NADIA LUCIW

Date and Place of Birth: February 7, 1943, Krakow, Poland

Date of Interview: July 12, 2023

Place of Interview: Toronto, Ontario

Interviewer: Andriy Shwec

Length of Interview: 1 hour 16 min

(Excerpt):

NL: So, I can tell you a little story about the Ukrainian Students Club [at Rutgers University]. It was an active group of students, must have been 40 or 50 of us in the club, and Professor Taras Hunczak was our consultant for that club. Every club had to have a professor, mentor, or consultant. A lot of us were history majors and Professor Hunczak was a history teacher. We decided to have an event and invite the Ukrainian USSR representative to the United Nations to come and make a speech.

Interviewer: Do you remember his name?

NL: I don’t, I couldn’t find my papers, sorry. He agreed, he accepted. Word got out that we were hosting this event and it drew a lot of negative attention from the Ukrainian community, articles in the newspaper, phone calls. I was the Vice-President of the Ukrainian Students Club, the President resigned, he wanted to cancel it. I met with Professor Hunczak, and I said, “What do you think?”, and he said “It’s your decision, I will support whatever you decide”. I said, “I think we should go through with it”, and he said “Yeah, you’re right, let’s do it”.

Interviewer: What was your reasoning for going through with it?

NL: I thought it would be good for us to hear what to say. We had prepared for it in our meetings what kind of questions we were going to ask and why we were doing that. We’re quite aware that it would be a very slanted response, we were not walking into this blind. I have to tell you, the backlash from the community was horrific. Phone calls to my house, threatening me, threatening my family, how un-Ukrainian I am, that I’m an enemy etc. I also did have 2 or 3 or 4 or 5, maybe very encouraging shows of support from academics. That was also sort of my first experience in the Ukrainian community.

CROSS REFERENCES:

1. • Ukrainian World Congress https://www.ukrainianworldcongress.org/
   

2. • Canada Ukraine Foundation https://www.cufoundation.ca/
   

3. • Plast https://www.plast.ca/
   

4. • Taras Hunczak https://www.husj.harvard.edu/authors/361/taras-hunczak
   

5. • St. Sophia’s https://www.dpcdsb.org/SOFIA/about/school-history