Dear President-Elect Trump:
Sofia spent her pre-teen years in a small Ukrainian town, 20 miles East of Kyiv. Born in 1927, she was fourteen years old when German forces captured Kyiv in 1941. She became the spoils of war. Ripped from her parents and her village, German soldiers crated her in a rail car and shipped her to Germany. There, they enslaved her in labor camps to assist the Nazi war effort.
Mykhailo Chumachenko was born in 1917 and had his life miraculously spared at least three times. As a fifteen-year-old boy, Mykhailo was among the only members of his family to survive the famine of 1932-33. In 1942, twenty-five-year-old Mykhailo was a Ukrainian soldier in the Soviet Army. When the Germans captured his Soviet Army squad, German soldiers held up a pencil and asked each soldier to identify it. Those who identified the pencil in Russian were taken away and shot. Those who identified the pencil in Ukrainian were taken captive and sent to Germany as slave labor. Mykhailo identified the pencil in Ukrainian.
Sofia and Mykhailo met in 1944, each slave in the German labor camp. They fell in love and married in Germany. They had a daughter—Lydia. Tragedy struck again when Mykhailo became seriously ill with tuberculosis. Still, miraculously, he survived.
The end of WWII found Mykhailo and Sofia with one child and refugees in Germany. They knew that returning to the Soviet Union meant almost certain death as Josef Stalin routinely executed Ukrainian soldiers and slaves who had been captured by the Germans.
Then a group of fellow countrymen and women stepped in. Ukrainians living in Chicago sponsored Mykhailo and Sofia to immigrate to Chicago.
They arrived in Chicago penniless and entirely destitute. Supported by the local church, they started a new life in Chicago, far from the German labor camp or their respective villages in their native Ukraine.
Unable to find work, Mykhailo went to an electrician in Chicago and told him that he didn’t expect to be paid. He just wanted to work. The electrician allowed him to volunteer for approximately one week. After the week ended, he hired Mykhailo as an electrician. It was the job Mykhailo would keep for over thirty years.
Once settled in Chicago, Mykhailo and Sofia had another daughter—Catherine Claire Chumachenko. Mykhailo and Sofia became U.S. citizens, worked their entire lives to build America, but also instilled in their daughters a duty to help their Motherland—Ukraine.
Mykhailo and Sofia’s story is similar to the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who were granted a place in America after World War II. Collectively, they helped build America and America is stronger because of its Ukrainian-America.
Sincerely,
David O. Leavitt
