Ukraine and Poland share many things -- similar languages, kindred histories and now a major football tournament.
Newspaper editor Stanislaw Panteluk, 55, has ferreted out many stories that unite the two nations for the pages of his Polish newspaper in Ukraine, Dziennik Kiowski, in the last two decades.
Panteluk’s personal story, however, is perhaps one of the best illustrations of the turbulent history of Poland-Ukraine.
Stanislaw Panteluk
On the orders of Joseph Stalin, Panteluk’s family was exiled from their native town of Kosiv in Ivano-Franskivsk Oblast. That Carpathian region was a part of European empires for centuries, until it went under Soviet control in the late 1930s.
Panteluk’s parents were put on a train to Kazakhstan in 1939, when hundreds of thousands of victims across the former Soviet Union were accused of various political crimes or just didn’t fit the profile of a Russian Communist.
A neighbor was at odds with my father, so he told the authorities [about our] Polish roots and they sent us right out.”– Stanislaw Panteluk, Dziennik Kiowski editor.
“A neighbor was at odds with my father, so he told the authorities [about our] Polish roots and they sent us right out,” recalled Panteluk the beginning of a family drama. They were able to return home only in 10 years after Stalin’s death.
Born in Kazakhstan, Panteluk was then only one-year-old.
Having majored in Polish philology, Panteluk spent 20 years working for Intourist, the largest Soviet travel agency.
He was taking Polish tourists across Siberia, the Caucasus region, Crimea and other parts of Russia and Ukraine. In between trips, he sometimes did freelance interpreting for Polish and Soviet political leaders.
When Intourist dissolved together with the Soviet Union, Panteluk started writing for Dziennik Kiowski, which is translated as the Kyiv Diary.
During the chaos of the early 1990s, Ukraine stopped receiving Polish books and periodicals, so a group of five ambitious Ukrainians with Polish roots decided to fill the niche with their own paper in Polish.
At the beginning it was a period of euphoria when we received letters from people with Polish poetry in them. Everybody was happy that they can speak the language freely and be open about their heritage.”
– Stanislaw Panteluk, Dziennik Kiowski editor.
“We wanted to write about Poland in Polish, but gradually the paper refocused on covering news of the Polish community in Ukraine,” Panteluk said. It was then one of the first business ventures promoting Poland in Ukraine.
“At the beginning it was a period of euphoria when we received letters from people with Polish poetry in them. Everybody was happy that they can speak the language freely and be open about their heritage,” he said.
In a couple of years, however, euphoria was swept away by the reality of the falling economy and increasing lawlessness of 1990s.
Many ethnic Poles decided it was time to make their way back home around that time.
With Poland entering the European Union, immigration became more difficult. The pride of being a Pole, however, soared and “motivates those in Ukraine to succeed in life,” said Panteluk.
Operating in a small office with a team of five writers on a very limited budget, Panteluk sees himself “as a chronicler of the Polish diaspora in Ukraine.”
He still remembers the time when the paper had no money at all and some Polish expatriates were pitching in to help it survive.
Jerzy Konik, 56, one of Ukraine’s richest expatriates, was one of them.
The chief editor remembers covering Konik’s court disputes in Ukraine, which lasted a decade, and said that the businessman couldn’t find justice in Ukraine’s legal system.
Jerzy Konik
Yet despite economic uncertainties, Konik, a native of Krakow, stayed behind and keeps storming Ukraine’s business peaks.
The Kyiv Post estimated his fortune to $24 million in the rating of
