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Walter Rutka and his twin brother, Anthony, were born in Vimy Ridge near Pine River, Manitoba on June 12, 1929 to parents Joseph and Anastasia (nee Kozar) Rutka. Twin bother, Anthony, succumbed to pneumonia at the age of 3 months.

Walter attended school in Vimy Ridge. At 14 Walter was taken out of school to help on the farm after his father became ill. At age 20 Walter went to work in a gold mine in Ontario for one year, then took a job at a service station in Winnipeg for another year. He then returned to farming full time until 1958.

In August 1960, Walter met and married Dolores Weselowski from Sifton, Manitoba. They had 3 daughters Brenda in 1962, Sheila in 1964, and Charlotte in 1970.

In 1966, Walter joined Manitoba Hydro as a machine operator and retired in 1994 after a career that saw him win several awards, including numerous Hydro Safety awards and the prestigious D.J. Ross award – a Hydro award presented for Walter's tremendous contributions to his community.

Walter was also very active in politics. He was elected as a trustee to the Highway School District for one term, served as a municipal councillor for the RM of Mountain South for six years, was a delegate at the march in Ottawa for the Western Farm Organizations, and was campaign manager for NDP candidate Mike Kowalchuk who was elected that year.

One of Walter's greatest passions was music. In his early 20s, Walter spoke of how he bought a $7 guitar in Winnipeg and brought it home to try to teach himself to play. Walter's idol was Wilf Carter and he spoke of how he would go behind the barn to play his guitar and try to learn to yodel, much to the chagrin of his mother. In the 60s, Walter formed a band called the Sunset Rhythm Ramblers, with friends Joe Caruk on violin, Zenon Caruk on drums, and Walter Nakonechny on accordion. The group played at many weddings and functions for six years.

In 1975, encouraged by many friends and associates, Walter recorded his first record album of his own compositions, calling himself the Ukrainian Cowboy. He went on to record three more albums over the next few years and was invited to play at countless Ukrainian functions and festivals across Canada. Through his music and albums, Walter made endless new friends across Canada and the United States and frequently got letters, gifts, and invitations to visit from many of his fans.

Walter passed away in December 2005.

Andrew Mazurenko was born on October 17, 1890 to Fedor Mazurenko and Tatiana Deshlevi in the village of Zelenyi Roh, Kyiv province, which is about 150 km south of Kyiv. He had two brothers, Thomas and John, and sister Irene. At the age of 17, Andrew left home to work for Germans on a farm near Kherson for three years.

On January 8th, 1910, Andrew left his village Zelenyi Roh. He crossed the Austrian border and went to Rotterdam, Holland, from where he went to Canada. He went to Cochrane, Ontario to clear the bush and build railroad. In September 1911, he went back home. He voyaged from Montreal to Liverpool, and then to St. Petersburg.

At home he got married to Maria Shewchuk, on January 23, 1912. They lived together for two months, and Andrew left again for Canada on March 25, 1912. In Canada, he worked on the railroad again, and in 1914 he sent his wife a ticket to join him. He applied for a homestead in Edmonton. Maria came to Edmonton on August 9, 1914. They had a daughter Lena in 1915. Every winter Andrew worked on the railroad and then in a sawmill until 1923. During the summer he worked on the farm. In 1921, their son Victor was born (Irene's father).

They lived on the farm until 1961 and then they moved to a house in Thorhild. Maria dies in 1973. Andrew died on May 10, 1980 and is burried beside his wife at the St. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church cemetery in Thorhild.

Pavlo Lopata was born in the village of Kaliniv [Pryashiv region], Slovak Republic on March 20, 1945. He studied at the University of Fine Arts in Bratislava from 1966-1968. In 1969 he emigrated to Canada and resided in Toronto. He obtained a Commercial Arts Diploma from George Brown College [1972] and a Fine Arts Diploma from the Ontario College of Art [1986]. From 1991 to 1998 he was curator and executive director of the Ukrainian Canadian Art Foundation. During this period he organized over 70 exhibits of many different artists from Canada, USA and Ukraine. To create art, Pavlo uses pencil, egg tempera, acrylics and oils. Themes of his works include portraits, wooden churches, icons, linear expressionism and surrealistic symbolism. He is also the author of over 350 articles related to the arts, culture and history, published in periodicals, journals and newspapers.

Over 1,000 of Pavlo Lopata's artistic works can be found in private and museum collections in Canada, USA, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovak Republic and Ukraine. He has held 29 solo exhibits and participated in over 80 group shows. Pavlo now lives and works in his private studio in a Ukrainian community "Poltawa" in Terra Cotta, located northwest of Toronto.

Ashley Halko-Addley, born September 1, 1995 in Regina, Saskatchewan, is the youngest of three children to Kathy and the late Wayne Halko. Ashley was baptized Ukrainian Orthodox at the Sts. Peter and Paul Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Melnychuk) near Tuffnell, SK.. Throughout school, she participated in Ukrainian dance and danced with the Chaban Ukrainian Dance Ensemble and Zabutnyy Dance Company in Regina, and the Cudworth Ukrainian Dance Club. While attending university for her undergraduate degree in Saskatoon, she was a member of the Solovei Ukrainian Dance Group and the Lastiwka Ukrainian Orthodox Choir. While attending university for her graduate degree in Edmonton, she was involved with the Veeteretz School of Ukrainian Dance and the Viter Ukrainian Dancers and Folk Choir (choir member).

Ashley attended the University of Saskatchewan from 2013-17, where she completed her Bachelor of Arts High Honours degree in Anthropology with a minor in Ukrainian Studies. Ashley was on the Dean's List (top 5%) each year, and in 2017, she was awarded the Most Outstanding Graduate in Anthropology from the College of Arts and Science. Ashley spent five weeks in Ukraine in 2016 studying Anthropology and language at the Ternopil National Pedagogical University, as part of the St. Thomas More College Spring Session in Ukraine program. During her undergraduate degree, Ashley received numerous awards and scholarships, including the John Russell Kowalchuk Award in Ukrainian Studies, the Ukrainian Self-Reliance Association Language Award, the Rose Semko-Hrynchuk Scholarship, the Leo J. Krysa Family Undergraduate Scholarship, and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Saskatchewan Provincial Council Community Achievement Award in the Youth Achievement category.

Ashley was very active in the Ukrainian student movement. In her first two years of university, Ashley was a resident of St. Petro Mohyla Institute. During that time, she sat on the executive of the Kameniari Ukrainian Student Society, serving her first term as Treasurer, and second term as President. She served three terms on the executive of the University of Saskatchewan Ukrainian Students’ Association, as Mohyla Representative, Vice-President Internal, and co-President. Ashley also sat on the board of directors of the Ukrainian Canadian Students’ Union (SUSK) for three terms, as Alumni Director for two years, and as Executive Vice-President for one year. Ashley also sat on the University of Alberta Ukrainian Students’ Society executive as Media Technician.

She has worked as a Museum Assistant at the Ukrainian Museum of Canada in Saskatoon, Marking Assistant for Ukrainian language classes at the University of Saskatchewan, as Assistant Director in the two sessions: children and teens at Green Grove Camp, Wakaw Lake, as counsellor at St. Petro Mohyla Institute’s Ukrainian Summer Immersion Cultural & Language Program, as a Research Assistant at the Kule Folklore Centre, and at the Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Village.

Ashley moved to Edmonton in September 2017. She completed her Master of Arts in Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies in 2019. Ashley received the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship-Master’s (SSHRC CGS-M) in 2018. Her research topic was the Ukrainian wax healing ceremony on the Canadian Prairies.

Born at Elphinstone on 1 March 1910, son of Anna Dziewer, he attended the Brandon Normal School and, over the next 40 years, taught at Rossburn School, Elphinstone School, and Minnedosa North School (1952-1953). He served as the Principal of Sandy Lake School (1946-1952) and McCreary School (1953-1956). In 1956, he moved to Fort Frances, Ontario where he taught for 16 years in the local high school, retiring in 1974. While teaching, he attended summer school and received BA and BEd degrees from the University of Manitoba, an MA from the University of Ottawa, and a PhD from the Ukrainian Free University of Munich, Germany. He translated first-person accounts by Ukrainian pioneers to Canada during the period from 1891 and 1914, and in 1978 published the book Land of Pain, Land of Promise based on them. He also co-edited a pocket book guide Ukraine and Ukrainians in 1984-1985. He died at Fort Frances on 27 July 1990.

Composer, conductor and bandurist Hryhory Kytasty (b. 1907, Kobeliaky, Ukraine, d. 1984, San Diego, USA) came from a peasant family. His childhood coincided with the First World War, the rise and fall of the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the rise of Bolshevism and the imposition of collectivization. He studied vocal and choral music at the Poltava Music College and choral conducting at the Lysenko Music and Drama Institute in Kyiv, where he also studied the bandura. He sang in the Kyiv Opera Chorus and in 1934 joined the Kyiv Bandura Cappella, which subsequently became the State Bandura Cappella. During the Second World War the Cappella made its way to Germany, and after several years in displaced persons camps, Kytasty emigrated to the United States and settled in Detroit in 1949. There he immediately founded the Ukrainian Bandurist Chorus, which he directed until 1958 and again from 1967 until his death. In 2008 he was named Hero of Ukraine posthumously. Kytasty composed more than 200 works, primarily for voice, chorus and bandura. In particular he was noted for the epic dumas he composed for male chorus and bandura ensemble.

Composer, conductor and pianist Virko Baley (b. 1938, Radekhiv, Ukraine) spent his early childhood in Slovakia and at a displaced persons camp in Germany owing to the Second World War. His first music lessons took place at the camp with Roman Sawycky, although his music studies did not begin in earnest until after his family settled in Los Angeles in 1949. He completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees in piano and composition at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music. After military service with a U.S. Army band in Germany, he joined the faculty of his alma mater, renamed the California Institute of the Arts, in 1967. In 1970 he joined the faculty of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas School of Music, where he worked for the next 46 years. The founding music director of the Nevada Symphony Orchestra, he has conducted orchestras in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Ukraine and Russia.

Baley’s compositions include a symphony, a piano concerto, two violin concertos and other orchestral works, chamber pieces, compositions for solo piano, violin, oboe, bass clarinet, bassoon and contrabassoon, a one-act opera titled Hunger, about the Holodomor, and the score to Yuri Illienko’s film Swan Lake: The Zone. In 1996 Baley became the first American to receive Ukraine’s Shevchenko State Prize for music.

John Demjanjuk (born Ivan Mykolaiovych Demianiuk), April 3, 1920 (Dubovi Makharenci, Vinnytska oblast, Ukraine) – March 17, 2012 (Bad Feilnbach, Bavaria, Germany) was a Ukrainian-American auto worker, a former soldier in the Soviet Red Army, and a prisoner of war during the Second World War.
During World War II he was conscripted into the Soviet Red Army, where he was captured as a German prisoner of war.
In 1952 he emigrated from West Germany to the United States and was granted citizenship in 1958. In 1977 an American newspaper “News from Ukraine” published an article and a picture of a forged ID card with Demianiuk photo on it. The article stated that Demianiuk was a trainee in the Trawniki training camp for guards.
In 1986 he was deported to Israel to stand trial for war crimes, after being identified by eleven Holocaust survivors as "Ivan the Terrible," a notorious guard at the Treblinka extermination camp in Nazi occupied Poland. Demianiuk was accused of committing murder and acts of extraordinarily savage violence against camp prisoners during 1942–43. He was convicted of having committed crimes against humanity and sentenced to death there in 1988. The verdict was overturned by the Israeli Supreme Court in 1993, based on new evidence that "Ivan the Terrible" was probably another man.
In 2001 Demianiuk was charged again, this time on the grounds that he had, instead, served as a guard named Ivan Demianiuk at the Sobibór and Majdanek camps in Nazi occupied Poland and at the Flossenbürg camp in Germany.
He was convicted in 2011 in Germany for alleged war crimes as an accessory to the murder of 27,900 Jews. Since his conviction was pending appeal at the time of his death, Demianiuk remains innocent under German law, and his earlier conviction is invalidated. According to the Munich state court, Demianiuk does not have a criminal record.

Composer and pianist Wadym Kipa (b. 1912, Kuchmisterska Slobodka, Ukraine, d. 1968, New York, USA) was born into the family of a railway inspector, who encouraged his son’s interest in music. Kipa trained at the Kharkiv Music School, Kharkiv Conservatory and Kyiv Conservatory, from which he graduated as a piano major in 1937 and joined its faculty. Until 1941 he performed as a concert pianist. When the Second World War interrupted his post-doctoral studies at the Kyiv Conservatory, he turned to composing. During the war he found himself in Berlin, where he taught at the Klindwort-Scharwenk Conservatory. In 1951 he settled in New York, where he engaged in composing and teaching. His compositions in a Neo-Romantic style consist primarily of solo piano pieces, art songs and incidental music.

Composer and pianist Larysa Kuzmenko (b. 1956, Mississauga, Canada) studied piano and composition at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto and composition at the University of Toronto. She began performing as a pianist in 1972, while still in high school. She has taught piano, music theory, harmony and music history through the Royal Conservatory of Music since 1981 and at the University of Toronto since 1989. Kuzmenko began composing in the late 1970s, and her works include three piano concertos, a cello concerto, a cello sonata, chamber music for string quartet, winds, brass, percussion and accordion, works for solo piano and organ, song cycles and choral works. She has been a frequent collaborator of the Vesnivka Choir of Toronto and her works on Ukrainian themes include In Memoriam: To the Victims of Chornobyl for solo piano, “A Journey to a New Life” for string quartet, the oratorio The Golden Harvest and “Holy God” for a cappella choir. She is married to composer Gary Kulesha.

Composer and scholar Zenowij Lysko (b. 1895, Rakobuty, Ukraine, d. 1969, New York, USA) laid the foundations of Ukrainian musicology in the United States. Born into a priestly family, he studied philosophy at Lviv University and piano and theory with Stanyslav Liudkevych at the Lysenko Music Institute. Drafted into the Austrian army during World War I, he joined the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen following the war. He continued his studies at the Lviv Underground Ukrainian University and the Lysenko Institute, as well as studying composition privately with Vasyl Barvinsky. He later enrolled in Charles University in Prague, where he also studied privately with Fedir Akimenko. During this period he became interested in folklore and ethnomusicology. He taught music at the Drahomanov Ukrainian Pedagogical Institute in Prague (1924-29), graduated from the State Conservatory of Czechoslovakia in 1927 and obtained his doctorate from the Ukrainian Free University in Prague in 1928. He taught at the Kharkiv Conservatory, the Stryi Branch of the Lysenko Higher Institute of Music, the Lviv Conservatory and was editor-in-chief of the journal Ukraïns'ka muzyka. After the Second World War he lived in Germany, before settling in New York in 1960, where he taught at the Ukrainian Music Institute from 1961 until his death.

As a composer, he was most active during his Prague period, completing an orchestral suite, string quartet, piano sonata, song cycles and arrangements of Ukrainian folk songs. As a scholar, he collected 1,400 Ukrainian folk songs, which were published in ten volumes. He also amassed a substantial archive.

Dmytro Kupiak (November 06, 1918, Yabloniwka village, Lviv Region, Halychyna - June 13, 1995, Toronto, Canada) was born in a family of Yuriy and Anna (nee Zdrazhil’).

In 1943, Kupiak graduated from the Institute for Trade in Lviv. In 1943-1945, he was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. He immigrated to Canada in 1948 and settled in Edmonton, Alberta. In 1953, he got Canadian citizenship. The same year, 1953, Kupiak married Stefania Khorkava. In 1955, he and his family moved to Toronto, Ontario. In 1972, he ran for the election as a member of the Conservative Party. At that time, he was charged by the Soviet Union with committing war crimes.

Kupiak was a member of the Ukrainian Professional and Business Club, the Canadian Legion, the Knights of Columbus - Sheptytsky Council, the businessmen’s association “Queens-Tavern” and many others. He was the owner of the “Mayfair Inn” and a tavern in Toronto.

Sources:
“Купяк Дмитро.” Марунчак, Михайло. Біографічний довідник до історії українців Канади. Вінніпеґ: Українська Вільна Академія Наук в Канаді, 1986, p. 362-363.

Gregory Turko (February 11, 1888 - March 10, 1977, Edmonton, Alberta) was born “in one of the Carpathian Villages” to a family of Ivan and Anastasia Turko. Gregory went to the Ukrainian Gimnasium in Peremyshl. In 1915, he married Maria Horodetska. Turko worked for the tobacco industry. He fought in WWI and WWII.

Turko immigrated to Canada after WWII through the German camps of Displaced Persons and settled in Calgary. After his wife passed away, he moved to Edmonton, where in 1967, he married Ksenia Shklanka. Turko was a member of the Edmonton Branch of the Brotherhood of Former Soldiers of the First Ukrainian Division of the Ukrainian National Army (Станиця Братства колишніх вояків Першої української дивізії Української національної армії в Едмонтоні) and Ukrainian War Veterans Association of Canada.

Source:
Турко, Ксеня. “Спомин про бл. П. Григорія Турка.” Ukrainian News, april 21, 1977, p. 6.

Helen Kozicky was born on February 6, 1916, in Calgary. Her mother came to Canada as a 2 year old child, and her father was 18 when he came. Her family was Greek-Catholic. During the Russian revolution her uncles and father came first to the USA and then to Canada; her father was a president of the Ukrainian church. Her mother grew up in Vegreville; she belonged to the Ukrainian Catholic Women’s League.

During the WWII, in November 1942, Helen Kozicky went overseas as a Sergeant. There were 8 women from each province. She took a course on driving a vehicle and repairing it. She was part of the Alberta Women’s Service Corp, first female contingent overseas to provide services for the Headquarters. Ukrainian Canadian Services Association was established in 1944; Ukrainian Club in London. Kozicky was the Secretary of the Club for 2 years.

Helen Kozicky died in Calgary in 2007.

Myron grew up in Kozava a town near Ternopil. He and his sister joined UPA, and eventually he had to flee to the west. His sister stayed behind and was arrested and sent to Siberia. Myron made it to the west, and lived in England, Montreal and finally Kelowna BC. He passed away in 2021.