Over the weekend, we visited the Hirchakiv area in Medvyn, where the Brazhnyky family has lived for centuries, from which the famous Ukrainian clothing designer and Ukrainian emigrant to the United States of America, Fedir Brazhnyk, descended. We were welcomed by the Vasylenko-Brazhnyky family. They know and remember Fedir and his wife Oleksandra well.
Mykhailo Vasylenko (born in 1942), Olha Brazhnyk (born in 1943), and their daughter Oksana Zubchevska (born in 1967) told about the dramatic events of the twentieth century, about their relatives who participated in the events of that time, about the way Ivan Dubynets’s book ‘Medvyn on Fire’ came into the family, about the Holodomor, about Ivan Sarapuka, the head of the OUN (b) in Medvyn, about the famous dissident from Medvyn, Viktor Salata, about how Oleksandra Brazhnyk visited them in the 1970s and the way she and her husband helped the people of Medvyn, as well as about what the old Medvyn was like then.
We are sincerely grateful for their hospitality and valuable memories, which we will work on and publish. May the memory of these worthy residents of Medvyn live on and spread.
