Baltimore Ukrainians mark one year since invasion
Every morning for the past year, Ann Kerda wakes up and checks for updates, as does the rest of the congregation of St. Michael the Archangel Ukrainian Catholic Church in Baltimore.
Feb. 24 marks one year since Russian tanks rolled over the border to invade Ukraine.
“We’re all on our phones and in touch with family. Together we piece it together. You’ll be on the phone with a family member or a friend and suddenly hear the air raid sirens and they’ll say ‘oh I still have a few minutes’,” Kerda said. “I wake up at whatever time and first thing is to check what’s happening.”
For the church community of about 220 families, consuming news updates might have come first, but actions have followed since.
“They’re writing back to us saying ‘hey can you buy us some trucks?’, and so we organized a dinner to fundraise for trucks,” said John Wojtowycz, who manages the church’s finances. “We’re all in the same boat and living the same scene together, so you come up with ideas.”
Once a month, parishioners take turns making 4,800 pierogis to sell. Last December, the congregation coordinated with military chaplains to buy an ambulance, while retiring doctors and dentists, as well as local hospitals, have donated medical equipment to send to the war zone.
Some church members have taken in family members as refugees, while others have watched fretfully as their families stay.
“It hits home. My husband is directly from Ukraine with daughter and grandkids there. Every spare moment he is on his phone listening to news and reading articles,” parishioner Maria Yavorivskyy said. “Initially when the war broke out, we were trying to get the oldest grandkid back here.”
Kerda, Wojtowycz and Yavorivskyy share a common backstory for their generation of Ukrainian immigrants in the United States — their parents were kidnapped by Nazis and forced into farms and work camps during World War II. After the war, instead of returning home to live under Soviet rule, the parents left for America.
Wojtowycz, a 1969 graduate of Patterson High School, said he remembers when you couldn’t walk down the streets of Canton without hearing conversations in Ukrainian. The parish on Eastern Avenue across from Patterson Park is more than 110 years old. Kerda said she believes the first Ukrainian church in Maryland was a chapel in Curtis Bay, built in 1909.
A few blocks away, Saint
Michael’s Ukrainian Orthodox Church is on Gough Street. Attempts to contact this church by The Baltimore Sun had not been returned by time of publishing.
Every Saturday, some of the congregation’s families carpool to a middle school in Bethesda where children take Ukrainian language and culture classes.
This weekend, both M&T Bank Stadium and Camden Yards will be lit in Ukrainian blue and yellow. On Friday evening, St. Michael’s hosted a candle vigil prayer service that included a popular battle cry, “Slava Ukraini,” which translates to “glory to Ukraine” and is met with the response “glory to the heroes.” For Saturday morning, the church chartered a bus bound for a rally at the Lincoln Memorial.
“Once you taste freedom, there is no going back. Ukrainians have tasted freedom and independence, so then we will die for our country,” Wojtowycz said. “That to me is so powerful. We will do whatever it takes to keep our independence from being taken over by Russia.”
Russia currently controls 18% of Ukrainian land, up from 8% at the start of the invasion while at least 8,000 Ukrainian civilians have died in the conflict, according to the Associated Press. Estimates suggest tens of thousands of soldiers have been killed on both sides.
According to the United Nations, 8.1 million refugees have fled Ukraine, which had a population of about 43 million before the war in a land mass slightly smaller than Texas, while another 5.4 million people still inside the country have been displaced.