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A refugee’s artistic journey
DECEMBER 2012
I N S I D E …
PHOTO BY FRANK KLEIN
By Carol Sorgen When one door closes, another opens, goes the familiar quotation attributed to Alexander Graham Bell. That has certainly been true for sculptor and painter Wasyl Palijczuk. From the humblest — and direst — of beginnings in his native Ukraine to a creative life filled with personal and professional success, the 78-year-old artist and Idlewylde resident is the living embodiment of Bell’s sentiment. Palijczuk arrived in the United States alone as a 15-year-old refugee. He never knew his mother, who died when he was 6 months old. As a child, he and his father lived together in a one-room house with a thatched roof, no running water and no electricity until the older Palijczuk was sent to Germany during World War II to work as a slave laborer in a Munich rubber factory. The two did not see each other from 1941 to 1945, when they were miraculously reunited in a displaced persons camp. “To this day, I have no idea how he found me,” Palijczuk said. During those years on his own, the young Palijczuk lived by his wits, surviving — barely — from food he begged from neighboring villagers. (The experience left a lasting mark, Palijczuk said. To this day, he can’t bear to throw any food away.) Not only was there little to eat, but there were no schools, no books, no pencils, no papers, indeed nothing to foreshadow the life of art that awaited him. “I had no idea what art was,” said Palijczuk, his speech still accented by his native tongue. But when he saw village children playing outside with the dark, Ukrainian mud, instead of making “pancakes,” he created three-dimensional mud “sculptures.” And instead of drawing on a piece of paper, which he didn’t have to begin with, he took the burnt ends of wood from the stove used for heat and drew on the blank walls — a creative effort for which he received a sound beating from his father. Palijczuk may not have known what art was, or even that what he was doing was art, but neither that nor his father’s thrashing stopped him from keeping at it.
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Artist and art professor Wasyl Palijczuk poses in the traditional clothing of his native Ukraine, a country he fled during World War II. One of his sculptures can be glimpsed peeking out from behind the ivy. A retrospective of his paintings and sculptures is now on display at Carroll Community College.
Immigrating to America During the war, Palijczuk also ended up in Germany, first as a servant for a family, where he drew pictures for the children who lived there, and then as a patient in a children’s hospital. After the war, an American social worker saw Palijczuk drawing and asked him what he was doing. “I don’t know,” he recalled telling her. After looking at his sketches, the young woman (who today lives in New Jersey and whom Palijczuk, who is still in touch with her, calls “my hero”) asked if Palijczuk would like to go to America. He knew nothing about the faraway country, but “It was like asking a dead person if he
wanted to go to heaven or hell.” Palijczuk arrived in New York in 1950, and he was sent to live with other refugee boys on the second floor of a Bronx synagogue, though he himself is not Jewish. “I became the ‘shabbes goy,’” he smiled, a Yiddish term referring to a non-Jewish person who is hired by Orthodox Jews to perform routine chores — such as turning on lights or the oven — that aren’t permitted on the Sabbath. Several months later, Palijczuk was told he was being relocated to Baltimore, a city he had never heard of. “I wanted to go to California,” he said, See ARTIST page 32
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