How they took Mykola into the army

After the eighth grade Mykola studied in Rivne, and that is where he was on the military register. But because they would not give him his diploma, he was a believer, he moved back to Frankopil and registered in the district office in Korets. In Rivne nobody had troubled him and he had not yet been taken into the army, though he was already 19.

In Korets they went after him at once and started summoning him for a “conversation”, to take him into the army. Our older brothers, Volodya and Valik, had just served their army terms and had refused to take the oath. So when Mykola came into the military office, the surname Yarmoshik was enough: they knew at once that he was a brother of those Yarmoshiks and would not take the oath either. And they hardened against Mykola right away, because they knew there was no persuading these believers.

They shouted at Mykola there and pressured him: if you will not take the oath, we will send you to the farthest, worst place there is. Which is what they did, they sent him to the farthest point of all: Murmansk region, the city of Severomorsk, right on the Arctic polar circle, on the shore of the Barents Sea. Under Soviet rule they tested their weapons there, and the air was the dirtiest, with radiation. Hard frosts there, and the northern lights.

Before they took Mykola into the army, the notice from the enlistment office came on the next-to-last day, and he was summoned again, together with our father. They wanted to accuse father too, as though it were father not allowing him to take the oath. They kept the two of them in that office for several hours, until about nine in the evening, and at five in the morning he already had to be at the enlistment office. And they still had to get home to Frankopil from Korets, 18 kilometres, and no buses ran that late. But God took care of that too, praise God!

The young people from the church and our older brothers had gathered to pray for Mykola and to see him off on the long road, and Mykola and father were deliberately being held and not released. That is how the devil wanted to knock Mykola's young heart off the right road, the road that leads to God. But God kept Mykola on all his ways, for which great thanks be to God. And with everything he had to live through in the army, he could only have come through it all with faith in Almighty God.

For me these are precious memories and examples: that my brothers had such firm faith in God and, no matter what, stayed faithful to God alone! Praise God! I was just so sorry for my dear brother, two years of army ahead of him, and they are deliberately keeping him in an office so that nobody can pray over him, bless him, give him parting words 😭 I understand his young heart, and how much he had to live through.