.......more about Walter Maksimovich.........
 | sketch by Vasyl Madzelan |
My mother, Maria Hranyczny (1931-1998), as a 16 year old girl was deported for the second time by the Poles in 1947 as part of a military operation code named Akcja "Wis³a"/Operation "Vistula" to what was until 1945 a German territory called Lower Silesia, now called Dolny Slısk. This area was given to Poland as part of the Yalta Pact as compensation for the Polish territories in the east (ethnically predominantly Ukrainian) that were claimed by Stalin in September 1939 as part of the Molotov-Ribentrop agreement. Today the eastern half of the divided land is within Belarus and Ukraine.
In the fall of 1944, her entire family left the native village of Hyrova, near Dukla in Poland, and was among the first transports of Lemkos who headed for Ukraine. This desperate move was precipitated by very heavy and protracted military operations that took place in this region, better known as the Battle for the Dukla Pass. They settled on a cooperative farm in raion/county Pokrovy, oblast/district Dnepropetrovsk, in the middle of devastated by the Germans Ukraine. They lived in the soviet Ukraine for just one year. Their native village of Hyrova suffered very heavy damage during the three month long Battle for the Dukla Pass, but very few houses and the Uniate church survived, unlike other villages that are no longer on the map. Through correspondence with those who stayed behind in Hyrova, and being disillusioned with their living conditions in soviet Ukraine, her oldest brother Ivan Hranyczny decided in the fall of 1945 that they will just leave everything behind and try to illegally cross the border, in an attempt to reach their native village in Poland. As fate would have it, their attempt to cross the border did succeed but others, who tried this shortly thereafter, failed. They and their descendants are residing in western Ukraine to this day.
My father, Jan Maksymowicz (1917-1995), was born in a little village called Voltushova by Rymaniv Zdriy. In 1940 he was designated by the village elderman (his brother) to leave for Germany (German occupied Austria), and became part of a human wave of cheap labor from central Europe, the so called "Ost-arbeiters", who toiled on German farms and in factories during WW II. Shortly after the inhabitants of Voltushova, together with the residents of nearby Doshno and Balutianka left for Ukraine (in June 1945), Voltushova was burned down, most likely by units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). They settled in a village of Teofipilka, county Kozova, district Ternopil. By the way, residents of these villages were known for their wood carving skills, craftsmanship that was practiced by my father and several of his brothers and is still practiced by a few descendants of the other families who now reside in Ukraine.
My father returned to Poland from the British zone of the Ally occupied Austria in 1947 but never made it back to his native village. Polish acquaintances warned him in Sanok, not to proceed to his native village or he will never be seen again. He heeded the warning and headed instead to Krakow where he worked as a barrel maker. Within a year he contacted friends in Lower Silesia, who were deported there as part of Akcja "Visla", shortly thereafter moved there and married my mother, Maria Hranyczny, in 1948. I was born in a hospital in the town of Lubin, which is 15 miles from Legnica, followed by my sister Anna, who was born in 1952.
There were Poles, especially those that were resettled to these formerly German territories from areas which in 1945 became part of Soviet Ukraine, whose attitude to these dispersed Lemkos was very unfriendly. They would call them Ukrainians (yes, being Ukrainian still holds a negative connotation in Poland) or "Banderovtsy" (members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.) In light of the above I consider myself to be a Ukrainian from Lemkivshchyna.
I visited my 30-40 relatives in already independent Ukraine in 1993, 1995 and July 2000 and enjoyed it a lot, especially since I speak Ukrainian and always carry a camcorder with me. I experienced a deep emotional impact when the KLM airplane was touching down in Kyiv in 1993, because I was aware that millions of people gave their lives so that Ukraine could become an independent country and not just be a colony of Poland or Russia. By visiting I got to see with my own eyes that some of my first cousins are better off than others, are well educated, have good positions, cars, etc., and to see how the country is sliding down economically during this post communist period.
My uncle, Paul Hranyczny, was also an Ost-arbeiter, but he chose not to return to Poland, which was slowly after WW II becoming a Stalinist country, but instead headed to the United States, with a slight detour to England, where he lived from 1950 until 1960. It is thanks to him that we as a family emigrated from Poland in 1964 and settled in New York City. He was our sponsor, the person who signed the Affidavit of Support, an action for which I and later others that we in turn sponsored, are very grateful. I visited the areas of my parent's birthplace in Poland in 1968 and then together with my wife Tania in 1979. Again, this time with my neighbor George Warholic, in July of 2000, we spent three days at Vatra 2000 in Zdynia, visted the Lemko Museum in Zyndranowa. An experience I repeated in July 2002. Vatra 2002. Zyndranowa 2002
After obtaining a Bachelor of Engineering from City College of NY in 1973 in electrical engineering, I have been working for NASA, in suburban Maryland, just outside of Washington, DC. I am a Uniate, i.e., Catholic of the Eastern Rite (Ukrainian Catholic), and my wife and both children, just like my mother, are Orthodox Christians.
From 1964 to 1973, while I lived in NYC, I visited Lemko Park in Monroe, NY for picnics, festivals and celebrations of the Holy Trinity / "Zeleny Sviata" holiday. Assimilation works very well on both sides of the Atlantic; shrinking base of support resulted in this property being auctioned off in October 1997.
I have many Lemko friends who continue to reside in New York and New Jersey and through the miracle of Internet, with Lemko-Ukrainians/Lemko-Rusyns from all over the world. Realizing the great potential that Internet was offering back in 1996, I decided to publicize the plight of the people who hailed from the Carpathian Mountains utilizing this medium of information. The http://www.lemko.org internet site is designed primarily for anyone whose roots come from that part of Galicia known as Lemkovyna, or Lemkivshchyna in Ukrainian, mostly descendants of the turn of the century "Ruthenian/Rusyn/Ukrainian" immigrants, particularly English speaking North Americans, who wish to learn more about their heritage. As a result of the first partition of Poland in 1772, Galicia was occupied by Austria, eventually it wound up in the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the empire's disintegration in 1918. Prior to it, and from 1918 until 1939, Galicia was administered by Poland.
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Document URL: http://lemko.org/wmax.html
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Date Posted: December 12th, 2000
Last Revision: January 22nd, 2008
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