Czechoslovakia is my home...
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He was born in 1955 in the Soviet Union in the village of Boratyn in the Volhynian region of Ukraine. Both his parents were Ukrainians, but his mother originally came from the Slovak village of Lutina, and his father from Poland. His parents were part of a group of Ukrainians and who had been “traded” for Volhynian Czechs after WWII. In 1957 he moved with his parents to the Ivano-Frankivsk region, where he studied in elementary and secondary school. After a one-year internship in forestry he studied at the Forestry Institute in Lviv, and then he began working in the Carpathian region. Since he was nine years old, he has been visiting the village of Lutina in Slovakia, which was his mother’s birthplace, and where his grandmother had meanwhile managed to return. His parents, and later also Valerij Kulacký himself, were making numerous attempts to return to Czechoslovakia, but before 1989 they had no chance to succeed. He eventually managed to relocate to the Czech Republic in 1994, and he settled in the village of Květnová near Karlovy Vary, where his aunt has already been living. He began working as a forestry expert in the Krušné Hory Forests company in Klášterec nad Ohří. At present he lives in Chomutov and he still works for the same company as a production manager. His son works as a truck driver, and his daughter is a student. Immediately after his arrival to Chomutov, Valerij Kulacký joined a local national movement of Ukrainians living in the area. His own initiative lead to the founding of the civic association called Bells of Hope, of which he is the chairman. He is also a member of the committee for ethnic minorities in the municipal council in Chomutov, and he serves as the vice-chairman for the organization the Ukrainian Initiative in the Czech Republic. Valerij Kulacký is a member of a group of Ukrainians from eastern Slovakia - people who have been in fact harmed by the return of Volhynian Czechs to their homeland, because people like him were sent to the Soviet Union in exchange for the Volhynians. Throughout the following decades most of them were striving to return to Czechoslovakia, but for many this dream has never come true. Their fate is yet another fragment in the mosaic which documents the massive movements of population that took place in central Europe after WWII. At the same time the story of Valerij Kulacký demonstrates the narrow-mindedness of those who habitually regard minorities, and especially Ukrainians living in our country, as a burden.
