As images fill the news of millions of women and children fleeing Ukraine – and the horrors of some young families not making it out alive – others like Natalya Dyachok are defying the dangers and …
The day the Russians invaded Ukraine, the Rev. Petro Dyachok knew that his wife, Natalya, had only one choice: to go back to their homeland. Their 31-year-old daughter, a registered nurse raising her two children there, refused to leave her husband who was preparing to fight.“I said, ‘I can’t close your Ukrainian heart’,” Dyachok, 55, said, “and in one day I had a ticket for her.”
Separated by continents and war, the priest and his determined wife symbolize how Ukrainians are so deeply connected to each other and to their homeland, no matter how scattered they now are. The Rev. Petro Dyachok, right, hugs parishioner Bohdan Kovalchuk, who has relatives in Ukraine, at the end of a prayer service at St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Catholic Center in Santa Clara, Calif., on March 11, 2022.
But Khrystyna wouldn’t consider it. “She said if Ivan goes to war, she will not leave,” Dyachok said, “because she loves him, because that’s the way she was taught, because we are Ukrainians.”The Rev. Petro Dyachok’s daughter, Khrystyna Chykaliuk; her husband, Ivan; and their sons, Vladyslav, 10, left, and Maxym, 4, are seen in a family photo taken in 2021. Expand
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