Anna Dravgalis

Anna Vikentievna Dravgalis is a sad victim of both - Soviet communist regime and Chernobyl disaster. During the 2nd World War she had been sent from her homeland Belarus to Germany to forced labour for Germans. After the War she went to Canada together with her husband Rafael Victorovitch Polansky to find a new home. They found a job at the Russian Section of the CBS radio station. They bought a house in Montréal and she gave birth to a child, Viktor Rafaelovitch Polansky. Finally they received a Canadian citizenship. One day she got a letter saying that her mother died in her native town Bykhov (Belarus, Soviet Union) and asking her to go to the funeral. But when Anna Dravgalis went to Belarus she got to know that her mother had died some 10 years before and that the letter about her death was a fake - just a cruel joke orchestrated by KGB. She was never able to come back to her home in Montreal. Her Canadian passport was confiscated by Soviet authorities. Since that time Anna was held in her home almost as a prisoner for more than 30 years. Her correspondence was censored, all her attempts to get in contact with familly were stopped. Belarussian authorities declared her as woman who had collaborated with the Germans during the 2nd World War and did not allow her to find any suitable job. She survived by doing small sewing jobs and growing vegetables on a small piece of her garden. But it is contaminated by fallout of radioactive Cesium 137 from Chernobyl disaster. Now she is living in small dirty flat dreaming to see her son before she dies, Photo by Vaclav Vasku, 24th March 2005.