A woman, 20, with long smooth hair and model-perfect makeup, wearing a red dress and high heels during her visit to Bismarck on Friday, knows someone who had to pick potato peelings from a dump and boil them so he wouldn't starve.

And she knows someone who worked 12 hours a day outside, his clothes covered in ice, then slept under a shelter of branches and snow to keep warm. And she knows a woman who scraped up flour dust crusted on decayed boards and boiled it so she and her sister wouldn't starve.

They were all her relatives, as were the relatives who were so poor they ate what they found in the forest - berries, mushrooms, cedar cones; they even chewed tree resin. And the ones who were in forced labor, carrying lumber waist-deep in icy water, who were always hungry, wore shabby clothes, were covered with lice and had no soap. Her relatives endured these hardships from early in the 20th century.

Their drive to survive continues, in her.

"I always have to have a goal. I can't live without it," said Evgenia Kramarenko, a college student in the Ukraine. She was the honored guest of the Germans from Russia National Convention held this week in Bismarck at the Best Western Ramkota Inn.

Her essay, the story told to her by her paternal grandmother about what several generations of her relatives went through after migrating to Russia, won the organization's annual essay contest. Her prize is a $750 college scholarship from the international organization, as well as a $100 scholarship from the Black Hills chapter in South Dakota.

Vera Hoff, of Rapid City, S.D., who coordinates the essay contest, said that's significant - that it'll take care of much of one year's cost of college in the Ukraine.

About 30 percent of North Dakota's population has ancestral ties to people who left Germany for a new life in Russia, according to historical information from the local Germans from Russia chapter. The exodus started in the 1700s when Catherine the Great of Russia, a monarch of German heritage, issued a manifesto inviting her kinsmen to settle land annexed in a war.

They were promised a new life in Russia where they'd be given land, building materials and farm machinery - so they spent a year getting there. That's where they found starvation - because the only promise kept was the land. There were no building materials or machinery. They literally had to dig into the ground, trying to shelter themselves from the elements. And about 75 percent of them starved.

Many left for America in the early 1900s. Some of Kramarenko's family returned to Germany, others stayed.

Kramarenko has had her own saga. At 11, her father, a pilot, died in a plane crash, leaving his wife and two children. She said she remembers thinking from that moment that she had to help her mother and help raise her younger brother.

"All my achievements to this day is thanks to, in some way … that tragedy," she said. "I became stronger."

Kramarenko was working as a translator on Ukraine tours when she met Hoff, one of the tourists. Hoff, so impressed by her, convinced Kramarenko to enter the essay contest.

Kramarenko, who is spending her summer break working as a cook at a New York children's camp, was brought to Bismarck to accept her award and scholarships.

She plans to be in the aviation field, like her father.