(b. March 14, year unknown, sometime before World War II, Czechoslovakia – d. July 24, 1987).
American public figure, member of the New York group of the human rights organization “Amnesty International.”
An engineer by education. From 1976-87, she supported the Ukrainian political prisoner Zinoviy KRASIVSKY. From 1977–78, when he was forcibly held in a psychiatric hospital in Lviv, she wrote him 30 letters to which she received no reply, but she did not lose hope. He was only able to reply to her 31st letter. During the short period Z. KRASIVSKY was free, their correspondence continued, and they became close friends. Their letters are one of the most moving human documents of that brutal era. “Iris came to me at a moment,” Z. KRASIVSKY wrote in a letter to Akagoshi’s husband after her death, “when I was humiliated and wronged... I have no doubt that she was sent to me by a Higher Power as a ray of hope, as a life raft for a drowning man... I have not known another person who embodied humanistic ideals for me to such a degree as Iris.” On the other hand, as Akagoshi’s friends wrote to KRASIVSKY, his correspondence “opened a new world for her. It was probably one of the most important aspects of her life in the last 10 years.” After the deaths of Akagoshi and Z. KRASIVSKY, their friends from “Amnesty International” prepared a book of the correspondence between these two extraordinary people, who never once met and spoke on the phone only once. The character of Akagoshi appears in the play "UBN" at the Lviv Ukrainian Academic Theater named after M. Zankovetska (2000, dir. H. Telniuk).
Bibliography:
Perehuk dvokh nad bezvistiu: Lystuvannia ukrainskoho politviaznia Zinoviia Krasivskoho z chlenom Mizhnarodnoi Ammistii Airis Akahoshi [An Exchange Across the Abyss: The Correspondence of Ukrainian Political Prisoner Zinoviy Krasivsky with Amnesty International Member Iris Akagoshi] / Compiled and annotated by L. Marynovych and M. Marynovych; Art design by I. Havryliuk. – Kharkiv: SP ”INART”, 1995. – 160 p.
Entsyklopediia suchasnoi Ukrainy [Encyclopedia of Modern Ukraine], Vol. 1. – Kyiv, 2001. – p. 238.
Mizhnarodnyi biohrafichnyi slovnyk dysydentiv krain Tsentralnoi ta Skhidnoi Yevropy y kolyshnoho SRSR. T. 1. Ukraina. Chastyna 1 [International Biographical Dictionary of Dissidents in Central and Eastern Europe and the former USSR. Vol. 1. Ukraine. Part 1]. – Kharkiv: Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group; “Prava Liudyny,” 2006. – p. 27. https://museum.khpg.org/1162910507
Rukh oporu v Ukraini: 1960 – 1990. [The Resistance Movement in Ukraine: 1960 – 1990].
Entsyklopedychnyi dovidnyk [An Encyclopedic Guide] / Preface by Osyp Zinkevych, Oles Obertas. – Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2010. – pp. 44–45; 2nd ed.: 2012, – p. 50.
Vasyl Ovsiyenko, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. Final reading August 2, 2016.
