1926 — 2011
Hanna Kovalenko
A village teacher from the Poltava region who spent forty-two years teaching children in the school where she had once sat at the front desk herself.
Childhood
Hanna was born the eighth child into a family that already had seven. Her parents’ house stood at the edge of the village, with a field beginning just behind it, and she remembered that the first sound each morning was not her mother’s voice but the wind in the thatch.
Childhood ended early. In 1933 the family lost two children, and no one in the house spoke of it aloud for another thirty years — not until Hanna began writing down what she remembered.
Her parents’ house, around 1935
First year of school, 1934
The village
The village had the same name as the river beside it. The school stood in the centre, opposite what had once been the church, and in the 1930s it held four classes for two hundred children.
I knew every child in this village by name. And every one of their fathers — because I had taught him too.
The interview
In 2004 Hanna agreed to a long conversation on camera. The recording runs almost thirty minutes; for most of it she talks about other people rather than herself.
This video has not been published yet.interview-hanna-01
Letters
After Hanna died, a folder of letters was found in her desk — most of them from former pupils who had written to her for decades from one city or another.
Letter from a pupil, 1971
One of the letters opens with the words the family later had cut into her headstone.
You were the only one who told me back then that there was something I could do.
Her voice
An excerpt about her first day of work at the school
Transcript
I walked into the classroom and realised I had no idea where to begin. So I simply asked them their names. That took the whole of the first lesson.
