COURAGE

connecting collections

The Ukrainian Museum-Archives in Cleveland, OH has in its possession an OST-Arbeiter patch that belonged to Iwan Shuljak, the live in caretaker of the building where the museum is now located. This item is part of a vast collection brought to Cleveland from Deported Persons Camps in Germany. The materials include not only personal items such as the OST-patch, work papers, correspondences, journals and other publications, but also hitherto unseen memoirs that describe a relatively unknown chapter of European history—the experiences of Ukrainian refugees during and after WWII.  

Shuljak was a fixture of the Ukrainian Museum-Archives, living in a spare room on the second floor of the museum. He sat on the porch reading, cleared the snow in winter, cut the grass in spring and summer, in order to show that someone cared for the UMA and its staggering collection of memorabilia, documents, books and artifacts. A lifelong bachelor, Shuljak was born in 1911 to a family of farmers, he lived through collectivization, the famine, as well as brutal arrests and interrogations from being designated a “class enemy.” He carried scars for his entire life where a Checkist had cracked his skull with a revolver, depriving him of hearing in his right ear. Once the Terror subsided, he was released to work on the railroad. After the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941, Shuljak, along with 2 million other Ukrainians, was taken to work in the German economy. Shuljak’s experiences are important, as they show why diaspora communities were often staunchly anti-Soviet in their outlook and why they expended so much energy and effort in documenting and preserving their heritage. 

Shuljak’s blue and white OST patch identifying him as a forced laborer is now part of the UMA’s permanent collection. Stateless when he moved to the US, he never became an American citizen, nor was he a citizen of Ukraine. With the help of the Ukrainian community in Cleveland, who lobbied on his behalf to expedite the process, he became a Ukrainian citizen at the age of 95 and finally made it home.

The files created by the architect Ulrich Keicher contain a series of photographs taken by the architect Günther Schuller, which illustrate the restoration of the Black Church in the period 1937–1978. Ulrich Keicher was a West German architect who coordinated the restoration site of the Black Church from 1981 to 2000. It has not yet been determined how these photographs ended up in Keicher’s possession probably during the 1980s. He kept and archived them in order to document the evolution of the restoration process before his involvement in the 1980s. Subsequently, Keicher donated his files concerning the restoration activity, including the photographs taken by Schuller, to the Black Church archives.
The photographs taken by Schuller represent a valuable historical source to document the restoration process which, after 1977, took place in contradiction to the Ceaușescu regime’s policy of discouraging the protection of historic heritage, especially ecclesiastical historic buildings, in the context of an aggressive urban systematisation. The photographs consist mainly of images illustrating the activity of restoring the facades of the Gothic building. Also valuable are the photographs dated 1937–1944, because they were used to retrace the restoration works of that period, but also to show the state of the facades of the Black Church before the subsequent restorations. In the 1980s and 1990s, some of these photographs were used for a series of technical studies, aimed at determining the progress of the erosion of the stone in the church walls. In addition, by preserving the photographs taken in the period 1937–1944, Schuller attempted to keep in the memory of the community an initiative started by the interwar elite of the Transylvanian Saxons.

This music-optical experiment is a sort of a proto-video clip.

The black and white visualisations resemble an archaic arcade game played on a hulking machine, only to switch to surrealistic photomontage, which passes on to automatically generated abstract animation However the film, recorded with use of a 35 mm celluloid stock, was created in 1944 in the UK, where Agnieszka and Stefan Themerson emigrated during the World War II.

The soundtrack comprises four songs by Karol Szymanowski, performed in English. What we see in the screen is the interpretation of the songs. Each one is briefly introduced by a speaker who explains the method used to connect the sound with the images.

Some of them are metaphorical images inspired by the lyrics of the songs, some form an analysis of the components of the songs, with different images assigned to different groups of instruments, e.g. one instrument is represented with a simple geometric figure, which fluctuates depending on the tone.

Four girls (I. K., B. K., Z. P. and D. M.) were accused of printing and distributing leaflets with a poem, which inappropriately (ironically) spoke about Josip Broz Tito and for distributing the so-called Pastoral letter of 20  September 1945 written by bishops of Yugoslavia in September 1945. Bishops strongly disapproved of the actions against the Church and priests (including killing) implemented by the new government. A short poem was entitled “ A Poem for Tito” and was parodying a famous partisan song “Comrade Tito, white violet/, the entire youth follows you” and was beginning “Comrade Tito, blue violet/, your head will be off until spring” asking for Tito’s death. It was signed by “anti-bolsheviks”, and Tito was named as a “Russian bear” alluding to his Soviet connections with Stalin. At this time, Tito’s life and work had still not been protected from contestations, but this example of everyday opposition proved the anti-revolutionary and anti-communist activities, which were related to the inheritance of traditions of the collaborationist Independent State of Croatia, and as such was strictly punishable.

The document was created by the public prosecutor in Zagreb on 28^th December 1945  (No K-3886/45). Iljko Karaman took the document illegally from the Public Prosecutor's office and stored it in his home collection. The material is available for researching and for copying.