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, Zena 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 w.