(born September 30, 1915, in the village of Krynytsia, Nowy Sącz county, Poland – died December 23, 2007, in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk).
Participant in the insurgent and human rights movements.
V.'s father was a priest and an educator in the Lviv region. Her mother was from the Bandera family. Liuba attended a village school and a state seminary in Lviv. She survived the pacification. At the age of 14, she joined “Yunatstvo” (Youth) and participated in the work of “Prosvita.” She was expelled from school for destroying a portrait of Piłsudski. When the Poles burned down their house in Rozdil in 1939, V. crossed the San River. She took a typing course. She was present at the modest wedding ceremony of Stepan Bandera and Slava Oparivska in Krakow. V.’s sister, Odarka, married Vasyl Bandera, Stepan’s brother. On May 23, 1940, the anniversary of Y. Konovalets’s death, V. met Mykola Lemyk, a prominent member of OUN(b) (he had assassinated the Soviet consul in Lviv, O. Mailov, in protest of the 1933 famine in Ukraine and had recently returned from prison). They married on August 4, 1940. She worked at a post office, as a typist, and as a cashier in a store.
With the start of the German-Soviet war, the couple moved to Peremyshl. M. Lemyk led the Central Marching Group of OUN(b) to the east and took his wife with him. Before reaching Kyiv, the group returned to Lviv. V. was detained by the Germans but was released after promising to work as a translator. She again joined the Southern Marching Group heading toward Kharkiv through Kremenchuk and Poltava. Meanwhile, the Germans hanged M. Lemyk in Myrhorod, a fact her friends kept from V. She worked at an arts and industry school in Poltava and transported underground literature to Kharkiv. She returned to Galicia and worked at the underground UPA radio station “Afrodyta” near Stryi.
On December 24, 1946, V. was arrested. She was held under number 22, with no mention of the name Lemyk. The investigation was conducted for three months in the NKVD prison in Lviv on Lonsky Street, and then in Kyiv at 33 Volodymyrska Street (then Korolenka Street). Lacking evidence, investigators Delchenko and later Guzeyev tried to interrogate her about other members of the insurgent movement and persuade her to cooperate with the NKVD. V. caught a cold in a punishment cell, developed a middle ear infection, and had a high fever. She shared a cell with a student named Raya Haiduk from Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi.
In the autumn of 1948, she was sentenced by a Special Council (OSO) to death, commuted to 25 years of imprisonment.
She served her sentence in Mordovian camps Nos. 3, 6, 14, and 17. There, she wrote and distributed leaflets among the prisoners, stating that Ukraine is one and that Ukrainian women are not divided into easterners, westerners, or Volhynians. Another leaflet declared that Ukrainian political prisoners could not be a whip over foreigners or their own people, meaning they should not become brigadiers or squad leaders or cooperate with the administration. She participated in organizing Christmas Eve and Easter celebrations, for which she was sent to the punishment cell.
In 1956, she refused to attend a court hearing to review her case, considering it humiliating. Instead, she passed a statement to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine through fellow political prisoner Halyna Fardyha, which read approximately as follows: “I appeal to you as defenders of the rights of the Ukrainian people. Our relatives have been deported to Siberia, where they are dying out and losing their native language, and you do nothing to protect the Ukrainian people from complete ruin. The commission reviewing cases has left me with a 25-year sentence, which is tantamount to a death sentence for me. Ukraine was the most devastated by the war. We would have worked on its reconstruction even as political prisoners. I ask that you allow me to serve the remainder of my sentence in Ukraine.” She was released that year.
V. was not granted a residence permit in Galicia, so she moved to the city of Taganrog in the Rostov oblast, and later to Anzhero-Sudzhensk in the Kemerovo oblast (Russia), where her father and sister Daria were in exile. In 1964, she moved to Horlivka in the Donetsk oblast and worked at a boarding school. In 1968, she, along with her sister and father, exchanged their apartment for one in Ivano-Frankivsk (10 Oleha Koshovoho Street). She worked at a power plant. She met V. CHORNOVIL, B. REBRYK, Oksana POPOVYCH, and V. MOROZ, and they were visited by Z. KRASIVSKYI, B. ANTONENKO-DAVYDOVYCH, and I. DZIUBA. At V. CHORNOVIL’s request, they welcomed the artist Panas ZALYVAKHA into their home upon his release in 1971; he later married her sister Daria. The KGB created various obstacles: unknown individuals broke their windows and attacked them and their guests, including beating V. DOLISHNIY. On Easter 1971, she traveled with her family and friends to the village of Kosmach, where V. ROMANIUK was the parish priest. There, Hutsuls protected V. MOROZ from the police, but he was arrested on June 1, 1971, in connection with which the first search was conducted at V.'s home. From 1972, searches became commonplace, as their house was a refuge for all dissidents. Samizdat literature was printed and distributed there. In the 1980s, the revived journal “Ukrainian Herald,” edited by V. CHORNOVIL, was partially produced there.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, V. also actively supported the movement for independence. She lived in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk.
Bibliography.
Interview with L. Vozniak-Lemyk, February 6, 2000. https://museum.khpg.org/1121181880
Mizhnarodnyi biohrafichnyi slovnyk dysydentiv krain Tsentralnoi ta Skhidnoi Yevropy i kolyshnoho SRSR (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. Pp. 108–110. https://museum.khpg.org/1121089304
Rukh oporu v Ukraini: 1960 – 1990. Entsyklopedychnyi dovidnyk (The Resistance Movement in Ukraine: 1960 – 1990. An Encyclopedic Guide). Preface by Osyp Zinkevych, Oles Obertas. Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 2010. Pp. 120-121; 2nd ed.: 2012, Pp. 133–134.
Vasyl Ovsienko, Kharkiv Human Rights Protection Group. June 6, 2005; last read on August 4, 2016.
