You'll havecoffee for breakfast. A potato for lunch. Broth for dinner.

Six days a week, they worked. Long days with little food and no comfort.

There was a soldier, she suddenly remembers. He stopped them one night as the girls returned to their barracks. They were all crying, their young bodies stooped under the weight of work and malnutrition.

Girls, he said. Don't cry. Things will get better.

It wasn't just his words that stayed with her. It was the fact that he cared.

Nina suddenly understood something about life. It doesn't matter where you are from, what uniform you wear, whose orders you follow.

You either have a heart, or you don't.

***

"I don't know who this is. I don't remember names."

Nina is studying a black and white photo taken in Germany. She's with two other girls.

Linda peers at it. "These girls worked in the factory with you?"

Nina nods. "I don't know what happened to them."

After the war, she means.

After the bombing and Gen. Patton's Army arrived in tanks and trucks and gave them fresh bread and peanut butter, people just scattered. There was no way to stay in touch.

She had no idea if her mother and sister were alive, and if so, where they were.

Remember, she says, how bad things were under the Soviets in the Ukraine?

That was important to remember, because after the war, the Soviets wanted them back. All the Ukrainians were ordered to come home. Soviet troops now in control of parts of Germany would knock on doors and visit businesses.

Any Ukrainians here?

No, the German citizens would lie. No Ukrainians here.

The people who once enslaved her were now protecting her from returning to an uncertain future in a homeland still under communist rule. You either have a heart, or you don't.

She wanted her mom, wanted to find out if she was alive, but Nina couldn't go home.

Nina got a job at a local hotel and met a man named Ivan Grigorenko, a fellow Ukranian.

They married, and in 1950, they learned of a new program offered by the Americans. It was called the Displaced Persons Act that allowed European refugees to come to the United States to start over.

As they left Europe behind, she had one regret. That long-ago prayer, the one she repeated over and over as the bombs fell, was never answered.

**

Do you know what 30,000 turkeys sound like, Nina asks suddenly. Loud. Very loud.

She has a photo, dark and grainy, of her husband standing inside a barn on their farm in Camden, Mich., where they eventually ended up.

They arrived in the U.S. with $2 each, courtesy of the U.S. government, and new names. Grigorenko was shortened to Grigg. Ivan became John.

They started out in Connecticut with the help of their American sponsor, but then relocated to Ohio to work on a poultry farm. They saved every penny, she says. After two years, they had $7,000.

Another American sponsor helped them secure a loan, and they bought the 60-acre farm in Camden to start a family and raise turkeys.

She laughs. Two Ukrainians, who had only known starvation and strife, who barely spoke English, built a life on an American tradition of giving thanks for a bountiful feast.

Then in the late 1960s, there was new hope for an unanswered prayer.

You know, things are different now, a friend told her. The woman was Polish and had also come to America after the war. You are an American citizen. You can visit Ukraine as a tourist now, and they can't do anything to you.

Nina wrote letters home, searching once again for information about the family she left behind. Were they even alive?

In 1969, Nina returned to Europe on a tourist's visa. She had an address in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine.

She knocked on the door.

It swung open immediately.

Momma.

**

Linda understands now—understands why her mother worked so hard on their turkey farm when she was a child, why she spent so little time with her children that Linda and her siblings never even learned to speak Ukrainian.

She understands why her mother never sits still. To this day, she won't rest until the dishes are done and laundry is folded.

She understands why nothing is thrown away, why no food that has been offered is ever refused.

"Even now, when I hear her story, it's hard to put myself in that situation," she says. "I wish I could go back in time and look through the windows to see her in her daily life."

That daily life today is slower. One of her favorite things is to watch WKAR, the public television station out of MSU.

"You can learn to do anything on that," she says. "How to bake, how to sew."

She also loves shopping at Meijer. They have everything there, she says. The shelves are never empty. All these people, buying whatever they need and want, something wholly inconceivable even to this day in Ukraine.

And if she can't reach something, nice people always hand it to her, because some people just like to help, she says.

She thinks about a man named Adam, a German. He defied the Nazis by smuggling her an apple every day in the factory.

And a man named Peter, who sometimes snuck her a sandwich in the camp. They are just kids, she remembers him saying when he got caught.

She thinks about the soldier, the one who cared when she cried.

"Do you remember his name?" Linda asks.

"No," Nina says.

But she never forgot the kindness.

You either have a heart, she says, or you don't.

The History

In this story, Nina Grigg of East Lansing shares her story of surviving famine in the Ukraine during the early 1930s and slave labor in Germany during World War II. Both are important pieces of Ukrainian-American history.

Between 1932 and 1933, an estimated 4 million Ukrainians died from starvation during a famine called Holodomor. At the time, Ukraine was under the control of Josef Stalin's Soviet Union, and it is now widely accepted that the famine was a premeditated act by Stalin as an act of genocide against the Ukrainian people.

Those who survived the famine, however, faced another threat during World War II. Historians estimate that as many as 15 million Europeans were forced into slavery by Nazi Germany at some point during the war. Of those, roughly 3 million were Ukrainians. Half were girls, some as young as 10.

After the war, many Nazi slave laborers were returned to their home countries. But many Ukrainians feared returning to Soviet lands, where they were often branded as traitors.

In 1948, the United States opened its doors to 200,000 European war refugees under the Displaced Persons Act. Of those, 85,000 were Ukrainian. The law was later extended to allow for more than 400,000 refugees into the U.S.

Nina Grigg and her husband, John, were among those who came to the U.S. through the Displaced Persons Act. They were assigned American sponsors to help them get settled and find work.

About Nina

Nina Grigg, 90, lives in East Lansing with her daughter, Linda, owner of Grigg Media and an advertising instructor at Michigan State University.

Grigg and her husband, John, came to the United States in 1950 as part of the Displaced Persons Act, a law that allowed thousands of World War II refugees from Eastern Europe to relocate to America.

They arrived with just $2 each, but by 1953, they had saved enough money to buy a 60-acre farm in Camden, Mich. to raise turkeys.

The couple had four children: Edward, Joanna, Irene and Linda. Edward died as an infant. Joanna died in 2008.

In 1969, Nina's prayers were answered when she was able to return to Ukraine to find her mother, Paulaska. It was the first time she had seen her in nearly 30 years, and during all that time she had believed her mother was dead.

It would also be the last time she would see her. Paulaska passed away in 1986, followed a few years later by Nina's husband, John.