Vasily Rodionovich Bunelik was born and raised in the small town of Mykhailivka (Михайлівка) Zaporiz'ka region, Eastern Ukraine. One of seven children and living in very poor circumstances inspired him to value education and embrace communism and so qualified as a teacher by the age of 21. He was noted as a gifted communicator and soon promoted to senior positions becoming director of а teacher training college in Xhortitsa, Ukraine by the mid 1930s. 

 

Following the German invasion of Poland in 1939, which at that time included a substantial area of Western Ukraine, Bunelik was sent to Lviv to establish a network of Soviet schools in the area. However the non-aggression pact between the Soviet Union and Germany (Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact) was broken in June 1941 by the German invasion of West Ukraine. Bunelik fled to Kiev, but the Germans soon occupied that area and beyond. In June 1942 Vassily Bunelik was forcibly sent to work in Breslau (now Wroclaw) in occupied Poland, and being identified as a political activist, he was interrogated by the Gestapo in March 1943 and sent to Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp A year later he was sent to work on a project in Leibnitz, near the Yugoslav border and from there he escaped as far as Maribor in Yugoslavia where he was arrested again. Giving a false name and personal history gave him time to effect another escape in the summer of 1944, making his way over the Hungarian border where he was arrested yet again and sent to Veszkeny Prisoner of war camp. There he stayed until the liberation of the area by the Red Army in the spring of 1945.

 

After the war he was given a seemingly humble position of teacher at a school for disabled children at Brukhovitch near Lviv, which he nonetheless enjoyed and gave him time to write his memoires of his war years and of the horrors of Mauthausen Concentration Camp which was published in 1966 under the title "Солдати Малої Війни" (Soldiers of the Little War)