[Congressional Record Volume 160, Number 25 (Tuesday, February 11, 2014)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E201-E202]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
MARCY KAPTUR'S UKRAINIAN ROOTS
______
HON. TIM RYAN
of ohio
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Mr. RYAN of Ohio. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to call attention to an
article that recently appeared in the Toledo Blade that describes the
family heritage of our colleague and friend, the Honorable Marcy
Kaptur. Ms. Kaptur represents Ohio's 9th Congressional District, is the
dean of the Ohio delegation, and is the senior-most woman in the House.
As this extraordinary article points out, Congresswoman Kaptur's
interest in the current situation in Ukraine is influenced by her
grandparents who were born in Ukraine and immigrated to America in the
early 1900's.
Last night, the House passed a resolution supporting ``the Ukrainian
people's struggle to build an independent, democratic, and strong
Ukraine that is free from foreign meddling.''
Ohioans are very proud of our family heritage as I am a son of Irish
and Italian immigrants. Marcy Kaptur is proud of her Ukrainian heritage
and I am honored to serve with her in the House.
I submit an article from the Toledo Blade by Tom Troy.
Kaptur's Ukraine Roots Run Deep
Behind the Scenes, Congressman Encourages Democracy
U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D., Toledo) looks over family
pictures on her desk. Miss Kaptur's grandparents were both
born in Ukraine, and she worries about that nation's future.
She plans to bring some Ukrainian farmers here on a trade
mission this month.
During her 30 years as the representative of Ohio's 9th
Congressional District, U.S. Rep. Marcy Kaptur has carried on
a love affair.
The object of her affections is Ukraine, the former Soviet
socialist republic that was the land of her grandmother and
grandfather's birth.
``It has been a lifelong interest because, as our mother
used to say, our children know the history of our family,''
Miss Kaptur, 67, said last week of herself and her brother
Stephen, 61, who lives with her in West Toledo. As Ukraine--a
giant eastern European nation famed for its fertile
farmland--roils in political unrest, Miss Kaptur has been
working behind the scenes to encourage democracy to flourish.
The Toledo Democrat said she has made at least a dozen
trips to Ukraine over the last four decades, and she is
cochairman of the Congressional Ukrainian Caucus.
In recent months the country has exploded into
demonstrations, triggered by outrage at Ukraine President
Viktor Yanukovych's decision to end negotiations to join the
European Union and turn to Russia to help it pay off a
crippling debt. Some see the revolutionary movement as a step
toward true independence that started when Ukraine broke off
from the Soviet Union in 1990.
Miss Kaptur was the co-sponsor of a resolution that passed
Wednesday in a House committee calling the Ukraine leadership
to a higher standard, and to support rights of assembly.
Whether it will come up for a vote in the full House is not
known.
``As the co-chair of the Ukraine caucus I have met with
literally hundreds of Ukrainian leaders, existing leaders,
emerging leaders, presidents, ambassadors, farmers. The
Ukrainian embassy knows about our caucus,'' Miss Kaptur said.
As the Ukrainian military begins making sounds about
intervening in the unrest, Miss Kaptur said she hopes that if
it does, it exercises restraint.
``The point is there has been a lot of interaction [with
the United States], training at the highest level,'' she
said. ``The kind of bloodshed that is historic in that region
hasn't happened and I hope it won't.''
Miss Kaptur as an infant sits in her Grandmother Teofila
Swiecicki Rogowski's lap
[[Page E202]]
while her mother, Anastasia Rogowski, stands. During college,
the representative `worshipped' her hard-working
grandparents, who emigrated from Ukraine in the early 1900s.
The realignment of Miss Kaptur's 9th Congressional District
in 2012 to snake along Lake Erie all the way from Toledo to
Cleveland has been widely decried as gerrymandering designed
to achieve Republican goals of squeezing as many Democrats
into as few districts as possible.
But one upshot has been the linkage of one of Congress's
most Eastern European-focused lawmakers with communities that
have a lot of Eastern European immigrants and their
descendants.
The district now contains the Cuyahoga County city of
Parma, which has a large Ukrainian-American population. Miss
Kaptur is also a founder and co-chairman of the Polish and
Hungarian congressional caucuses.
Her mother's family was Polish living in modern-day
Ukraine.
Miss Kaptur's grandmother Teofila Swiecicki Rogowski and
Grandfather John Rogowski emigrated from Ukraine early in the
1900s.
``Then it was czarist Russia. They were not allowed to
graze their one cow on the open field and could not feed
themselves,'' Miss Kaptur said.
Over the years, as their homeland was devastated by
political and military rivalries, including a famine brought
on by Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and invasion by the Nazis,
they lost all contact with family members in Ukraine. Her
grandmother took in wash, and worked in the Commodore Perry
and Willard hotels to earn money, while her grandfather, a
carpenter, struggled to find work.
``When I was in college I worshipped her and her husband,''
Miss Kaptur said. She wanted to take her grandmother back to
Ukraine and find the town they came from, Burtyn, but her
grandmother was afraid, she said. Teofila died in 1970.
In 1973, Miss Kaptur--then a planner for the city of
Toledo--and her mother, the former Anastasia Rogowski, drove
into Soviet Ukraine, where they found her grandmother's
brother, a former inmate of Stalin's gulag political prison
system for 20 years.
``He was not allowed to travel out of his area because he
was viewed as an enemy of the state,'' Miss Kaptur said. He
was released from the gulag in 1952, but lost his brother to
the camps. Her great-uncle's crime: He had offered aid to a
wounded Kulak, a member of the property-owning farming class
that was being driven into extinction by Stalin. They had the
only car in the dusty town, and were the only guests in the
hotel, which had no curtains but a listening device. They had
sent word to relatives that they would be at the hotel if
anyone wanted to meet them. They were on their third day with
no visitors when they heard activity in the lobby.
Miss Kaptur's great-uncle Casmierz Swiecicici was a former
inmate in Joseph Stalin's prison system for 20 years. ``We
learned the desk clerk had been denying to the woman visitor
that any foreigners were staying in the hotel, despite her
repeated attempts to contact us,'' Miss Kaptur said.
She said the moment that she finally met her grandmother's
brother, Casmierz Swiecicki, was an emotional one. ``There
stood this tall man and I looked at him and gasped because he
held his hands the same way that our grandmother did. He
looked at my mother and said, `are you my sister?' We just
wept,'' Miss Kaptur said. They gave him an orange. ``That
began the moment when we began to unlock the history of what
happened,'' she said. They met more family members in a
return trip two years later.
Andy Fedynsky, resident scholar at the Ukrainian Museum and
Archives in Cleveland, said Miss Kaptur has actively
supported Ukraine since her first term in 1983. He said that
year she played a leadership role in passing a bill to create
a commission on the Ukraine famine, which was widely denied.
``This commission was set up and did a thorough job
establishing there was a famine, it was planned, 7 million
people were deliberately starved to death,'' Mr. Fedynsky
said. He said Miss Kapttr testified that the victims included
her own family.
``She said, `Don't tell me this never happened. I know it
happened because my ancestors endured it,' '' Mr. Fedynsky
said. The commission ``made a huge difference in Ukraine
historiography.''
Miss Kaptur and others worked to get President Obama to
include a Ukraine reference in his State of the Union speech
last week, which he did. The President said, ``In Ukraine, we
stand for the principle that all people have the right to
express themselves freely and peacefully and to have a say in
their country's future.''
``I have been meeting with Ukrainians on a regular basis.
We are planing a trade mission for farmers to bring them to
Ohio in February,'' Miss Kaptur said.
She has a picture of herself meeting a year and a half ago
with one of the opposition leaders when he was in Washington.
She said she was in Ukraine in 2013 while on her way to
Poland to be awarded an honorary citizenship--her father's
family was from Poland--when she feared that Ukraine was
slipping backward. ``I left very, very worried. I saw how
much more difficult their life had become. I was deeply
worried about what I saw--greater poverty among older women,
farmers that I've known.''
Ironically to the girl whose grandmother had only wanted to
raise money in order to buy a piece of land on which to graze
their cow, Ukrainian farmland is being bought up by
oligarchs.
``There was a real sense that democracy was slipping away.
Then all of this has happened. The people of Ukraine have
stood up, and we should stand with them,'' Miss Kaptur said.
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