Two Regimes

Book excerpt: This is a verbatim memoir of Teodora Verbitskaya. Very little is known about Teodora, a gentile Ukrainian woman who bravely chronicled the years before, during and after World War II, in Soviet Ukraine. The Two Regimes Memoir specifically includes deportation to German forced labor camps. Through it all, Teodora was a woman who strived to feed and protect her children under very severe conditions, and she did so with sheer survival mode determination, integrity, prayer, and perseverance. These are Teodora’s thoughts concerning her children and what they lived through. Teodora and her daughters, Nadia, and Lucy were survivors and witnesses to the Holodomor and the Holocaust. Teodora wrote her memoir to document that these events took place, and, most importantly, to validate that the people she knew and lost would never be forgotten. Teodora’s daughter, Nadia Werbitzky, was haunted her entire life by what she had experienced. As a professional artist, Nadia used a paintbrush to express her thoughts. Nadia understood the importance of her mother’s manuscript, memories shared by both mother and daughter. Nadia painted feverishly in the last years of her life so that her story would not perish with her.