Among the artifacts, which representing reality of the Nazi occupational regime exhibited wooden food bowl of the Auschwitz concentration camp prisoner Hryhorii Zhulynskyi. This is almost the only thing, which helped him to survive in the place where only death prevails.
The thorough research of this place history was started just in middle of 2000s. In 2007, the President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko during the visit of his Polish colleague received an agreement to organize a regular national exhibition in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (Oświęcim, Poland) which attracts about 1 million of visitors each year. Our Museum also was involved into the project, however by that moment a number of materials in the Museum collection was very small. With time, the work around this topic became more and more intensive, despite the fact that the Ukrainian exhibition in former concentration camp yet remains on the paper. Previously the lists were formed and request letters with application forms were send to 1121 ex-prisoners of the Auschwitz. By 2009, we received 131 responds, 99 of them – with memories, photographs and documents from the family archives. Approximately, at the same time famous Ukrainian politician and literary critic Mykola Zhulynskyi transferred to the Museum extraordinary valuable materials of his father, Hryhorii Zhulynskyi. Abovementioned bowl was among them. It allowed him to feed on relatively better than those prisoners, who had not such dish.
An extraordinary dramatic family story with flavor of salvation and happy meeting appeared before us.
During the First World War Russian troops, which occupied Ukrainian territories of Austro-Hungary forcedly relocated the Zhulynskyi family from the Rivne region to the Katerynoslav province of the Russian empire (now Dnipropetrovsk region, Ukraine). In 1917, Hryhorii`s father died typhus. Within year of deprivation died his mother. The boy grew up in the orphanage in the cities of Warsaw Czestochowa, Poland.
In 1920, he returned to home, to his sisters Anastasia and Fedora, who were lucky to cross the Polish border yet in 1918. Afterwards he got married (his son Mykola was born in 1940). Until 1930, Hryhorii worked as a hireling. In 1930, he was recruited to the Polish army. Later he joined the sect of Baptists and become a wandering preacher. In 1939, he was mobilized to the Soviet army. After beginning of the German-Soviet War, he became a prisoner of war in 1941 summer near the city of Dubno, but was released as a Pole. In 1943, Nazis arrested him in his native village during the raid and detained him in the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, where he became a member of labor group. Three months later, he was relocated to the Dachau concentration camp and in 1944 to the Sagan labor camp (Poland), from where hi managed to escape. While hiding he met a young ostarbeiter woman, who helped him with food. After the end of the war they by accidently met again in one of the US assembly points. The couple married and moved to the USA. In 1971, at first after long years of separation he found his family in Ukraine with the support of the Executive Committee of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Hryhorii Zhulynskyi passed away in 2008.
This is exactly how astonishing and ambiguous the true Ukrainian history of World War II is.