Three small diaries discovered in a Bolton house have been turned into a poignant historical memoir telling the story of a woman, who moved to the borough after surviving Nazis occupation.

Zina's Journey: A true story of the unbreakable force of the Ukrainian spirit has been told by her granddaughter Victoria Leonard and is the result of ten years of painstaking research based on the diaries

Victoria, who works as a foreign languages teacher in Northamptonshire, was clearing out her late grandmother’s belongings at a house in Radcliffe Road,The Haulgh, when she discovered numerous diaries written in Russian.

Victoria said: “At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, but I read the first sentence, and I realised my grandmother had documented her entire life story down. She’d never told any of us before, it came as a complete surprise.”

(Image: Victoria Leonard) Zinaida Poltchenko, Victoria’s grandmother, was born in a small village located to the south of Ukraine in 1925.

When she was just seven years old, her family was struggling because of the  horror of the Holodomor, the devastating man-made famine orchestrated by Stalin in the early 1930s, 

“The diaries don’t go into much detail about it” added Victoria, “but she alluded to only eating potatoes for a while. She then moved with her mother, Ewdokia, to Zaporizhzhia, a city in Ukraine.

“They were living there when war broke out and Zaporizhzhia was captured by the Nazis. She  trained as a nurse when she was 16 years of age in a makeshift hospital and wrote about looking after wounded Soviet soldiers.

(Image: Victoria Leonard) “At the time, her father was fighting with the Soviet Army in Poland and her mother worked as a successful seamstress mending soldier’s uniforms.

“She had to learn German on the job and stayed there until they were forced to move on through Romania, then Austria and then to Germany.”

Zinaida’s diaries detail that her time in Germany was especially challenging. By 1944, she was working at a potato farm and was forced to dig in minus temperatures across the land.

Victoria added: “The diaries are really bleak about this time in her life, she was reprimanded for asking if she could have gloves because her hands were freezing. She was held at gunpoint and accused of being a spy for the Red Army.

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“My grandmother was very elegant and loving, but a very private person. We had no idea she’d gone through any of this as it was never brought up once.

“One thing that strikes me is my grandmother never left her mother, Ewdokia, alone. Not once did they part. Even through these hardships their bond was so strong that they remained together.

“Through the atrocity that war brings, she stayed with her mum the whole time. She didn’t leave her”

Zinaida’s diaries recall the day of liberation after the war. Yet despite the celebrations, her father did not return home. They would not learn for another four decades that he had died of natural injuries in 1944.

After the war, Zinaida had been studying at University in Munich when she was given the chance to sail to England and embarked on the journey oversees with her mother.

“The two women ended up in a village called Inskipp in Lancashire” Victoria said, “By 1950 they had moved over to Bolton, which was where she met my grandfather, Sewerian Cernoculschi, at what was at the time a Ukrainian social club on Radcliffe Road.”

(Image: Victoria Leonard)The couple married in 1952 and bought a bungalow on Radcliffe Road. Despite coming from humble beginnings, they made modest income renting out properties to students in the local area.

Speaking on her own memories of Zinaida, Victoria added: “She was loving but not warm, I’m assuming because of what she had been through. She was very elegant and very private, we didn’t know what she’d endured during her lifetime. None of us had any idea until we found the diaries.

“I’ve been working on compiling the diaries for the best part of a decade, which are now available for those who wish to read them. As they were written in Russian, a lot of it had to be interpreted, so I’ve done my best to fill in the gaps.

(Image: Victoria Leonard)

Zinaida died in 2002, when Victoria was just 14 years of age. She is buried at the Tonge cemetery with her mother, Ewdokia, who died in 1991. The former had continued to write letters to her mother, even in the months after Ewdokia's death – another homage to the bond shared forever between the two brave women.

Victoria said: “The book is dedicated to my mother, I wanted to emulate this love that my grandmother had for her own mother and honour that sacred, special bond between two people who had endured the unspeakable horrors and yet still lived to tell the tale.”

The memoirs hold extra poignancy today given the Russian invasion.

Zina’s Journey: A True Story of the Unbreakable Force of the Ukrainian Spirit is available on Amazon.

Got a story? Email me at Leah.Collins@newsquest.co.uk