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Veteran keeps library alive
The last time that Orest Horodyskyj was in Luhansk, he was in his
mid 20s, the German invasion of the Soviet Union was in full swing,
and he was putting his life in grave danger by writing for an
underground Ukrainian newspaper. Now 86 and retired from a life of
factory work in Chicago, he is still contributing Ukrainian-language
literature to the city. He sends monthly parcels of books to
Ukraine's eastern-most urban center, contributing as much as he can
to the city's sole Ukrainian-language library.
In 1941, the Ivano-Frankivsk native was conscripted by an
expansionist German army and sent to Luhansk to act as a translator
for Germans stationed there. But without his boss knowledge,
Horodyskyj risked his life between 1941 and 1943, reporting on the
news, events and culture of the city in Ukrainian, for the
underground Nove Zhyttya (New-Life) newspaper.
"I was trying to encourage use of the Ukrainian language there,"
Horodyskyj told the Post from his home in the American Midwest on
Nov. 18. "[The Germans] would have killed me if they had known
what I was doing." In fact, he said that the newspaper's editor was shot
and killed when the Bolsheviks retook the city. To this day, one can
read Horodyskyj's articles. Every issue of Nove Zhyttya is on file in
the former KGB archives in the city. During his time in the army and
in the chaos of war, Horodyskyj saw much of Ukraine firsthand. The

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