Sergi Andrijenko’s old eyes light up when he speaks of the great spreading tree that stood outside his childhood home in a coal-mining village in Ukraine.Sergi Andrijenko, survivor, turns 100 next week, but doesn’t call his life a celebration.It became Sergi’s dreaming place in his too-short childhood. Up there, he hovered above the troubles that would soon consume him.
He finally made it to Australia in 1948 as a refugee. He cut cane in Queensland and worked as a saw miller before training as a railway guard and building a life in Melbourne.He married twice, to Lilly and Gerda, both gone. He and Gerda were parents to a daughter, Larissa, killed in a car crash in Sale in 1993, and a son, Ron, who died of leukemia.
Ukraine was – and remains – one of the world’s leading grain-growing nations. But under Soviet dictate, agriculture was “collectivised” – all produce belonged to the Soviet state. Starvation was used by Stalin to punish Ukrainians for wanting independence.Determined to feed his family, Sergi’s father took his son to a collective farm to search for small potatoes left in the ground after a harvest.
His mother, he says, could neither read nor write and was disabled from untreated childbirth injuries. There was a younger sister and a baby brother to feed. Sergi suddenly understood the Soviet slogan, “He who does not work does not eat”. It was not a happy homecoming. Sergi’s mother, overcome with grief and passion, beat him with coiled rope.
Sergi, learning American forces were massing across the border to storm the Siegfried Line’s defences, decided he’d had enough of slaving for the Nazis. He fled towards France. Later, amid a series of close shaves, Sergi made it to a displaced person’s camp in Germany’s west, where he “acquired” the identity papers of a man who was leaving for America. He travelled to Belgium and worked in a coal mine before authorities jailed him on suspicion of stealing the documents.
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