One Hundred Years in Galicia: Events That Shaped Ukraine and Eastern Europe
Ukrainian Galicia was home to Poles, Jews and Ukrainians for hundreds of years. It was witness to both World Wars, starvation, mass killings and independence movements. Family members of the authors include survivors of German concentration camps and the GULAG prisons. They fought in Austrian, Polish, Russian and German armies, as well as in the Ukrainian pro-independence army. They were arrested by the Gestapo and the NKVD, tortured and even declared dead. They survived against the most unlikely odds. Their stories, shadows and secrets permeate this book and provide a rich background to some of the most dramatic events humanity has witnessed.
Dr Dennis Ougrin graduated from a medical school in Ukraine in 1998 and came to England to undertake his postgraduate training. He is currently a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist leading the Enhanced Treatment Service at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. He is also a Reader in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Global Health at King’s College London, and leads a programme of information exchange between the UK and Ukraine. His main professional interests include interventions for self-harm, as well as the history of psychiatry.
Anastasia Ougrin attended Alleyns School and Brighton College, UK. She has a keen interest in history, specifically that of Ukraine. She has participated in history essay competitions run by Oxford and Cambridge Universities, writing essays on the topic of the Holodomor for which she was awarded two prizes. She is currently reading History at St Andrews University, UK, and has experience of working with state archives in Ukraine.
“This wonderful short book by Dennis Ougrin (with two chapters by his daughter, Anastasia) holds so much! First it is a story of two (and more) families putting together a Ukrainian life, across every obstacle, in a contested corner of Europe. Second, it is a history, with necessary geographical and political detail, of that very special region, Eastern Ukrainian Galicia. Dennis Ougrin lets us feel the currents of Polish, Jewish, and Ukrainian life, all important, interweaving there. In Ougrin’s storytelling, the personal is not avoided; in fact, it (and the author’s wit) makes the political complexities of time and geography comprehensible. Third, this is a family story, a gift from her father that Anastasia and her descendants will treasure in the future. The stories of the Ougrin and Litynskyy families, so honestly and beautifully detailed, from the time of Franz Joseph to that of Mikhail Gorbachev, really make history come to life.”
Roald Hoffmann
Cornell University; Winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1981
“It is the story of a very troubled part of Europe from the perspective of a single family, going back to great-great-grandparents and down to the present and back again from time to time. It […] is funny at times and there are some very sharp psychological observations, as one would expect from the author.”
Benny Dembitzer
Nobel Laureate
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