My friend Ivanna Maszczak, who has died aged 100, survived a brutal seven-year spell in a Siberian labour camp in the late 1940s and early 50s before moving to the UK, where she made a new life for herself.

A native of Ukraine, Ivanna had fallen foul of the Soviet authorities when they discovered her support for Ukrainian independence. After serving her sentence and arriving in Britain during the mid-60s, she kept up her connections with Ukraine – and her support for its independence movement – via the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain and worship at the Ukrainian Catholic cathedral in Mayfair, London.

Small and tough, she lived the whole of her life in the UK in a third-floor flat in Notting Hill, west London, working as a librarian. Over the years she became a local celebrity and a well-known face in the Ukrainian community in London.

Ivanna was born in the village of Krupets, to Osyp Przepiórski, a Greek Orthodox priest, and his wife, Iryna (nee Marenin), a teacher. She went to school in the nearby town of Sokal, and had a happy childhood in a creative family, surrounded by music, poetry, amateur dramatics and lively group discussions.

During the German occupation of Ukraine in the second world war she finished her education at the Ukrainian State Trade College in Sokal, where she graduated in 1943. During Soviet rule of the country she was forcibly resettled, in 1947, to the Olsztyn region of Poland.

It was there that she was arrested by the security forces in 1948 for collaborating with the Ukrainian underground movement. Sentenced to 10 years’ hard labour in the sub-arctic gulag at Magadan, Kolyma, 10,000km away, she endured torture and other unspeakable hardships across seven years before being released in 1955 after the death of Stalin.

In 1956 she began working in a library in the Polish town of Kentrzyn, and during that time completed a librarianship course at the Polish ministry of culture and arts in Gdynia. In 1965 she was able to visit a friend in London, and there was introduced to a fellow Ukrainian, Wolodomyr Maszczak, a newspaper administrator, who proposed to her five days after they met. She remained in London, where they married the same year.

Initially Ivanna worked in London as a clerk for Barclays Bank, before moving back to being a librarian at the Association of Ukrainians.

Once she retired, she began painting, and discovered she had a talent for it, creating beautiful, delicate scenes, including of traditional wooden churches from her homeland. She also wrote two volumes of memoirs, Roads from the Past (2010) and Love and Pain (2024).

Although she had endured great horror and pain, she never showed any self-pity, treating her extreme experiences as “just one of those things that happened”, and instead focusing on the joy of being alive. She was entirely herself, never bending to anyone else’s will. Her dignity, warmth and wonderful sense of humour – you could joke with her about anything – won her friends of all ages.

Wolodomyr died in 2012. Ivanna is survived by two nieces.