It was in the early 1930s. The repressive machinery turned on its apparatus to grind human destinies.
My father, the priest Pavle Boyko, was arrested, and we, as Shevchenko wrote, “… small and naked… scattered among the people, like mice… …”
After my father’s arrest, our large family was driven out of someone else’s house into the cold, and we, four little ones, were separated. Mom went from house to house and begged for alms. Famine mowed down the people. Mother gathered us in a peasant’s house in the village of Parafiivka, Ichnan district, Chernihiv province. She put a candle in front of the icon of St. Nicholas, lay down on a bench and folded her arms over her chest, ready to die first so she wouldn’t see our death. But our Lord Jesus Christ did not let her leave this world: the door opened – the father-priest returned from captivity and brought us some food.
He served in the church for a few days, when the president of the village council, a good-hearted man, called our mother and said: “You have to leave the village, because your husband is threatened with arrest and shooting.”
The parishioners gathered and said: “It is better to know that you are alive somewhere, than to bury you here. God will save you.”
My father gathered us all and we headed to Sumska Governorate, to the village of Razleti. There he and our mother got a job in a limestone mine. They made lime, loaded it onto wagons, and sent it down the river Desna in boats. We revived a little in Razleti, but we still had a plate of borscht and a piece of bread. Our father, realizing that we couldn’t hold out like this for long, that the Soviet secret police would come to him, would raise his hands to heaven and pray: “On me, a sinner, show Your mercy…”
One night the father had a dream of St. Nicholas who took him by the hand and led him across the sky, as if to protect him from persecution. In the morning, while the father was recounting the dream to the mother, the door suddenly opened and an old man entered, addressing the father from the threshold:
You must leave the village tonight, because you are about to be arrested and shot. Only, don’t go across the fields, but go, after dark, along the fences to the fisherman who lives on the bank of the Desna river, at the end of the village. He will transport you to the other side, and thus you will be saved…
On the same day, there was a meeting in the mine. The director complained that, apparently, the miners are not fulfilling the plan, because there are enemies of the people among the workers.
He said our father’s last name. The father rebelled, he said, he fulfills three norms. “You will defend yourself before the state prosecutor,” was the answer. In the evening, father and mother consulted: since such a dream had come true, and such a wonderful old man appeared before the meeting, he decided that he should leave! He took a bundle with a piece of bread and left.
At night, three armed bandits came to arrest the father, and the mother answered them: “We had a fight, he took the things and left.” Of course they didn’t believe her, they looked for him in the yard, pierced the hay with bayonets, while the father was already at the fisherman’s house. “Now I am not allowed to transport you, – the fisherman addressed him. – Let everything calm down, and I will transfer you in the morning.
In the pre-dawn fog, the fisherman ferried my father to the other shore. Father ran 25 km to the town of Krolevets, caught a train there and went to Poltava. In Poltava, he got a job as a stoker at a thermal power plant and soon invited us to his home. After some time, father started serving in the Poltava temple, where I also helped him. When I grew up, I became a subdeacon with the archbishop of Poltava, and in 1943, when Poltava was liberated from the Germans, I went to the front as a volunteer.
During the battles, I often prayed to St. Nicholas, and the Lord protected me all the way to Berlin itself.
Here I am for 30 years, bringing my life’s journey to an end, serving in the temple dedicated to St. Nicholas the Miracle Worker of Myra in the Pokrovsky Monastery. The first foundation stone was laid by Emperor Nicholas II, the second by Empress Alexandra Feodorovna, the third by Grand Duchess Alexandra Petrovna, the founder of the monastery (now glorified in the image of a saint – ed. author)
See, my dears, what mercy Saint Nicholas shows to everyone who turns to him with faith.
Prepared by: SergeI Geruk