March 17, 2024

Living the dream with author and activist Oksana Kukurudza

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From the echoes of World War II to the current conflict in Ukraine, join us on the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball as we dive into a gripping narrative with Oksana Kukurudza. Discover her family's harrowing journey from Nazi slave camps to success in America, and how history's shadows loom over today's geopolitical struggles. Oksana's tale is a testament to resilience, a reminder of the past, and a call to action for the future. Tune in to be inspired by a story of survival and triumph against all odds.

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> Speaker A>Welcome, um, to the living the Dream podcast with curveball. If you believe you can achieve cheat, cheat.

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> Speaker A>Welcome to the Living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where interview guests that teach, motivate and inspire. Today we're going to be talking to author and businesswoman, Axana Kukarutza.

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> Speaker A>Uh, Axana parents spent time in the Nazi slave camps in World War II, and she was in displaced camps in Europe until she finally got here to become a successful businesswoman. So we're going to be talking to her about her experiences in the camps and her parents'experiences in the Nazi slave camps and everything that she's up to now. So, Axana, thank you so much for joining us today.

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> Speaker B>Hi, Curtis. Um, so glad to be here and thank you very much for having me.

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> Speaker A>Well, we're definitely glad to have you. Why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Speaker B>Sure, I would be happy to. Um, so, just to let your audiences know, uh, I was actually born and raised in the United States, so I didn't, uh, spend time in the displaced person camps, uh, after World War II. However, I do have older siblings who did. Um, so just to, uh, let your audiences know, I'm the youngest of twelve children. And so, um, my parents had six children in Germany, um, in the displaced person camps as well as, uh, in apartments, uh, in and around Germany.

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> Speaker B>And then when, um, they were able to immigrate to the United States, they had an additional six children here in the United States. And I'm the last of them. I was born and raised in Rochester, New York, uh, where all of my siblings grew up. Uh, but prior to that, um, my parents have a very sad story, um, of being either duped or kidnapped.

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> Speaker B>My mother was duped through propaganda. My father was just deported and kidnapped, uh, to Nazi Germany from their homes in western Ukraine, which at the time, in the late thirty s and early 40s were a part of Poland, uh, until, um, the Nazis invaded.

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> Speaker B>And they spent their entire time during the war in these forced labor camps, which for all intensive purposes were slave camps. They were a little bit nicer and better than concentration camps, but they were forced to work twelve hour days. They couldn't go home, they couldn't write.

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> Speaker B>Their families see their families, and they were barely paid. Many, uh, people don't realize that, um, many people know about the Nazi master race theory that had, um, Jews in Roma, uh, and uh, homosexuals and handicapped kind of at the bottom, uh, considered parasites for extermination.

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> Speaker B>But one rung up from that were eastern Europeans and Slavs, like my parents, um, who are ukrainian. And basically the Nazis considered Slavs to be their slave race. And once they were done working, uh, their plan was to eventually exterminate them once they had gotten through the Jews in the Rome. So my parents had very traumatic beginnings, um, in their lives, because they were there when they were teenagers. Um, my mother went there at 17 years old, and somehow they found a way to survive and find themselves in the United States and raise a family. And I was able, uh, with their help and support, uh, to be one of the few of the twelve of us who was able to go to college, leave home, and go to school in Boston. And I was able to travel the world, become a public accountant and a management consultant.

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> Speaker B>And now I'm 52 years old.

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> Speaker B>Ukraine has been invaded by Russia, by what I see, uh, is a dictator and an authoritarian, Vladimir Putin, not much better than Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.

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> Speaker B>And I feel like it's my time to educate the world about and remind all of us about what happened in World War II and just how easily an authoritative leader with ideas of grandiosity and looking at another people, in this case, the u people, is less than compared, um, to russian people, and how we can easily find ourselves in a world.

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> Speaker A>Well, I'd like.

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> Speaker B>I know that was a lot.

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> Speaker A>Oh, no, that's fine. And I'd like to apologize, because I guess your bio was a little confusing.

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> Speaker B>That's fine. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't, um, suggesting that I had a personal experience, um, that I didn't have. Uh, however, I do have older siblings that did spend some time in those displaced person camps after the war, as well as my parents. And I've done extensive research, so I can definitely talk more about labor camps or the displaced person camps after the, um. Know, I'm very passionate about this topic because of the war in Ukraine, and, uh, seeing the events that are happening that the Russians are doing to Ukrainians, whether it's stealing their children, whether it's putting them into internment camps, torturing them, the bombings that are happening, and just the rhetoric and propaganda coming out of Russia suggesting that are not as good as Russians, makes me feel like the same events are repeating themselves with what happened in World War II. And that's why I want to shine a light on my parents'past. So this know, we, as a society here in America, in the United States, or know in the west, or throughout the whole world, realize that we, as humans, just keep treating other people, us.

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> Speaker A>Um, tell us. How many Slavs were working in these camps?

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> Speaker B>Yeah, so there were 13 million total people across Europe that were brought to Germany to work, and over 6 million of them were Slavs.

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> Speaker B>And the laborers were treated very differently, um, based upon their ethnicity. And it was very much a part of, um, the Nazi master race theory, uh, where if you were german or Aryan like, so let's say scandinavian or british, or you are french western European, you are considered to be germanic like. And so you were forced to work, but yet you were treated with the same conditions as a German, and you were paid the same rates as Germans. The 6 million Slavs that included, know, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians, when they were brought, uh, to Germany, they were treated very differently. Um, they were often under lock and key with guards. They were separated into different camp, um, and their living and working were really hard. In fact, I've read, Curtis, that it was about a 25% survival rate in, uh, these labors, which is deplorable if you think about it.

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> Speaker B>And, um, these workers, over 6 million, uh, workers, many of them perished in the work that they did. And they did a bunch of different kinds of work. So some of them worked on farms. Um, many of them worked in factories which had some of the worst conditions, um, imaginable. And many of them worked nearby concentration and would see them. My mother worked in a bomb factory towards the end of the war, and she told me the story about how there were jewish workers, uh, women, and she said children, maybe they were teenagers, I'm not sure, working under the factory, in the basement of the factory and how on Sundays she would see them digging were. Conditions were really rough.

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> Speaker B>And many people know about what happened in the concentration camps. They've watched the films. They know about Auschwitz, Berkinau and Dakau and those camps. But most people don't know about these force lake camps and don't know how badly millions and millions of people. And I feel like it's time like their stories need to be told.

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> Speaker A>Okay, well, another story that needs to be told is, uh, the last million refugees. So tell us who they are and why they're called that.

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> Speaker B>Sure. I'd be happy to. So before the war ended, and I believe it was at the, uh, Stalin. Uh, it was Stalin. It was Truman on the US side, I think Roosevelt and Churchill sat down and they took a map of Nazi occupied Europe. They separated it. And when the armies came through, um, especially in Germany, there were many parts of Germany that I didn't even realize were liberated by the US. Army, but yet a few months later handed over to the Soviet because they had created this map, um, before the invasion of Germany. And so these millions of workers that were liberated, many, um, of them were very lucky. They were liberated in areas that were already predetermined to be british, French, um, US occupation zones. Uh, but other of them were not so lucky. And they were either liberated by the red army or they were liberated by the US army, but then later handed over to the Soviets.

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> Speaker B>And these leaders, um, amongst themselves, decided that they would hand over, uh, the refugees if their country of origin was the Soviet Union or Poland or France. And they did this because the British and the French were very concerned about getting their citizens back after the war. And so many people ended up going back to their countries of origin by choice. Um, I already said that there were over 6 million, um, know, in Germany at the end of the war. And many of them did choose to go back to the Soviet Union or to, um, Poland and other countries. However, many of them didn't want to go home. And what ended up happening is they were either forced to go home by the British and the US or the French, or the Soviets started even kidnapping them. So the Red army would come into these displaced person camps, um, where had kind of put the know to give them someplace to stay and give them food. And they were administrated by the United nations and Soviets would come in and brutally interrogate people that they thought believed were their citizens and forced them to go back to the Soviet Union. And courtesy may ask, well, why were people so afraid to go home? They were afraid to go home because the Soviets and communists hated the Nazis so much.

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> Speaker B>They believed any of their citizens that were in Germany during the war were complicit and somehow collaborated. They didn't see them as being kidnapped and being victims. They believed they were collaborators. And so it made so many of these refugees after the know, these former forced laborers or concentration camp laborers, so afraid to go back to the Soviet Union because oftentimes if they did go back and they were deemed thought to be a collaborator, they were either killed, um, by the Red army or they were put in labor camps and gulags in the Soviet Union for years and years and not let out, oftentimes until Stalin died in the. So between the kidnappings and voluntarily going home, you ended up having these 1 million citizens or 1 million refugees who just refused to go home.

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> Speaker B>They found their way in british and US occupation zones that were more sympathetic to their plight and their anti communism and not wanting to go home and let them stay. And my parents were west Ukrainians. They were ukrainian nationalists. They had lived under Poland. They had only lived under the USSR for a year during the war. And they were very anti communist and they didn't want to go back home because their home now was under the Soviets. And so they weren't together at the time, Curtis. Um, they were in separate camps, but both of them, um, appealed, ah, for refugee status with the US army. And so they were two of a million people that are called the last million because many of them spent years finding a country would take them because they didn't feel like it was. And it's a sad story. I mean, my parents, um, they were in Germany for years until they finally found a place in these. They moved here, but yet they were liberated in 1945. So they had eleven years in Europe displaced without a home.

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> Speaker A>Okay, well, let's talk about Putin invading Ukraine. Why did he invade Ukraine?

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> Speaker A>And why does he feel like that Ukraine has.

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> Speaker B>Those are. Those are all interesting questions. I believe there's a number of reasons why Putin invaded Ukraine. One is that since Ukraine has been an independent country, and that was in 1991, so over 30 years, well, it hasn't been a perfect democracy. Um, there's a lot of corruption in Ukraine, however it has been. There are multiple parties, political parties. They've had six different presidents in their over 30 years of history, and they want to look westward.

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> Speaker B>And all of this is very threatening to someone like Vladimir Putin, who effectively an authoritarian leader, uh, has a dictatorship, doesn't have real elections, uh, like what happens in Ukraine, and is basically clamped down on any kind of dissent or freedom of speech or freedom of expression. And I think for Vladimir Putin, one seeing a neighbor so close to him that has those freedoms, I believe he fears that Russians are going to look to Ukraine and want the same, know, if not already wanting the same.

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> Speaker B>And then secondly, a dictator always needs a foreign enemy to be able to retain their power and to work up the masses.

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> Speaker B>So I believe another reason why he invaded Ukraine was because he had to keep a foreign enemy to keep his own people in line. Putin also sees Ukraine as Russia because back over a thousand years ago, there was once this great empire called Kiev Rus. And Vladimir Putin is very big on empires. I think he almost sees himself as an emperor himself.

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> Speaker B>And he likes to fantasize, um, that Russia himself, the tsars, um, all come from the original grand prince of Kiev and Kiev Rus.

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> Speaker B>And if Kiev is the capital of a country called Ukraine and not Russia, it's very hard for Russians, or even Vladimir Putin, to know we are the descendants of Kiev Rus. Um, we own the legacy of the history of Kiev Rus. And I believe that's the real reason that Vladimir Putin says that Ukraine is Russia.

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> Speaker A>Okay, well, explain to the listeners what it was like growing up with family on the other side of the Iron Curtain. And what was it like when you finally got to meet them?

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> Speaker B>Sure. That was an interesting time. It's almost unbelievable that only 30 or 40 years ago, we couldn't call people on the other side of the world or have conversations with them. And so for my parents, the only way that they could communicate with their families, uh, behind the Iron curtain in the Soviet Union. And for my mother, that was her older sister as well as her two half brothers.

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> Speaker B>For my father, it was his younger brother. And the only way that they were able to communicate was through letters and packages. And for my parents, they were very close to their family, to their siblings. And for them, they felt it was very important to help support them in the Soviet Union. And so about two times a year, even though my parents were very poor and struggling because they were immigrants themselves, they always found a way to pull packages together to send to their family and the iron curtain. And one of the best black market items was Levi's jeans. Back then, they would often pull together these packages of Levi jeans to send, uh, over to their families. And for the rest of us, it was very strange because we had never met these people.

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> Speaker B>The only things we knew about them were the letters that my parents would share with us and read to us. So they were ghosts and strangers, uh, to us.

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> Speaker B>And then, on the other hand, we were also struggling ourselves and without things. And yet we were seeing these family members that were often given nicer jeans, nicer clothes than we even had. So there's a little lot of jealousy, I would say, and some resentment with family that we had never met. And so when I had the opportunity in my twenty s to move to Ukraine for work, I did, uh, public accounting there and lived in Kiev. I did some work in the west and had the opportunity to meet my relatives there and even bring my mother over so that she could help introduce us.

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> Speaker B>And it was interesting.

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> Speaker B>It was like meeting strangers, I have to say strangers that look like you, which is interesting. But over time, when we got to know each other, those boundaries were broken.

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> Speaker B>And I even have a cousin who moved to New Jersey ten years ago, and he and I have become very close, and I've become close to his family. So I would say, it was kind of rough in the beginning. Um, but my parents were able to reunite with their families, which were great after the end of the Iron Curtain, and I've been able to maintain a close relationship with my mother's side of the family, at least.

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> Speaker A>Well, that's a good thing to hear. How do you feel like Ukraine has developed such a resiliency to fight back against a richer adversary, a bigger adversary, like Russia.

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> Speaker B>Yeah. Uh, I think for Ukraine, um, many people believe that Ukraine means borderland. And if you learn anything about ukrainian history, Ukrainians have been in the middle. I mean, after the destruction of Kiev Rus by the Mongols, Ukraine is really in the middle of great powers, whether it was the polish lithuanian empire or Commonwealth that was called, or the german empire, the Austro Hungarian empire, the russian empire. And so for hundreds of years, it's been dominated by other foreign powers.

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> Speaker B>However, since 1991, for 30. Over 30 years, they found freedom, and they have memories of the atrocities that they had to face under the domination of these foreign powers, and they have felt what freedom is like and having their own independence, being able to set their own course and their own future.

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> Speaker B>And I believe they don't want to give it up, and that's why they're so resilient and they're fighting so hard. And we're seeing them as, uh, almost like David to a know, taking on such a huge country, know, mass stockpiles of weapons and men, and they're holding their own. And it's been an amazing thing to watch over the past two years as a Ukrainian American, and I just really hope that the west continues to support Ukraine so that they can maintain their independence and get their land back.

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> Speaker A>Well, tell the listeners about your book. Tell us, uh, what we can expect when we read it, and tell us where we can get it.

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> Speaker B>Sure. So I'm in the m midst of rewriting parts of it. Uh, I am working with a literary agent who believes that a number of publishers will be interested in it. Um, in fact, there's already one that's interested in it, but we're going to look for some others as well. The book title is sunflowers bend, but rarely break, and it's based very much on the resiliency of the ukrainian people, as well as my parents. Sunflowers bend as they reach for the light, but they never break. And that's how I see my parents being survivors.

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> Speaker B>Right. Um, and then thriving here in the United States and raising a beautiful, large family. The book will be very much focused on the experience that both my parents had separately, as forced laborers. So I'll take you on a journey. From the moment they moved, um, to Nazi Germany, what happened to them as forced laborers, and then, most importantly, how they both fought to find liberation with the United States and the US occupation zones.

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> Speaker A>Okay, well, let us know about any current upcoming projects that you're working on that we need to be aware of.

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> Speaker B>Sure. So, in the meantime, while I'm rewriting my book, I've been doing quite a bit of writing about history, current events, culture of Ukraine on the, uh, blogging site called medium. And, Curtis, I'll send you the details that you can give to your readers to find me there. I also write little, um, I would say, articles that will give some insight into the book as well and write about the forced labor experience. So this way, readers don't have to wait until my book comes out. They can learn more about this topic, um, as I'm writing it and in the process of being published.

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> Speaker A>Okay, well, so we all can keep up with everything that you're up to and the important message that you're shedding light on. Go ahead and throw out your contact information.

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> Speaker B>Absolutely. I mean, uh, listeners can find me on Instagram, on Facebook, on LinkedIn.

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> Speaker B>Um, my name is quite unique, so, um, I think on Instagram, I'm, uh, okukurutza, too. Uh, so very easy to find on all of those social media sites. And I also have a book landing page. So if your audience is interested in downloading that first chapter for free, it's, uh, ww dot sunflowersraelybreak.com.

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> Speaker A>All right, ladies and gentlemen, so please go check her out, close us out with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to touch on that you would like to talk about, or just any final thoughts you have for the listeners?

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> Speaker B>I do have one. And, Curtis, I don't know if you mind. We didn't talk about it before, but I do have a call to action. Uh, one of the things that I've been doing.

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> Speaker A>Yeah, go right ahead.

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> Speaker B>One, uh, of the things I've been doing. As a Ukrainian American, I feel very strongly that it is in the United States best interest to support Ukraine because of the risk of what China might do to Taiwan, um, what Iran might do in the Middle east if we allow Vladimir Putin to hold the world hostage with his nuclear weapons and just take over countries that don't belong to him. And so I've become quite an activist calling. In October, I was even on Capitol Hill, uh, doing some volunteer lobbying on behalf of Ukraine again in April and I ask any of your listeners, they also believe United States role to support countries who want freedom and to please reach out to your representatives and tell them to pass this aid bill and support Ukraine.

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> Speaker B>Support countries that um, have it.

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> Speaker A>Ladies and gentlemen, sunflowersratleybreak.com. Please go check it out. Follow Rate Review Share this episode to as many people as possible and listen to Exana's call to action. And if you know of anybody else that can benefit or can help with, uh, her call of action, or can check out her book and support everything that she's up to. Follow Rate Review Share this episode to as many people as possible if you have any guest or suggestion topics, Cjackson 102 at Cox.

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> Speaker A>Net is the place to send them. As always, thank you for listening and supporting the show.

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> Speaker A>And Zana, thank you for having so much bravery and being courageous and joining us and sharing your story.

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> Speaker B>Thank you so much, Curtis, for having me. I really appreciate you having me on and supporting me in this call to action. It's very close to my heart.

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> Speaker A>For more information on the living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurveball.com until next time, stay focused on living the dream. Dream.