After Austria-Hungary collapsed, Pidhiryanka remained in exile across the Carpathians from war-torn Galicia, where the West Ukrainian People's Republic was defeated by the Poles, who then fought off the Bolsheviks and annexed the territory.
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As a teacher, poet and Ukrainian patriot she would have been a likely target of the NKVD, both before the invasion by Nazi Germany in 1941 and during Joseph Stalin's post-war campaign against Ukrainian nationalism.
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According to the memoirs of one of her pupils, Stefan Terlezki, the two women taught more than a hundred children between them.