I first met Nadia Diuk when we were kids in the 1960s in England. Her parents, as mine, were refugees from Ukraine who had been swept up in the brutal tides of World War II and left as fighting between Nazi and Soviet armies devastated their homeland.
Our parents knew each other and were very active in building a Ukrainian community in the U.K. None had existed prior to the war. Most of the Ukrainians who settled in Britain were very proud of their identity, wanted to do everything they could to help Ukraine achieve independence and dreamed of returning to their home country.
They taught their children the Ukrainian language and later tormented us with Ukrainian Saturday school. They placed us in Ukrainian choirs, dancing, and orchestral groups, and one of the two main youth organizations, the Ukrainian Youth Association (called SUM for its Ukrainian initials) or the Plast scouting organization.
So, right from the beginning of her life, Nadia was immersed in Ukrainian culture. She was raised not so much with parallel Ukrainian and English identities but a wonderfully entwined combination of both. Nadia was always proud of her British citizenship. Even years after she became a U.S. citizen, she was diligent about renewing her U.K. passport.
Nadia was a member of SUM, as I was, and the organization held annual summer camps at a former World War II U.S. Air Force base bought by the Ukrainian community near a town called Derby, not far from Coventry, where Nadia was born.
The SUM camp, called Tarasivka, was where many of us made lifelong friendships and that is where I got to know Nadia, a tall, willowy, attractive early teen. Coventry is around 150 kilometers north of my hometown, London, and her “Midlands” accent seemed exotic to my “BBC English” version.
Nadia took part in all the activities and was good at dancing and singing, which became a lasting passion for her. She was a committed member of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church choir in Washington, D.C., where she spent the last 33 years of her life.
Her Ukrainian language was excellent, far above average for a diaspora kid, and she enjoyed reading and reciting Ukrainian poetry. As we both grew up, we kept in touch. Nadia was best friends with a woman who became my first wife and we saw a lot of each other as students, where she helped organize protests outside the Soviet Embassy in London in support of Ukrainian political prisoners and worked with British students to publicize the plight of those being persecuted in Ukraine.
But Nadia was always curious about life beyond Ukraine and Britain. She had a strong streak of adventure-seeking which propelled her on expeditions during summer holidays to other parts of the world. She and her friend Lessia Djakowska spent a student summer holiday hitchhiking around Turkey – something few women did in the 1970s, or perhaps would do even today.
Nadia was always a smart one and, although not arrogant about being one of the few Ukrainian Brit diaspora kids who got a doctorate from Oxford, she also was not tolerant of people she thought were less than bright. She would listen carefully to what people said and reply, often with a humorous twinkle in her eyes, in a precise and analytical way.
She was not a social butterfly who held or attended lots of parties. But she always had a close circle of friends, to whom she remained intensely loyal.
Her early interest in all things Ukrainian continued into her adult life and the friends she formed the closest bonds with were like-minded people who were also striving to do their bit for Ukraine’s freedom.
In the 1980s she joined in the work of a group called Prolog, which helped Ukrainian Soviet activists and political prisoners and smuggled dissident literature out of Soviet Ukraine & pro-democracy literature in.
Our lives went their separate ways as she moved to the United States, but occasionally we intersected, almost always in Ukraine, which she began to visit frequently when she joined the National Endowment for Democracy, eventually becoming vice president.
The NED was created by the U.S. Republican and Democratic parties and, within that organization, Nadia did an enormous amount to support and entrench democracy in countries around the world, especially focusing her attention on Ukraine, where NED financed multiple democracy-building projects and nongovernmental organizations and provided opportunities for young Ukrainians to visit and study in the U.S.
Her forums, lobbying, and unbounded enthusiasm drew the attention of senior government officials from the U.S. and other countries, politicians, journalists and influential figures to Ukraine. The value of her efforts for Ukraine are incalculable.
In 2011, I and my wife, Irena Chalupa, moved to Washington, D.C., and I was pleasantly surprised to find that Nadia lived less than a 10-minute drive from us, which meant we could see each other much more often. Nadia didn’t do much entertaining at home, but when Ukrainians studying or visiting D.C. needed a place to stay, she would often help out.
Much of her socializing centered on her singing in the church choir. Sometimes at Easter or Christmas, Nadia would invite her friends to her home and, after serving traditional Ukrainian dishes, hours of singing would follow.
She thought she had “beaten” breast cancer some 12 years ago but the disease returned with a vengeance some 18 months ago. Even as treatments failed to halt its spread, Nadia never gave up and almost until the last moment she tried different experimental procedures. She wanted to live.
In the last months that we met up at her home, I would trade a yellow lentil dish that I made and she liked for some very English tea and biscuits. We, of course, talked about our days as kids in England, about our parents, and told funny stories about our mutual friends and how we had all changed with age. Always the conversations gravitated to Ukraine and what was happening in the country she loved: the war, the often-crazy politics, the perseverance of its brave people.
She always perked up when talking about Ukraine, even if the news from there wasn’t great. She spoke about Ukraine with great fondness, exasperation and humor.
And the twinkle would come back into her eyes.
