A Ukrainian museum in Hamtramck becomes a wartime focus for help, pride and history
- Former Congressman Dave Bonior, who has Ukrainian heritage, is dedicating his time to supporting Ukraine and advocating for democracy.
- The museum serves as a reminder of the long history of Ukrainian immigration to the Detroit area, with waves of Ukrainians arriving since World War I.
- The museum highlights the resilience and determination of the Ukrainian people, both in their homeland and in the diaspora.
Calls now come every other day, it seems, from around the state to a tiny museum in Hamtramck that has held the stories of Ukrainians in Detroit since they began arriving to work at the Dodge plant in 1912.
“Americans are saying, ‘What do I do to apologize for my nation? Where do I apologize on behalf of America?’ ” said executive director Olga Liskiwsky.
The Ukrainian American Archives & Museum has been a presence in the community since 1958. Artists fill the gift shop with their artwork, jewelry, handmade dolls, painted eggs and beaded clothing now sold to help pay for injured soldiers.
On March 18, Russia bombed a power station in the Slovyansk, Donetsk region, just hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin promised President Donald Trump the strikes against energy infrastructure would stop.
“Putin during the call reiterated his demand for an end to foreign military and intelligence assistance to Ukraine, according to the Kremlin. Trump, though, denied that the subject came up during an interview with Fox News,” the Associated Press reported.Meanwhile, Detroit quietly holds Ukraine and Ukrainian families close.
What began as a reading room more than half a century ago has evolved into a space that attracts visitors from around the world.
Despite being on Joseph Campau Avenue, the storefront is easy to miss. It has been there for a decade now. A small yellow and blue Ukrainian flag hangs in the window.
‘Devoting the rest of my life to Ukraine’
Dave Bonior, a former congressman from Hamtramck who spent three decades in state and national politics representing Macomb and St. Clair counties and parts of Oakland and Sanilac counties, grew up in a home where Ukrainian and Polish were spoken.
“Ukraine is a big country, about the size of Texas. My grandfather migrated from Ukraine in 1912, when he was 18. He worked 30 years at the Dodge plant as a fireman,” Bonior said.
“I’m 79. I am devoting the rest of my life to Ukraine. It’s very, very important to step up to be strong for democracy. It’s something all our relatives have fought and died for. …”
Bonior, the son of a printer who served in the U.S. Air Force from 1968-72 during the Vietnam War, plans to return to Ukraine at the end of March for the second time in 13 months.
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He works aggressively behind the scenes as someone who once held the powerful role of House majority whip, the enforcer of political party discipline in Washington, D.C. He was also chair of the Ukrainian caucus, a role in which he was preceded by Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, and succeeded by Nancy Pelosi, D-California.
World events, for Bonior, are personal. Three generations lived together in his childhood home near Holbrook and Lehman, just blocks from the Ukrainian museum.
These days he writes about Ukraine for the National Catholic Reporter newspaper and the Macomb Daily.
His home state is where about 39,000 Ukrainian Americans live now, according to the U.S. Census.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, thousands of Ukrainian nationals were approved to live and work in the state under President Joe Biden-era programs aimed at offering a temporary reprieve from war, Bridge Michigan reported.
Polish restaurants in Hamtramck are staffed with Ukrainian servers who moved to Detroit to be safer. One refugee, a former lawyer in Ukraine, cleans houses in Royal Oak with his wife to earn money. Their employer called the museum to ask whether the couple would be safe during these uncertain times.
As the U.S. steps up deportations, Trump has considered revoking the legal status of some 240,000 Ukrainians living in the country under the humanitarian program, Reuters reported early this month.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tweeted that the Reuters report was “fake news” and then wrote: “The truth: no decision has been made.”
‘We are proud Americans’
Waves of Ukrainians have settled in metro Detroit since the start of World War I in 1914. In the 1930s, Ukrainians coming to the U.S. didn’t have luck getting bank loans, so they formed fraternal organizations throughout the country and borrowed money from each other.
Liskiwsky, who has run the tiny Ukrainian museum for eight years, translates historical books and documents into English and then archives materials. Growing up in Detroit, the Rosary High School graduate attended Ukrainian language school on Saturdays and went on to attend Harvard summer school to study Ukrainian history and literature. She later was certified to teach Ukrainian.
“As a child of immigrants, my parents always instilled in us that we are proud Americans, that this country gave them opportunities. We’re asking, ‘How can we remove intelligence sharing as Putin continues to bomb innocent civilians?’ Every day there’s bombing.”
(The Trump administration halted intelligence sharing with Ukraine after the highly publicized Oval Office blowup between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, but resumed earlier this month.)
While her career includes stints at the legendary Motown Museum and The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn, Liskiwsky decided to run the site that is little-known to many outside the Ukrainian community. She wanted to invest in preserving her roots rather than pursue a national position despite so many encouraging her to do so.
“I still have family in Ukraine, so it matters to me,” she told me.
Looking through books, she pointed to a picture from 1933 on Woodward Avenue in Detroit. It was a protest led by Ukrainian Americans against the manufactured famine in Ukraine organized by the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, Liskiwsky said.
“They were isolating entire areas of Ukrainian peasants who didn’t want to participate in collectivization of their farms. The Ukrainians wanted to retain ownership of the land that their families had farmed for generations," she said. "Stalin sent brigades of enforcers into the villages to remove all foodstuffs. Despite the fact that it was a bumper crop that year, all harvest was removed, and, out of desperation, people were burying food for their own survival. They were starving to death,” she said.
Local families donate photos of their parents and grandparents from the past 100 years. Liskiwsky gently paged through documents and images. She talks about textiles and war bonds and stamps from all over Ukraine. She’s aided by an intern from Mumford High School provided by the Bloomberg Philanthropies.
For more than a century, the Ukrainian church community has been strong, Liskiwsky said.
“We had a lot of businesses, bakeries, stores. We used to practice our music and dance in the hall.”
In southwest Detroit, the Ukrainian National Temple — center of the Ukrainian American community beginning in the 1930s — is now a Spanish Pentecostal church in an original Ukrainian neighborhood off Michigan Avenue and Livernois.
Catholics and Jews found refuge in Detroit
A majority of the people who came to metro Detroit from Ukraine were from western Ukraine and Byzantine Rite Catholics whose priests could marry, she explained.
“There were large Jewish communities throughout the country because Jews were not allowed to live in Russia proper. They were only allowed to live in Ukraine or Belarus or Lithuania. It was called a Pale of Settlement (from 1791 to 1917). Jews were forbidden to live in Russia as part of an ethnic cleansing program," Liskiwsky said.
"People now will come and say, ‘My grandfather was Austrian. But he’s listed in as a citizen of Austro-Hungary and ethnically is Ukrainian. … There was antisemitism then, in the 18th century. In 1876, the Russian Empire made a great proclamation that Ukraine does not exist and Ukrainian is not a language. They forbade Ukrainians from printing, from performing. Schools were closed.”
Ukraine was independent for a brief period after World War I, but regained its full sovereignty and territory in 1991 with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The museum displays stamps and war bonds from past and present.
Families who have lived in Detroit for generations now reach out to try and help. They raise money selling donated items and handmade crafts to help pay for medical treatment or surgery for Ukrainian soldiers.
“People reach out and share that the right side of their son’s right face was blown off and they don’t have money for surgery. We’re constantly dealing with these sorts of heartbreaking situations,” Liskiwsky said.
Helpers are found all around, members of the Ukrainian diaspora:
- Dr. Mark Hnatiuk is a craniolfacial surgeon from metro Detroit who goes to Ukraine through a program called Razom, and helps train surgeons — some of whom have lost children to the war.
- Alex Tkachenko, a Ukrainian muralist whose art is in the Fisher Mansion and Motor City Casino, has works at the museum for sale to help raise money, too.
- Emily Rutkowski runs Misha’s Angels in Shelby County, raising money to get clothing, first aid kits, night goggles and anything else the soldiers might need. Rutkowski, who has roots in Hamtramck, is the granddaughter of the cook at the Polish Century Club.
“All these things are circular,” Bonior said.
Searching for lost children, keeping faith
Christina Dzul (pronounced “Jewel”), 69, of Grosse Pointe Farms, is the daughter of parents who fled from Ukraine during World War II with just the clothes on their backs.
Growing up in Detroit, Dzul attended a Ukrainian grade school, Ukrainian Immaculate Conception High School and then language school on Saturdays. She participated in Ukrainian dancing and never spoke English at home.
“It would have been disrespectful,” Dzul said. “My grandmother was living in our house, too. We were raised with two languages.”
She and her family have returned to Ukraine to see family and visit gravesites.
“We still have family there,” Dzul said. “We are trying to help in every which way we can.”
She and her husband, Dr. Andrew Dzul, an ear, nose and throat doctor, have been to the Polish border to help with medical care and language translation.
“My niece was a television reporter in Kyiv who fled for her life when the main city was getting shelled,” Christina Dzul said. “She came to the U.S. because she speaks four languages and they made her a reporter in Washington, D.C. But she missed family so she went back. Now she’s working for an organization trying to find more than 20,000 children abducted by Russia. She keeps track of all their names, their backgrounds. They have been able to get 200 or 300 back but there are 20,000 who have been taken.”
Dr. Dzul, 71, serves on the board of the tiny Ukrainian museum and has traveled overseas to conflict zones.
“The world has always felt the United States is a supporter of international peace and good deeds,” he said. “That whole system is completely falling apart.
Americans have questioned Trump’s perceived admiration for Putin over Zelenskyy, who was elected in 2019.
Trump told Fox News on March 18 that he had a “very good relationship with Putin,” a former intelligence officer who has been president since 2012.
‘Human dignity is not negotiable’
Donna Voronovich, 62, an architect from Bloomfield Hills and professor at Oakland University, is a board member at the museum whose parents immigrated as children from Ukraine to Canada and the U.S. after spending five years in “displaced persons” camps in Germany awaiting approval for refugee status during World War II.
“I come from a long lineage of Ukrainian patriots,” Voronovich said. “My mother was a school psychologist and my father a chemical engineer. My father’s father was a doctor and my other grandfather was a veterinarian. My grandmother was a pharmacist. When they had to leave Ukraine, they left everything behind. They came with nothing but their education and their determination to persevere.”
While passion for Ukraine is intense, Ukrainians are not special or unique in any way as far as love, patriotism or devotion to culture, Voronovich said. “I think Ukraine is representative of basic humanity; people who want to live in freedom.”
When Bonior talks about Ukraine, he can’t help but include details about “the Polish miracle,” the largest refugee migration in 2022-23 since World War II. Some 13 million Ukrainians came across the border into Poland. No one was sent to a refugee camp but, instead, taken into homes and convents and monasteries and churches.
The nation absorbed its neighbors, providing language and education and food support with leadership from the Caritas Catholic relief charity, said Bonior, a social worker by training.
“One of the places we went was Ukrainian Catholic University,” Bonior said during a talk at the St. Clair Inn in September.
“A lot of the university is made up of women now (while the men are off fighting). It was quite moving to hear what they had to say,” he said. “I remember this one woman, her name was Yanna, and she had a boyfriend fighting on the front line. She told us, ‘The best people in our country are dying. When we lose our best people, we will be ready to become the best people.’ ”
Ukrainians will never give up because its people have an unwavering spirit, a fearless nature, and an ability to persevere against all odds, Detroiters told me.
“We are not afraid because we know that Ukraine is and always will be,” Voronovich said.
“As long as there is one Ukrainian alive, Ukraine exists. … Ukraine’s fight is the fight for every human being who ever had their identity or freedom threatened. Human dignity is not negotiable.”
Phoebe Wall Howard is a former Detroit Free Press auto reporter who now writes a column on car culture, consumer trends and life called “Shifting Gears" on Substack. Contact her at phoebe@phoebehoward.com.