WWII survivor has many stories to tell

BIG LAKE — Lily Empie said she’s been blessed with “an uncanny memory” since she was a toddler.

But with that blessing comes a curse: she remembers some awful things.

An Alaska resident since 1989, Empie was born in Ukraine right at the beginning of World War II. For decades she has felt obligated and at the same time reluctant to tell her story. Weighing the perceived need to educate today’s youth against her own real, remembered pain from a bygone era, Empie was motivated to write down her thoughts when a reporter called (and with encouragement from her church family at Faith Bible Fellowship).

“Too many of the survivors already have passed away, with their stories passing away with them, never to be revealed,” she wrote.

The breadbasket

Empie’s family had what she called an “idyllic life” before they were pushed out of their homeland by the conflict between Russia and Germany. Her father was the accounting manager at a candy factory — “the perfect dream job” in the eyes of Empie and her older brother — and her mother worked hard to take care of the house and the children. They lived close to many friends and relatives, in a large house on a hill with acres of land for raising livestock and growing vegetables. Anything else came from trips her parents took to stores in a nearby city a few times a year.

But the Nazis and the Russian communists had already been battling over Ukraine, and Empie’s family knew it was only a matter of time before the “breadbasket of Europe,” was seized by one force or another.

One by one, her relatives disappeared. Her uncle was the first — reported by someone for speaking against the communists, without proof — followed by his wife six months later.

“The police came and asked my uncle’s wife if she wanted to see her husband. She said that of course she did, so they took her away. We never saw either one of them again,” Empie wrote.

The couple had several children, including a set of twins. One of her cousins came to live with Empie’s family, the other with relatives in Czechoslovakia, and the rest with relatives elsewhere. The Empies never heard from those children again.

When the Nazis invaded, “hardship and cruelty escalated,” Empie said.

“All the weapons were confiscated, then all the valuables were taken. If they wanted something they took it and everyone knew better than to object,” she wrote.

Empie remembered one item in particular, a Russian stringed instrument called a balalaika, that the Nazis seized in the middle of the night. Someone had told the Germans of their possessions.

During the raids, Empie began to notice the Jewish people in her community being taken away in droves. Despite the fact she and her family were Christian, they worried even more about who would be next, and when.

“They put fear into our hearts just to see them patrolling the streets in their black knee high boots, with swastika on their uniform and … very vicious dogs,” Empie wrote. “We all lived in the shadows, being as inconspicuous as possible.”

The Empie family became more withdrawn, not leaving the house to visit neighbors or even for church. Her father, jobless at this point, told her mother to pack the essentials, and be ready to leave at a moment’s notice.

Meanwhile, the children were given peach pits to plant in the backyard.

“Our Dad told us that we too might have to leave for a while, but when we returned we would have young peach trees. That was his way of easing our fear of what was to come,” Empie wrote.

But they never got to see those peach trees.

When the day came to leave, the Empies were told by the Nazis that, “the glorious German leader named Hitler” would transport them via train to a place where the men could get jobs and “have a wonderful life.”

“Of course, no one believed this,” Empie wrote.

The families were taken to Warsaw, Poland in “cattle box cars” with no seats and no toilet, and not every place they stopped had trees to hide people doing their business, she said. In Poland, the men and women were locked in separate compounds. Everyone except small children went to work, with no pay.

Empie, just 4-years-old at the time, stayed in the barracks until her mother came home.

To Germany

After more than six months in Poland, the Empies and others were transported to Germany. It was there that Empie remembered eating rotten cabbage or potato soup, but it was not the food that made her sick.

“You don’t get sick from the food because by that time your body is craving that nourishment,” she said. “You wouldn’t throw up because you needed those nutrients.”

While diarrhea was one problem, Empie came down with a more serious health issue during that time — pleurisy, or the inflammation of lung tissue.

She said she couldn’t remember how her father got permission, but he somehow heard of his daughter’s condition and, after securing a discarded baby buggy, walked miles to the nearby German hospital.

Empie remembered two agonizing details of her weeks-long stay there: a German boy jumping on her stomach when the nurses weren’t in the room, and being passed over whenever the nurses doled out chocolates.

Then the bombs started dropping.

Though the Germans built the prisoners a bomb shelter, Empie remembered having to sprint there from her room (after returning from the hospital) during the night to escape the bombings. In the daytime people picked their way over dead bodies, shrapnel and other debris.

Once in the shelter, suffocation became a very real threat, with no air circulation in the crowded room. So great was the concern, Empie remembered, one mother left her child in a buggy outside. No sooner had she retrieved the baby, after much urging from other mothers, and stepped inside the shelter, “than a bomb fell and shattered the baby buggy,” Empie wrote.

It was a harrowing time, but Empie and others were growing more optimistic by the day. The mere presence of the Allies encouraged them.

“Even though we knew that the bombs might kill us, we were still rooting for the pilots,” she wrote.

Though the frequency of the bombings decreased, news of the Allies’ coming excited Empie and the others. They had hope.

“We always said tomorrow will be better. If tomorrow was not better, then we’d say again tomorrow will be better, and eventually it was,” Empie wrote.

Empie was 12 by the time her family was sponsored by a church in New Jersey to come to the United States. Neither she nor her parents or brother or cousin could speak English, but at the taunting of her American schoolmates, Empie vowed she would learn the language better than they.

Perhaps by now, she has.

“I love this country and it is my home,” she wrote.

Though Empie continued to face hardships in the U.S. all her life — bad bosses, unfriendly hosts, losing her Big Lake home to a fire, for example — she has kept the faith that “tomorrow will be better,” and everything happens for a reason.

“Many things happened to me and I could’ve said why me … but why not me?” Empie said. Now, “I can relate to someone else’s trials better.”

Contact reporter Caitlin Skvorc at 352-2266 or caitlin.skvorc@frontiersman.com.