Wasyl Scheremet

Wasyl Scheremet was born on the first of March, 1907, a Greek‑Catholic Ukrainian of the western borderlands. His DP questionnaire gives his birthplace in Ukrainian as Люблинець — “Lubinec” as the clerk romanized it — the village of Liublynets near Kovel in Volhynia, a country that had lain inside interwar Poland and was fought over by empires.

The Second World War tore his world to pieces and left him, like millions of others, a displaced person adrift in the ruins of Germany. In 1952 he and Eva sailed into New York harbor aboard the USNS General Harry Taylor and began again in Minneapolis. On their landing papers the family was written down as “Polish, Roman Catholic” — a quiet fiction that helped keep them out of Stalin’s reach.