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A Scottish/Ukrainian Odyssey

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Three years after the full scale invasion by russia, Dmytro and I made the decision to visit Ukraine. We had been invited by a friend, who has since turned out to be a distant relative of Dmytro's. Victoria was helping Dmytro locate his lost family from the Second World War, the brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles that his father, Teodor often spoke of. He suffered all his life from not knowing what happened to them. Some taken to the Nazi concentration camps and some taken to the russian gulags. In her searches, Victoria discovered that Dmytro probably has a half brother, born soon after Teodor was taken by the Germans - did he know of this son? We think not as he never mentioned it and he always took his responsibilities seriously, even helping a Ukrainian friend by looking after his financial legacy for the son he'd left behind in Ukraine.  So, he wishes to make a bit more sense of the records that have been found, some in Ukrainian, but others in russian or Polish and th...
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Duncan James Cameron - A Memoir

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This is a testimony of a slightly different kind. Although not a Ukrainian testimony, it has unexpected connections, including the link with a twelve-year old Polish boy who escaped a Russian Gulag and then went on to fly for the RAF alongside my late Uncle Duncan. That Polish boy Flt/Lt Jerzy Kazimierz Stanislaw KMIECIK AFM, QCSVA (Known as Joe Kmiecik) wrote a book in 1983 about his time in the Gulag and his escape from it. Sadly, the horrors of russia connect too many stories. A Boy in the Gulag  Kmiecik, Jerzy ISBN 13: 9780704323216 Duncan James Cameron,  August 11, 1924 - January 20, 2015 Introduction by Hazel Buchan Cameron I only met my Uncle Duncan once, he was my father's elder brother and moved to Canada with his English wife a couple of years before I was born. When I was twelve, he visited us but I have few memories of him then. After my Dad died, Duncan made contact with me directly by email in 2013. I never asked him much about himself as I was keen to ...
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Bonsai and Bombs

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This is a record of private twitter conversations between two men (composer, Dmytro Morykit and a Ukrainian in Kyiv) who met on social media (Twitter) after Russia began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022. Introduction Initially interacting through public posts, private messages began and built up. Twitter (now X) does not store all conversations so by the time we decided to make the conversations public, all interaction before January 2024 had been removed. For obvious reasons, our Ukrainian friend has been anonymised for the purpose of this post, but Dmytro is a well-known and active member of the Ukrainian community in Scotland and beyond. Although Dmytro is British, his father was Ukrainian and his mother Italian. Both came to the UK immediately after WWII.  As a young boy, Dmytro has many memories of his father, Teodor’s, trauma and knew that his Grandparents, Uncles and Aunts were either still in Ukraine or had been killed by German or Russian armies...
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Location: Scotland, UK
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