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14 WWW.UNWLA.ORG “ НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ ”, ЛИПЕНЬ - СЕРПЕНЬ 2020 Our Cover Artist Ola Rondiak’s art stems from her family’s experiences living in Ukraine during the historical events of WWII, Stalin’s Iron Curtain, the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014. These events shaped Ola Rondiak’s worldview. Emotional experiences surface in her art as her own history intertwines with Ukrainian history and tradition, preparing the viewer for "contemporary art with a historical conscious ness ." For Rondiak, the female portrait underpins the terrain for truth and dignity. Her contemporary "Motanka" sculptures, inspired by ancient Ukrainian rag dolls, serve as a talisman for good health, fortune, and healing. Rondiak’s work is part of a permanent collection of The Revolution of Dignity Museum in Kyiv, Ukraine, The Ukrainian Embassy in Bern S witzerland, Shevchenko Museum & National Museum of Decorative Arts in Kaniv, Ukraine, and private collectors. Rondiak’s landmark painted mural in the historic district of Kyiv, Ukraine, is a prominent part of Kyiv’s Street Art explosion. Readers can follow Ola on Instagram @olarondiakart or on her website at www.olarondiak.com . __________ Embroideries from the Gulag In 1943 – 1944, during the se cond Russian invasion of Ukraine in WWII, Ukrainian in tellectuals and nationalists, my grandfather among them, were forced to flee from their homeland to Western Eu- rope or face certai n death at the hands of Stalin’s secret service (NKVD). A sympathetic R ussian sol- dier warned Ola’s grandfather of his imminent ar- rest and he set out on foot, with his 11 - year - old daugh ter Maria (who would become Ola’s mother) for western Europe. His wife Paraskevia Michniak, Ola Ron diak’s maternal grandmother, stayed be- hind with their other daughter who was ill and im- mobile. The plan was for the family to reunite later. The reunion never happened. The daughter, Ola’s aunt and namesake, never recovered and passed away in Kolomiya, Ukraine, in 1944. On March 28, 1947, Paraskev ia was arrested by the NKVD, charged under Statute 20.54.1.A “Assisting the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA)” and sentenced by a military tribunal to 25 years of hard labor at the Women’s Strict Regime Prison in Mordovia, Rus- sia. There was no trial, no court, and no judge. While in prison, at great personal risk, Par- askevia began embroidering religious icons at night, by the light of the northern latitudes. She used cloth and threads from h er clothes and fish bones for needles. Stalin died in 1953. In 1956, Ni- kita Khrushchev granted amnesty to political pris- oners who were victims of Stalin’s repressions. Paraskevia received her “Certificate of Reha bilita- tion” on July 2, 1956, and smuggled t he embroi- dered icons (which were strictly forbidden by So- viet authoriti es) out of the prison by sewing them into her clothes. Unable to join her family in Amer- ica (the Iron Curtain continued to be a barrier), she returned to Kolomiya and began a written (a lbeit censored) trans - Atlantic correspon dence with Ola’s grandfather and mo ther. In the late 1960s, an American tourist successfully smug gled some of Paraskevia’s embroideries to her family in the West. Paraskevia passed away in 1975. Her story is one of mill ions of stories of displaced, imprisoned, and repressed Ukrain ians in WWII. Since proclaim ing their independence in 1991, Ukrainians have struggled to fight the forces of corruption and Russian influence. Ola Rondiak witnessed the Orange Revolution (2004) and the Revolution of Dignity (2014) first hand. Her col- lage “Maty Revolution , ” a symbolic completion of her grandmother’s partially completed prison em- broidery, captures the struggle of Ukrainians to move towards European values of openness and democracy in the face of a tyrannical regime. In March of 2014, Russia illeg ally annexed Crimea an d invaded the sovereign territory of Ukraine in the Donbas region. According to the UN, over 13,000 have died in the conflict, while two milli o n have been displaced .
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