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TEPAN

ANDER A

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(1909), Oleksandr (1911), Volodymyra (1913), Vasyl’ (1915), Oksana

(1917), Bohdan (1921), and Myroslava (who died in infancy in 1922).

After the death of his mother, Stepan’s brothers and sisters lived with

relatives of the family. On 22 May 1941, Andrii Bandera and two of

his daughters (Marta-Mariya and Oksana) were arrested and deported

to Kyiv, where Andrii was sentenced to death and shot 18 months after

the trial. Two of Stepan’s sisters, Marta and Oksana, were deported

to the Krasnoyarsk region and the latter returned to Ukraine only in

1989.

Another sister, Volodymyra, had an equally tragic existence.

On 7 September 1946, she and her husband, a Greek Catholic priest

called Teodor Davydyuk, were sentenced to 10 years in a labour camp.

After three years of living in camps, Teodor died in Soviet Moldova.

His wife served her sentence and survived. In 1956 she returned to

Ukraine where she resided with her daughter. Two brothers of Stepan,

Vasyl’ and Oleksandr,

were also involved in the OUN. Vasyl’ was

sent to the Polish concentration camp at Bereza Kartuz’ka because of

his political activity and was freed only in 1939 with the collapse of

the Polish state. In 1942, both Vasyl’ and Oleksandr were imprisoned

by the Nazis in Auschwitz, where they died on 21 July 1942. The

fate of Bohdan Bandera is uncertain; there are no references to him

after 1944. It is probable that he was shot by the German occupation

regime in Ukraine in 1943.

Stepan’s childhood ended when the First World War began.

Immediately after the war, politically-active Ukrainians made two

abortive attempts to form an independent state: the Ukrainian National

Republic (Ukrains’ka Narodna Respublika, UNR) formed in January

1918, and the Western Ukrainian People’s Republic (Zakhidno-

Ukrains’ka Narodna Respublika), formed in late 1918, which united

briefly in January 1919 with the UNR. By the terms of the Treaty of

Riga of 19 March 1921, however, most western Ukrainian territories

were included in Poland. In 1919, while Ukraine’s future was still being

determined, Bandera started his education in Stryi gymnasium. Since

studying was costly, Stepan needed to work in the household of his

grandfather with whom he lived during this period. Evidently he was

an excellent student because by his fourth year of study he was giving

lectures to the younger students. In the 1920s in Galician schools, now