Parents
Yushchenko's father, Mykhailo Chumachenko, was born in the village of Zaitsivka, Kharkiv Oblast, in 1917, to a large family of farmers. He was one of only a few members of his large family to survive the Ukrainian Genocide Famine of 1932–33.
Chumachenko studied electrical engineering in Lisichansk, Luhansk Oblast. He served in the Soviet Army, was captured by Nazi forces and taken to Germany in 1942. Yushchenko's mother, Sofia Chumachenko, was born in Litky, Kyiv Oblast, in 1927, died 30 September 2012 in Kyiv. Along with many girls in her village, Sofia Chumachenko was taken to Germany at the age of 14 to serve as a slave laborer. Kateryna Yushchenko’s parents met in Germany, married, and gave birth to her sister Lydia in 1945. Mykhailo Chumachenko became seriously ill with tuberculosis in 1945 and spent eight years in a tuberculosis sanatorium. In 1956, the Chumachenko family immigrated to the United States on an invitation from the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in Chicago. Mykhailo Chumachenko worked as an electrician in Chicago until his retirement in 1984. The Chumachenkos moved to Florida in 1987. Chumachenko visited his native Ukraine three times, in 1991, 1994 and 1995. His dream was to return to his village and start a small farm. He died in 1998 and is buried in Kyiv.
Read more about this topic: Kateryna Yushchenko
Famous quotes containing the word parents:
“The child who would be an adult must forgive the parents for all the ways they didn’t raise him or her just right, whether their errors were in loving too much or too little. All parents, as parents of adults, do deflating things that make you feel like a child. If you have children, you’ll do those things too and eventually laugh about them.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Deep inside us, we know what every family therapist knows: the problems between the parents become the problems within the children.”
—Roger Gould (20th century)
“We do the same thing to parents that we do to children. We insist that they are some kind of categorical abstraction because they produced a child. They were people before that, and they’re still people in all other areas of their lives. But when it comes to the state of parenthood they are abruptly heir to a whole collection of virtues and feelings that are assigned to them with a fine arbitrary disregard for individuality.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)