What's a Displaced Person? Dudycz Tells Parents' Story In Ukrainian Exhibit

Though Bob Dudycz of Niles formerly served as Maine Township Supervisor, and his brother Walter served as a state senator, the family lived through grim poverty and danger during and after World War II.

Their parents got stranded in Germany when World War II ended, and couldn't return to their native Ukraine because the occupying Soviets likely would have killed them.

So their parents lived--and got married--in what was called a displaced persons camp. That's where Bob was born, in the bare-bones atmosphere of what might have been a warehouse or barracks before the war.

Now, Bob (whose real name is Bohdan) Dudycz has helped conceive and create an exhibit on displaced persons camps for the Ukrainian National Museum of Chicago, where he serves on the board. A Chicago Tribune article describes the exhibit, "From DP to DC, Displaced Persons: A Story of Ukrainian Refugees in Europe 1945-1952."

"We got to talking, and we discovered eight of the nine members of the executive board had been born in DP camps," Dudycz explained. "We never knew it because we never talked about it.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of," he said, though he acknowledged that when he was growing up in Chicago, some judgmental people used DP as an epithet for "dumb Polack."

"With the exhibit, we wanted to show how the Ukrainian community in Chicago formed," he added.

World War II uprooted people across Europe, and after Hitler's defeat in 1945, 30 million non-Germans, whom the Germans had imported as labor to fuel their war effort, remained in Germany.

The United Nations, formed in 1947, helped oversee repatriating those refugees over about a year and a half. But many of the three million Ukrainians refused to go back to Ukraine, Dudycz said, knowing the Soviets would kill them because they considered them traitors--even though they had been forced against their will to work for Germany.

Thus, many of the refugees spent as much as seven years--until 1952--in displaced persons camps, waiting for other countries to accept them as immigrants.

"My parents were in there five years," Dudycz said, and he was born in one in January 1949. By November of that year, the family arrived in Chicago.

He and many others worked on the exhibit, which also produced a book in English and Ukrainian, as a labor of love.

"We wanted to have the exhibit reflect a positive note," he said, "not the horrors of war."

IF YOU GO: Ukrainian National Museum of Chicago, 2249 W. Superior St., Chicago IL, 312-421-8020. Open Friday through Sunday, 11 a.m. to 4 p.m.

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