‘I’ve seen the atrocity’
Ukrainian woman who fled during World War II reflects on Russian attack
When she was about 11 years old, Myroslawa Iwachiw recalled living on the second floor of a farmhouse in Germany as World War II was ending and sharing a room with her 6-yearold sister and a 2-year-old boy of another family seeking refuge.
Iwachiw, now 88, remembers one night she heard screaming and commotion outside. She opened the window, looked to her left and saw the red tiles of the roof shattering. She said she quickly realized it was an airplane shooting in the area.
She grabbed her sister and the boy — one under each arm — and ran for safety, Iwachiw said.
“I ran to the basement with them, from the second floor down,” Iwachiw said. “I didn’t trip. I didn’t drop the kids. To this day, I don’t know where I got the strength.”
Sitting at the dinning room table in her Munster home, Iwachiw said she and her husband made careers as a tailor and seamstress in America. With a laugh, she said that meant she always sewed her own curtains, including the curtains hanging behind her.
Iwachiw proudly — with faint tears in her eyes — pointed to a painting on the opposite wall.
The painting was of a small home with white exterior walls and a hay-like roof in a prairie, which she said is identical to her childhood home in Ukraine.
Iwachiw, who goes by Myra, was born in 1933 in a little village outside of Berezhany, Ukraine, called Lisnyky. She had two sisters, one older and one younger, and her parents, Petro and Paraskevia, were farmers, she said.
Growing up, Iwachiw said her family wasn’t poor and had a nice house. But, toys and candy were a luxury, she said. By the time she was 7, Iwachiw said her grandmother assigned her chores.
“She used to say to me ‘You have to be busy otherwise you will think of doing mischiefs,’ ” Iwachiw said.
Iwachiw said she attended very little school as a young girl because Russia and then Poland occupied Ukraine. When Germany occupied Ukraine, she went to school for a couple months but then World War II started, she said.
In May 1944, her family decided to leave Ukraine because her three cousins were in the Ukrainian underground military during the war. After her cousins’ immediate family was taken to Siberia as punishment, her
family became her cousins’ next of kin in Ukraine so her family fled, she said.
The family packed some food, a cow, a horse and a wagon with them. They made it by foot to Budapest, Hungary.
“It was hard. No one gave us any food, except in Czechoslovakia. We lived on our own, whatever my mother had,” Iwachiw said.
In Budapest, German soldiers led her family and other refugees by a river, she said. The German soldiers told the refugees to sell their horses and wagons and loaded the people on a freight train, Iwachiw said.
She recalled a time the train stopped near a cornfield, and sneaking off to take some corn husks. She recalled people putting the corn husks in their sleeves to take back on the train, Iwachiw said.
Once in Germany, the refugees were sent throughout the country, she said, and her family was sent to a rich man’s farm. She recalled multiple gardens and a big iron gate at the front of the property, Iwachiw said.
Her family stayed at the farm for about one year, Iwachiw said, as the war came to the end and its aftermath. Her family then ended up in Bayreuth, Germany, living in a bombed-out school.
Her father and a few others went to an American military camp and her family lived there for a while, Iwachiw said. At the camp, she attended school and her family was able to secure a sponsor to come to America, a man in Maryland who needed workers on his farm, she said.
Her parents signed a contract to work on the farm for one year as repayment for the trip, Iwachiw said. The family took a military ship for about 11 days to get to Maryland, she said.
They made it America in 1949, Iwachiw said, and she recalled her father harvesting hay and her and her mother milking the cows and feeding the farm animals. Iwachiw said she would do her work early in the morning and then get ready for the school bus by 8:45 a.m.
The family worked for a year, Iwachiw said, being paid $12.50 a week. Her cousin wrote her a letter to let her know there were more job opportunities in Chicago. After the year ended, she said they had enough money for two one-way tickets to Chicago, so her and her father went.
“My mother was left with $3.78,” Iwachiw said.
Iwachiw and her father made it the Burnside neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Iwachiw said her father got a job and she lied about her age to also get a job, and within a year they saved enough money to bring the rest of her family to Chicago.
Burnside had a large Ukrainian population, with a church and social club, Iwachiw said. Her first job was working in a photo studio developing the pictures, she said.
She met her husband, Mykola, at the social club, and they went on to have three children: Orysia, Stephanie and Jerry. The family moved to Munster in 1972, buying a home near St. Josephat Ukrainian Church.
Mykola died in 2007, but they have five grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
After 1994, Iwachiw went back to Ukraine three times: once by herself, once with her husband, and once with her oldest daughter, Orysia. Iwachiw said she was able to see her childhood home again.
Watching the war in Ukraine has been devastating, Iwachiw said, and she didn’t sleep the first few nights after it started.
“I’m living through it. I’ve seen the atrocity,” Iwachiw said.
Stephanie Bohney, Iwachiw’s daughter, said she’s seen in her mother over the last month a response of preparedness — cooking food and checking in on friends — as well as a sense of fear and suspicion. Both responses, Bohney said, directly relate to what she experienced during World War II.
That response is not limited to just her mom, Bohney said.
“(Ukrainians) always lived in fear and very suspicious. That’s the feeling that came out of it all. Even after leaving, you can’t get over that fear and you can’t get over that suspicion. That’s always how it has been in the Ukrainian community. They have never felt safe,” Bohney said.
But, Iwachiw said what is giving her hope is the world’s response to the war.
“What gives me a little bit encouragement is how people are reacting, how they are helping, how they are getting things together. I think Ukraine shook the conscious of the world.”