UHEC Audio Collections

Michael Andrec: This is an oral history interview of Christyna Sheldon on behalf of the Ukrainian History and Education Center on July 24th, 2025.

And just in the interest of full disclosure, Christina and I have known each other for a long time, since probably the early 1990s at some point. So again, just in the interest of full disclosure.

So please, just for the recording, state your name.

Christyna Bodnar Sheldon: I am Christyna Bodnar Sheldon, and I've known Michael for a very long time.

I'm now 84 years old, and I arrived in the United States in 1950 at the end of March after a horrendous sea journey in New York City. My paternal grandmother and uncle were our sponsors, and we lived with them for a short, short time.

My mother was a widow from 1944 until 1950. She had met her second husband in a displaced persons camp in Mittenwald, Germany, and the plan was to have the marriage in the United States pretty much as soon as we arrived. So by July, my mother got married to Dr. Volodymyr Ivan Martynets and pre-

In preparation for that marriage, we were helped to find a dwelling in Jersey City, to get out of Manhattan, where my mother and her parents, my maternal grandparents, Olena and Mykola Humennyi, had lived in a rat-infested tiny apartment behind a bakery off Orchard Street. Typical newly arrived Ukrainian experience.

So when one of our friends from Mittenwald, Mr. Gavur, who had, I think, two or three sons and a beautiful daughter, and they were laborers, but very, very helpful. They had been in the United States for about a year, but they had made all sorts of contacts and they were living in Jersey City. We met at church, of course. Everybody meets at church.

And Mr. Gavur offered to find the Humennyis and their daughter, widowed Lida Bodnar, a very nice apartment in Jersey City. So we moved probably at the beginning of July from Manhattan to this wonderful duplex apartment in a brownstone.

MA: Which year would that have been?

CBS: 1950, right. And at the end of the month, at the end of July, my mother and Volodymyr Ivan Martynets got married, and so we were a family of stepfather, mother, and I lived in the upstairs area, and then my grandparents lived in the basement level, which had the kitchen and the dining area.

The reason we were able to afford this is that the building was owned by a Slovak man who had arrived before the Second World War and he bought up a lot of properties, a lot of the brownstones that were very badly neglected but beautifully built initially. So in this three-family home, the downstairs apartment was empty because he was holding it for a daughter who was going to get married in about a year. So we knew we had about a year to spend in this very nice place.

And the first thing that my бабця did was to go out into the yard, which was totally neglected, full of weeds. She pulled the weeds out, she dug, and she planted stuff. So Ukrainian garden, both flowers and veggies.

I played on the street with a bunch of kids who were from Polish backgrounds, Italian backgrounds. A couple of Ukrainians.

Our neighbors on the corner were the Stetsiuk family. That was Professor Yosyf Stetsiuk, I think, who had taught my mother Latin. He had married one of his students who was a couple of years older than my mother, but a friend of my mother's. They had a son, Yurko Stetsiuk, so he was my best playmate. And life was very happy.

And in that summer, I managed to learn English quite well. So that of a family of grandparents, newly married daughter and son-in-law doctor, who was working in a hospital in Manhattan. And my mother worked in a factory sewing buttonholes. My grandmother said she had to earn some money, so she had a cleaning offices at night kind of job. But I was the only fluent English speaker.

And my first year of school, full year, was in fourth grade. My teacher was Helen Seely. And once she discovered that I was really good in math, because I learned in the German school system, I mean, in the displaced persons camp, we could do long division by third grade. And she was very impressed. And then she discovered that I had a pretty good memory. So she took me aside one day and she said, "Christyna, I want you to pronounce words the way I do. Don't talk the way the kids do. Don't say 'Joinal Skwe-ah', say 'Journal Square'." Anyway, it was Miss Sealy who put me on the path of good English pronunciation so that I would not sound like a New Jersey kid.

There were lots of newly arrived Ukrainians in Jersey City at that time. About a year after we moved into this wonderful apartment, my mother's brother, Lev Humennyi, who was a musician, introduced us to newly arrived Marian and Ivanka Kots. They turned into great activists in the Ukrainian community. They were great philanthropists. They made wise decisions about purchasing properties in Soho of New York. But their first steps were to run a Ridna Shkola, and to run a Plast. And the домівка for Plast was somewhere on 4th Avenue, a few blocks away from the apartment where we lived, so I could walk there by myself.

MA: Do you remember the address of where you lived?

CBS: It was 4th Street between Grove and maybe Erie. And it's... Аbout 15 years ago, I drove to a wedding in that area, and all of those beautiful brownstones were razed, totally replaced by shanties, honestly, you know, public housing that just didn't last, that's falling down. It was more of a slum 15 years ago than it had ever been when we were living there in 1950. And on Grove Street, I'm sure that the домівка was on Grove Avenue, Grove Street.

There was a grocery store owned by the Anderson couple, Polish people, and they allowed everybody to charge. Бабця often sent me to pick up, you know, a little bit of сметана or two more potatoes because they were short. And I would just put it on our charge. And then on Friday night, when my mother got paid, she would go to the grocery store and pay the Andersons. Very neighborly living. It was wonderful. On another corner, there was a luncheonette. They didn't give credit, but an ice cream cone cost five cents. So that was my big treat. When I had done something very nice for the family, we would go get an ice cream cone.

The closest public library was on Pavonia Avenue. And I think that's probably six blocks away, six blocks on street blocks. And my grandfather, who was a great reader, would meet me at school and we would walk to the Pavonia Avenue library so that he could read newspapers, because they had newspapers in several languages. The family subscribed to Svoboda and to Nowy Swiat, Polish paper. And I remember my grandmother listening to the Polish radio stations. So when I came home for lunch, I would hear all these Polish announcers giving the news and playing songs. But at Pavonia Avenue Library, my grandfather happily read German and Polish newspapers, and tried to read in English as well. And I would go into the children's section, and I discovered Grimm's fairy tales and Anderson's fairy tales. And I would take home as many books as I could borrow, and then we would bring them back. So early in life, I discovered all those ogres and all of the bloody fairytales that, you know, why are they for children?

Okay, so the Plast домівка was a wonderful place to go on Friday nights. We had сходини. And that was fun. I was in the гурток of Жовтодзюби. But besides running the Plast groups, the Kotses decided to teach social dancing. And so maybe on Saturday nights or some other evening, all of the pre-teenagers and young teenagers would gather, and girls on one end of the room and boys on the other, and we learned to do the foxtrot and the polka and the waltz and a tango. So we were all prepared for the забави. They also, Marian and Ivanka Kots prepared kids to put on plays. So we had little entertainments at holiday times like Mother's Day. That was a very happy time.

The wonderful apartment with the garden then became destined for the daughter of the owner, and we had to move out. So my mother, stepfather, and I had an apartment right across the street in another brownstone, on the third floor, and we had to share a bathroom on the second floor. My grandmother, oh, well, my grandmother moved to a different section of the city, closer to the Ukrainian church, which is where she had started to work as a housekeeper during the day to cook the major meal for the two priests.

Meanwhile, I forgot to talk about my grandfather, my mother's father, who died. We arrived in 1950 and by 1951 in September, he had a massive heart attack and died on September 17th. So his death was one of the times when I had to use my fluent English as the translator for the family. And the, let's see, the сотрудник priest, Father Joe Sholoka, assured the family not to worry about finances, that he would take care of things, he said. So the Kowalczyk Funeral Home arranged the funeral, and they agreed to take, you know, time payments. Paid off the funeral for a year.

But the plot that Father Sholoka arranged at Holy Cross Cemetery at the other end of Jersey City was for free, and everyone wondered how that could be. Now, he might have explained the nature of that plot that was for free. But as an 11-year-old, I didn't understand. It turned out that my grandfather was buried in a pauper's grave.

And a year later... OK, бабця, who was working cleaning bank offices, saved up all of her pennies for a monument. And so in 1952, when she was ready to put up the monument, I was away at summer camp. Somebody took my grandmother to the office of the cemetery administrator and said she wanted to put up a monument. And he said, you can't because the bodies that were interred there will rest there for only a year. And then we recycle the graves. So a big tragedy. But they didn't tell me about this in camp. They didn't want to bother me.

So it wasn't until I returned from Father Smyk's camp in Stratford that I learned that my grandfather had been disinterred and reburied in a plot in Belleville, New Jersey, for which the family paid some money. And then бабця was able to put up a monument. But that was a big tragic event and everyone blamed the сотрудник priest for treating newly arrived Ukrainians with such little respect that, you know, the thought that a family could settle for a one-year burial. First of all, it cost more money to do the funeral twice, but secondly, I mean, primarily, it was the disrespect to a departed member of the family. But I'm going to take a little break. Okay.

So about 1953, I came back from camp with a broken foot -- a broken ankle, and so I couldn't go to school. The Department of Education sent a tutor, Miss Elizabeth Fredericks. Since I was alone in the apartment, because both my parents worked, Miss Fredericks would spend the whole morning with me, and I had nothing to do. There was no television at that point. She brought me library books that I could read, so my reading ability in English improved and improved dramatically. But for the entire day, I had nothing to do except the lessons that she had left me with. And so in the course of September, October, and November just before Thanksgiving, when these lessons stopped, I had covered almost the whole seventh grade curriculum.

And it was at Thanksgiving that we learned of the availability of an apartment on the "good side of town" on Montgomery Street in a building that was a two-family home, newly purchased and owned by Ukrainians, the Dmytriv family. And I don't remember, I think it was Petro and I don't... Emilia maybe, and their daughter, Olya Dmytriv. So we went to see the apartment and it was second floor, absolutely beautiful. I had my own bedroom. Of course, we had our private bath finally. It was a great place. It was across the street from St. Joseph's College. I think it's St. Joseph's... A Jesuit college. So that the seniors would walk down the street with their billowing black robes, because the seniors wore robes to classes. Very impressive. Anyway, lovely neighborhood. And I was enrolled in a new school, the Joseph H. Brenzinger School, number 17. I was then in, yeah, seventh grade.

But after a few days in classes, and we had four teachers in that class, so we changed classes in preparation for our high school experience. It was very impressive. But all the kids were new to me, A girl with thick glasses was very friendly, Judy Gutman. She said, "Anything that you don't know or you want to ask, please, I'll be right here on your side to help out." And Judy Gutman remained a great friend of mine right into our 70s when she died of cancer, living far away from me, but we were friends forever. But the teachers discovered that I had covered so much of the curriculum with Miss Elizabeth Fredericks, that I would be bored being in the 7th grade designation. And a lot of classes were held together with 7th and 8th graders. So the principal called my parents. One of my parents took time off from school. She said, "We want to put Christyna into the higher grade so she won't be bored." And so that was the point at which I skipped the 7th grade and finished that year in 8th grade.

A lot of other people, Ukrainian new immigrants, were moving from that cluster in downtown Jersey City with the old buildings and they were moving to the nicer neighborhoods so that my friends didn't all end up going to the same high schools. There were four high schools in Jersey City, and the one that was closest to the poor neighborhood, Snyder, is the one that had the fewest number of Ukrainians there, because so many of the Ukrainian families wanted to move to a better school and a better section for living. And we learned to take the buses to see each other, and the Kotses were no longer running Plast, because another... a devoted family had become part of the Ukrainian community, the Nynka family. Very devoted Plastuny, and they really were running stuff. And our сходини were now on Saturday mornings rather than Friday nights. And then Рідна Школа was being held at the church hall in downtown Jersey City. So, you know, we all knew the bus system and took buses to wherever we had to go. So that's what I remember. How much longer... I mean.. What else... How far do I need to go?

MA: So where did you go to high school? You went to high school in Jersey City.

CBS: Yes, I went to high school in Jersey City. I pleaded with my parents to send me off to either Fox Chase or Slotesburg. I loved being... I was an only child, and I loved being away in the summer, being part of a group of contemporaries, rather than being the little old lady living with her older parents. And my grandmother had been coerced into living with us, rather than being independent, because she had a series of heart attacks, mild ones. So we were a family of three adults and one kid. But I went to Lincoln High School with friend Judy Gutman and friend Anita... Anita... I'll remember her name, also a Jewish friend. It turned out that a lot of Ukrainians and a lot of, okay, not just Ukrainians, sent their kids to Catholic schools. So, my mother didn't want me to go to a Catholic school. She had had bad experiences with nuns and she said, "My kid's not going to be tainted." So I went to Jersey City and most of the people who were in the college preparatory section of the school with classes were Jewish. It was a better neighborhood and kids from that neighborhood, if they were Christians, were sent to boarding schools, or Catholics were sent to the academies, and there were two academies, and the boys went to St. Peter's Prep, maybe? Anyway, I ended up really having almost exclusively Jewish friends from my classes. There was only one Ukrainian in that group, Katya Dykhtiar. She was... She went to a different church because she was православна, so I didn't... I knew her from Plast and I knew her from some of my classes. So I was really in an exclusively, you know, English-speaking environment during my school year, school week. And it was only on weekends that I had the Plast and the Рідна Школа.

I started... I was taking music lessons in... first in Jersey City, and then the Музичний Інститут in Manhattan. And because I had a grandmother and uncle who lived in Manhattan on 9th Street and 2nd Avenue, going to the Institut, which was right around the corner on 2nd Avenue, allowed me to visit my relatives and to go have my music lessons and to go have some nice food afterwards in Ratner's Restaurant with my grandmother and uncle. So I took piano lessons from пані Байлова, who was reputed to be very, very tough.

And then in my teenage years, I did a lot of singing in the high school, in the chorus. And Ruth Lipschitz, the conductor, gave me all the solos to sing. And she kept saying, "You've got to take some voice lessons." And through another teacher at that high school, I was taken to Juilliard for an audition and accepted in the preparatory division so that my junior and senior year of high school, I spent every Saturday, you know, taking the subway up to Juilliard. My mornings were spent at Juilliard taking diction and repertoire and group singing and solfeggio and it was quite wonderful. And the voice teacher was... had a studio that... the one I was assigned to, Elizabeth Bishop, had a studio on 57th Street in Manhattan, and so once a week in the afternoon I'd take the subway and go have my voice lesson.

New York City was... The whole area was safe for teenagers to travel on their own and to do a lot of things that now would be unthinkable. I went to plays because we got discount tickets for Broadway plays. It cost like $1.25 to buy a student ticket. And I saw every single play that was popular in the 50s with friends, going with friends. One of the teachers in the Lincoln High School had a subscription to the Met Family Circle, and so she often offered me the second ticket. So I heard every opera for about four seasons at the Met.

And then the landlords in whose house we lived on Montgomery Street, the Dmytriv family. Olia Dmytriv was a businesswoman. She was a buyer for Lord & Taylor, "Better Sports Clothes", and she traveled really all over the world buying "Better Sports Clothes". So, number one, I benefited from that because she brings samples, sometimes... samples back and say, "If this fits you, you're welcome to have it." So I had some really nice clothes, even though I couldn't have afforded them. The other thing is that Olia had studied music and she was a fabulous pianist, fabulous sight reader. I could never get to that point. I envied her terribly. But she would sometimes accompany me and say, "Sing. Let's see what you've learned to sing from your voice teacher." So I had some really wonderful sessions.

Olia was part of the group of the older immigrants and the children who were very active in maintaining Ukrainian culture, and they were all part of УКК, Soyuz, National Soyuz. When Soiuz bought Soyuzivka, I went up there... Well, my parents went for some medical meetings, but I went up with Olia and her girlfriends, just to see the resort before it was even cleaned up, because they were great friends of Lysohir and his wife, the opera singer Marika Lesawyer. The Flyses were friends and palled around with Olia Dmytriv, so I got to meet some of these people. And when the Dmytrivs had a party, and they often had these very, very important Ukrainian activists at the parties, I got to meet them. I got to hear some of the singing and some of the music making, and when they put on a couple of performances, you know, great big spectacles at Carnegie Hall. We had one event that all the organizations, Musical Інститут provided its talent, choruses, church choirs provided their talent. It was an omni-chorus, and I got to sing in that, even though I was just a teenager. And we learned to dance some beautiful promenade things. But that was a result of my being, you know, a tenant in the house owned by a very cultured Olia Dmytriv.

MA: What else do you remember from, like, that crowd, like the Lysohir crowd, or your impressions of them?

CBS: Well, my biggest impression -- and I loved satire right from the beginning, you know -- was that the новоприбулі, who were immigrants because of... they had to leave Ukraina because they were the інтеліґенція that was threatened by the communists, right? Either threatened by death or sending off to сибір so that they wouldn't influence the simpler folks. So this інтеліґентна community that had arrived from displaced persons camps that thought very highly of itself. Some people were able to translate their professional training into careers in the United States. A lot were not able to because, you know, what do you do when you have a law degree? It doesn't translate easily. So doctors and engineers quickly became... really quickly became engaged in their professional... you know... the jobs for which they had trained at the universities. So they were... But they made fun of the старі іміґранти, because the старі іміґранти didn't speak Ukrainian fluently or grammatically or they had a language that was very old. A lot of them had raised their children to be totally immersed in the American life so that they wouldn't stand out and be considered the green horns. So, some children of these старі іміґранти did not speak Ukrainian at all. So, that was the attitude of the інтеліґенція that had arrived after the Second World War.

What I discovered by living in this house with, you know... close to people who were the старі іміґранти, it was at a very, you know... Іn my teenage years, I wasn't very old or sophisticated, but I saw how wrong the attitude was of the нова іміґрація toward the старі іміґранти because they didn't give them credit for all of the accomplishments that the earlier immigrants had accomplished. They had built the churches, they had maintained culture, they were supportive still. You know, institutions like Народний Союз, the newspapers. There were two newspapers, I think. I don't know what happened to the one that was published in Philadelphia. Because Svoboda existed and then бабця got another one from... Anyway, those were accomplishments of the early immigrants and the newly arrived snooty, intellectually snooty people didn't give them credit. Until later. And I think it was really my generation of people who made better bridges and got along socially Anyway, that was my impression.

I loved hanging out with Olia Dmytriv and her friends. It was a great privilege.

MA: Which generation was... which immigration wave was like Lysohir and those guys?

CBS: Oh, their parents were the economic, you know, after First World War, after First World War arrivals. A lot of them were from Pennsylvania, they had ended... yeah... and then moved. I don't know their family histories, but I think that they were like the Dmytrivs. They arrived before the Depression... Before the... Yes... Before the Depression, and had their children here. And then the Depression hit, and they went through terribly hard times. So when the Dmytriv family bought their house in 1952, let's say, and that was their first real estate venture, their children were fully grown because they had gone through the difficulty of the Depression. But, you know, hardworking and honest and so helpful. Just generous. So...

But my parents had continued their friendships with the people that they knew from Mittenwald. And Mittenwald was, I was just a young kid, but I remember well, we had a theater that was run by the Hirnyak family, those super talented people.

MA: Maybe Iosyf?

CBS: Iosyf, yes, Iosyf. And Lipa, his wife Lipa. And the people, Dr. Chulhan, who was a playwright, and his brother, who was an actor, and Pani Sai, who was a performer. Those are all part of the social group that my mother and her brother and gra..., you know, hung out with in Jersey City. And among them was a Dr. Shtokalko, Zynovii Shtokalko, who is a bandurist and a singer and a drinker and a raconteur.

In Mittenwald, my mother worked as a nurse in the hospital and they would... I think they stole alcohol and turned it into booze. But they had very little food and very little money to buy anything, yet they managed to have wonderful parties. Since my little family had arrived in Mittenwald early and we got... Бабця was the wise one and said, "let's find the smallest room on the floor so that they won't put strangers in with us. And so we did have a small room at the end of the hall, and we never lived with, you know, people that were not related to us in any way. As those other people, you know, so many people had to live in rooms for 12, and it didn't matter whether you were related or whether you were single or newly married. Really quite awful. But I remember that as a very happy time, because our little room was often filled in the evenings with people my mother worked with. And Uncle Leo, who was a violinist, a clarinetist, and a saxophonist, he made his living after the war playing in clubs in Garmisch in Munich. So he often was not in Mittenwald, but when he came back, all of his buddies, like, let's see, Hirniak, Niako Hirniak, and his German wife, who played the piano. You know, there was music happening all over the place. And we had some really great scholars who were teaching in the schools. Wonderful priests, like Father Smyk, who was young with a family, but he was a Пластун. And things, great cultural events happened in the displaced persons camp. So the life there, you know, as a child, I experienced a very full life.

And when we were living in Jersey City, A lot of those people continued to be part of the social group that my parents hung out with. So that kind of enrichment continued.

MA: So Shtokalko would come in from...? Was he living in New York?

CBS: No, Shtokalko... I didn't... I just mentioned Shtokalko as being part of the Mitenwald group.

MA: Oh, aha, yeah.

CBS: And then Stokalko arrived in the United States much later, I think, late '50s or maybe even early... I guess late '50s, because he had stayed in Germany. And the reason that our relationship, you know, we resumed it because my stepfather, who was an MD, had worked in the hospital. And then he finally got the courage to open his own medical practice in New York City. But my stepfather was a very fearful man. He didn't give up his full-time job at the hospital. He had office hours at night for mostly Ukrainians. And so he sublet a medical office from someone for the evenings. And Shtokalko, who also had a hospital job and wanted to have private patients, shared this office with Ivan Volodymyr Martynets, or John... By then my stepfather had changed his name to John Martynek, instead of Volodymyr Ivan Martynets. So, they... Because each man had a full-time job in hospitals, and then they had evening hours, and they couldn't... Obviously you're not gonna have evening hours five days a week. So they shared the office space and became really great friends, mostly through drinking. But, they had common interests, And then the other one, the third one that was already in his private practice, but hung out with him was Ilarion Chulhan, who had started writing plays, I think in Mittenwald. And he had his plays published, but one of the plays had disappeared, so that the volume is called "Дванадцять п'єс без однієї". And I'm afraid that I found the "одна" in my Uncle Leo's stash of music. But Shtokalko, yes, became part of the social group that my parents hung out with in Brooklyn, in New York... Brooklyn.

MA: So what do you remember about him, even though it isn't New Jersey?

CBS: Just full of life, and very embracing of... First of all, curious about every person he saw. His eyes would just, just laser sharp look into your soul. He wanted to know all about you. He had known me as a little girl in Mittenwald, and then he, now he knows me as a young adult in New York, and I was involved with music. I felt as though he just was, you know, looking right into my soul when he talked to me. And he wanted to share all of his knowledge, whether it was medical knowledge or musical knowledge or experience in life.

And he was married to a charming German lady who did not live with him full time. She still went back to Germany, but whenever she came... I saw her maybe three times. I was so impressed by how generous she was in sharing herself and her experiences. It was just like being in a room with five people, not one. Shtokalko knew so many areas of life, but he wasn't a braggadocio about it. He simply wanted to share. And happy. Great big booming laugh. And then when he sang it was just fabulous. And he would ask me to sing along with him. So we had... The only time that I overdid drinking to the point that I was really sick the next day, was in an evening with my parents, and Shtokalko and his buddies, a couple of buddies who had come. We started partying at about nine o'clock after his office hours were over and kept at it until after 2 a.m. And I never even realized that I probably went through half a bottle of vodka all by myself because there were three empty bottles when we finished. So, but it wasn't a drunken time, it was just such a happy sharing time. A lot of music and a lot of accounts, you know, narration of stories of what had happened. But Stokolko saw everything in a very positive light. He never complained. I mean, there were times when his life was in danger, both because of lack of... You know, lack of food, lack of lodging, lack of, you know, safety. But this man was so full of life that it, that was just part of making life experience richer. That was the thing I remembered. Because I came from, you know, parents who were a lot more timid about life than that. And he just, he wasn't timid at all.

MA: Do you remember him playing the bandura?

CBS: Oh my gosh, yes. Yes. He would just pick up the instrument and play. And he, you know, he strummed and he made up poems right there. He made up new songs. He made up words.

MA: Do you remember what the bandura looked like? Was it sort of plain or did it have like these flower decorations?

CBS: You know, I don't remember, but it was not, but it was, I know that it was a regular bandura held in the lap. It was not a, what are the ones that men play with, with the strings in front rather than sideways.

MA: Oh, right. Okay.

CBS: Okay.

MA: It was, he played it that way. He played it like perpendicular.

CBS: Yes. Okay. Yes. But he would lay on his lap sometimes on his knees and then And he said, he would point to his hand and say, "These fingernails are not good for a doctor, but I need them for my playing." Okay.

But I moved away from Jersey. Okay. so I was halfway through... I went to Connecticut College for Women in 1958 and my parents were still living in Brooklyn. And then in 1960, my stepfather decided: no more hospital work. He had purchased a big medical practice in Brooklyn. And so we needed... The family needed to move so that he could work on this big office on 9th Street and near 4th Avenue in Brooklyn. And it was... Just as I had been translator when I was 10 and 11 and 12, when the family had to move from the apartment where they had been living for eight years and loved it, but they needed to live in a different city for work purposes, I was the one who took the family car and took the newspaper ads for apartments and drove to Brooklyn and found the apartment where they lived for another eight years. So I learned a lot as a little girl of being проворна. You have to find a place to live.

MA: So that's when you, well, apart from college, that's when you moved out.

CBS: Yes. Yes, we moved away from Jersey City in 1960. A lot of good things were happening with Ukrainian stuff. I mean, the Soyuz bought its building on, I don't know, by the river and, you know, it was so impressive. And my, cousin, Mark Humennyi, my uncle's only son, was working for the UNA and Svoboda in this building on... I can't remember the name of the street. So it just looked as though the Ukrainian presence in Jersey City would be... would last forever and be very influential. And it was really totally discouraging to see the changes that occurred in real estate ownership, presence in Jersey City, et cetera. But I know that the church was built... We were not... When we were in Jersey City, the Catholic Church remained in its location in downtown, right by the river. It was later that the church was built in another section of town. I have never seen the new church.

MA: So moving backwards a bit. Returning to something about Mittenwald, just to connect up with something that the UHEC might have a connection to. You don't remember any teacher at the Gymnasia or anything. You wouldn't have been in Gymnasia, obviously.

CBS: No, I was in grade school.

MA: But maybe you encountered him named Oleksii Balabas.

CBS: No, I don't remember anything at all. The only one I remember, because he lived in the Hunter, New York area, was Ivanchuk. He was a math teacher, I think. And he taught both in the gymnasia and in the lower grades. So I knew Ivanchuk. And I knew Father Smyk. But of the other teachers, I don't remember. I had female teachers for grades one and two. And then by grade three, we had different teachers coming to teach different subjects. I don't remember them because I was in grade three in Mittenwald only until, I think November, and at that point our immigration papers had come through and we were going to be leaving. We left for Munich for all that processing stuff, which lasted like three months.

MA: So you went through the Munich center.

Not the Fallingbostel one, I guess? Because there was another huge one up north.

CBS: Yeah. No, we were in Munich for months and months. I don't remember where we spent свята, різдвяні свята. I don't think it was in Mittenwald. I think we had already moved out of our quarters. Because I remember, you know, we sailed out of Bremenhaven in March, and we had... the family referred to it as три місяці що ми були in the process of being reclassified or retested for health purposes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, so.

MA: So at what point did you know that you were going to the US?

CBS: At the end of 1949. Because in '48, when they started, I think in '48... Yeah, okay, my mother met her second husband in '48. He came as director of the hospital staff. And she was a nurse. So they knew each other for a year and then they were engaged officially in the summer of 1949. And he left for the United States in December of '49. But in '48, when they started disbanding the camps or planning to move these people out, because my mother was a widow, she was not a desirable immigrant into the United States.

So the big worry within the family was that my... And my grandparents were... they were... I think they had signed papers or volunteered to be like indentured servants to come to Tennessee for a five-year term. That was the condition under which they could be accepted. My mother and I were going to go to Canada, but because I, in second grade, I learned how to sing the Kookaburra Song about Australia, I kept nagging and saying, "I want to go to Australia." And my mother said, "It's too far away." I didn't understand distances. So, yeah, it was... And I don't know when the Marshall Plan was passed in Congress. I should look it up. I'm feeling embarrassed that I don't know the year. But once the Marshall Plan was passed and went into effect, people like my mother, a widow with earning skills, able-bodied and able to earn a living, were then invited to the United States. And so it was in 1949 that we knew that we could come here.

I remember a trip by bus from Mittenwald. By bus? No, it must have been by train to Munich and then we were put on an army kind of truck with benches and there were some female army officers who were accompanying us to the... the halls where we were going... to the dormitory halls. And we were a family of four... was given a space of like 12 feet by 12 feet, and you could separate the things with blankets so that you had some privacy. But it was a huge hall where there were dozens of people living in this huge hall, sleeping on the floor, or on cots, the army cots that were brought in. And I was very good at opening up a cot. I could do it all by myself. So yeah, I remember... And that trip was in the winter, and it must have been around Christmas time.

MA: So stepping back a little bit further, I recall that you do have some memories of Ukraine as a young child, or no?

CBS: No, what happened when I was 50 and I traveled to Ukraine, courtesy of my uncle Bohdan, who said, "You need to see where you come from." So I took my American husband and we went back to Ukraine, starting in Lviv. When we were walking around the city of Lviv, I was able to make the right turns, the correct turns to go to places like the cemetery and the bread store. So that was like some kind of, you know, physical memory?

But where my memory begins to, like, be continuous happened at the... in Slovakia. My... We were escaping from the beginning of the... Well, I guess the spring of '44, we left Lviv. And I have no recollection until we were in Slovakia in Trenčín. My father drowned. And his funeral had to be performed really quickly, on a Monday, because the Russians were coming and the Slovaks didn't want the repercussions of having sheltered, you know, displaced persons. So they wanted us out of there. And we knew we had to get on freight trains and get out of there and toward Bratislava and then Vienna. So my father drowned on a Friday, his funeral was on a Monday. Now that I know from family lore, but what I was never told, and that was part of my visceral memory, was that as the procession moved out from the little kind of roadside chapel where the services were held, and moved through the cemetery up to the grave site.

That was the memory that I was able to retrieve when I was there as a 50-year-old. And because the director of the cemetery couldn't find any record of the burial of Zenon Bodnar. But out of desperation, I told him, and he spoke some... he understood Russian, so I, in Ukrainian, narrated what I remembered as a three-year-old, well, three years old and two months. I said, "This is what happened during the funeral of my father." And I described the procession, because I was holding my mother's hand and she was weeping. And I just remembered the slope that we had to climb, the direction that we were going in, and the poplar trees that were young and waving in the wind. This was September. I guess. And when I told that story, the director of the cemetery wiped his eyes, because he'd been crying, and took down a book where only plot plans were there with symbols of the monuments. And he said, "There are three graves. We didn't know the identity of the people buried in them. But two of them have markers." The families had put on markers. And the third one was an unidentified grave. So we found the place where my father was buried through the story I told of my memory as a three-year-old.

A year later, when I brought my mother to Slovakia, we gave the director of the cemetery money to have a monument put up on my father's grave. I gave him money and then I sent him a drawing that was prepared by Bohdan Tytla for a simple monument. And we said that we would be coming back a year later with my mother. So when my mother came, Henry, my husband, stayed aside. My mother and I started out in this little roadside chapel, and I said, Mama, you lead the way. And she led right to the grave where this new monument was standing.

So, and so I begin... You know, experiencing that at age 50, that that memory was real, I began to trust some of the other snatches of memory that I had of my early years. There were incidents that happened in Vienna, where we were spending like months and months. First in a farmer's house in Hinterbrühl, which it was a farm country. Now it's just part of a suburb of Vienna, but that's where we lived for a while. I remember two incidents vividly there, and then the arrival in Bavaria and the entrance into Mittenwald. Snatches then are joined by, kind of connected, so children have pretty good memories. What else?

MA: No, I think that covers most of it, unless there's something else.

CBS: No, but the Jersey City experience, those first years, probably from 1950 to about '55, when people, when the Ukrainian group that we were part of, was living in a closer proximity and socially engaging in the new life in the United States. For me, it was a very happy time, because familiar and new were able to blend and form a life. And then as people, you know, as the adults began to make their way with language skills and better jobs and better conditions, I remember our first car was a 1956 Plymouth. Yes, in the popular colors of that day. It was great. All right.

MA: Thank you very much.