First published in The Record, Sept. 29, 2022

“I got a war, and the place Burned down.”

After a suspicious fire, a Ukrainian camp in the Hudson Valley tries to hang on

 That which a fire cannot destroy is revealed.

Five weeks after Russia invaded Ukraine, by a country highway in upstate New York, a fire started in the kitchen of a Ukrainian summer camp. The camp was all but deserted. That, plus the camp’s location, hidden from the road by a hill and a scrim of evergreen trees, allowed the fire to burn for hours undetected. When firefighters eventually arrived, in the early afternoon of April 1, the kitchen was destroyed, along with the cafeteria and laundry. All that remained were splinters of blackened wood rising from a crater.

It appeared the kitchen had been bombed from the air.  

The building stood for five decades. That it would burn so violently, just 36 days after the invasion, caused many longtime camp volunteers to suspect the fire was started by someone, probably Russians. The Ulster County emergency services department has yet to release its fire report.

“The timing is a little bit funky,” said Oksana Tomaszewsky, 55, who has been a camper, counselor or administrator at the camp every year since she was 7.

For years, the Ukrainian families that built this camp had been moving away. The grandchildren of immigrants go to college anywhere in the country, now, and they marry and have children far from the old cities of New York and New Jersey. Camp enrollment declined slowly. Then came COVID, and it dropped even more. Before the fire, the camp had operated at a deficit for many years. This left no money for security cameras, nor for building upgrades, so the kitchen did not meet modern building codes.

Which meant it was not insured. Without a kitchen, the facility could not host summer camp this year.  

“The fire was catastrophic for us,” said Lesia Harhaj-Kudryk, president of the Ukrainian American Youth Association, which owns the camp. “I got a war, and the place burned down. It’s incredibly daunting."

Swimming, hiking, crafts, an escape to the woods, these are the reasons for camps everywhere to exist. But for Oselia CYM, the camp in Ellenville, New York, where the fire took place, these activities are secondary. The camp was founded by immigrants and refugees from Ukraine. Many had fled famine and murder by a Soviet dictatorship intent on exterminating Ukraine as a language, culture, identity, and nation.

Then they found this land, 115 acres of hilly farmland and forest along a coldwater creek in the Hudson Valley. Across the creek rose a cliff of the Catskills, which reminded the Ukrainians of the Carpathian Mountains back home.

They bought the property in 1955. Their children could hike the mountains, swim the creek. More important, they would learn to speak Ukrainian. Hear Ukrainian folk stories. Learn the dances of their grandparents. Meet soldiers from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, who harassed and assassinated Soviet generals for an entire decade after the end of World War II.

They would learn Ukraine is not some mythical place. It is a country and a people. It existed for 300 years before Moscow. It exists now. And when the campers grow up, they learned, the founders of this camp taught their children that it’s their responsibility to assure Ukraine continues.

“My grandfather came to New York in the ’60s,” Harhaj-Kudryk said. “He never went back to Ukraine. My mom never went to Ukraine. But to us, it feels like we never left. Because we built it here.”

If the fire was set by allies of Russia, their goal was partially achieved. The camp hosted no campers this summer. But the camp’s work as an incubator of Ukrainian independence is renewed. As a camper in the 1950s, Roman Myhal sat and listened to the insurgent army soldiers. He remembers their stories now, the feeling of purpose they gave him.

“When I was five or six years old, I wanted to go to war and fight the Soviets,” said Myhal, 71.

Six decades later, Myhal sat on a folding chair in the camp’s banquet hall to hear more stories from the front lines. Phil Karber is a military strategist recently returned from Ukraine. It was his 39th trip there, to assess the nation’s ability to fight the Russian army. In a week, Karber and retired Army General Wesley Clark would present their findings to the United Nations. There he would speak to the president of Poland about supplying Ukraine’s army with tanks and fighter jets.

In between those trips, Karber drove to Oselia CYM, because this camp is important to the war. He wanted to see the fire crater for himself.

“I don’t think this place is at all a secret to the Russians,” Karber said of the camp. “If they want to screw you up, they will.”

Karber also wanted to see leaders of the Ukrainian diaspora face-to-face. These are the people whose sons and cousins are leaving the United States and Canada to fight in Ukraine. They are raising money for camouflage uniforms, for binoculars and tourniquets and rubbing alcohol. They should know the truth: There is hope for Ukraine, but time is running out. Advancing from the east, the Russian army was using artillery to pulverize cities block by block, Karber said. Ukrainian soldiers countered with better speed and fighting skill, but at a terrible cost. Thousands of the country’s best soldiers were dead. Ukraine’s defenses were stretched thin. If the Russians break through, it will become a tank war on the open steppe.

“It’s tank country,” Karber said, “and Ukraine doesn’t have a chance.”

Myhal’s eyes stayed locked on Karber. He did not move in his chair. His expression did not change. For nearly seven decades, he has come to this camp and listened to people with firsthand knowledge describe Russia’s latest effort to wipe out Ukraine. Now he sat 100 feet from the fire crater, which he suspects may be part of that effort.

Simply being here is to take part in Ukraine’s resistance.

“During the Cold War, we were one of a handful of institutions in the world keeping the idea of Ukraine as a country alive,” Myhal said. “It feels different this time only because there are no kids.”

 A camp in crisis

 It was a church service singular for its softness. The biting smell of the kitchen fire was gone, replaced by the musky sweet smoke of frankincense. The smoke poured from the open doors of the little church, which sat on the lawn like a garden shed wearing an excellent golden hat. Bishop John Paul Chomnycky sang a mournful hymn. On the lawn before the little church, 30 people sang in a whisper. The sun, warming to the day, chased the congregation into the shade of the sycamore trees, where they stood and sang and prayed in the language of their grandparents.

“That we may be delivered from all tribulation, wrath, and misfortune, let us pray to the Lord,” Chomnycky said in Ukrainian.

And the people said in Ukrainian, “Have mercy and protect us, oh God, by your grace.”

One can experience a thousand Catholic masses and never see one as beautiful as this. The soft singing. The bishop, dressed in his most ornate golden finery, as if for an audience with the Pope, standing instead in the humble beauty of morning sunlight falling on grass.

Vladimir Putin, like generations of Russian dictators before him, believes this mass is a threat his power.

He is right.

For decades during the Cold War, the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church met like this, in the woods, in hiding, far from the road, singing softly so the Soviet spies couldn’t hear. Throughout the Cold War it was the largest underground religion in the world. Its bishops were hunted and killed. Its congregants became targets for rumors and propaganda because they dared speak Ukrainian in a church named for their country.

After 30 years of worship out in the open, the churches in Ukraine are again under attack, pulverized by Russian artillery along with the cities where they stand.

At Oselia CYM, this church does not hide. Motorcyclists on the two-lane highway can see its accordion-shaped spire. After mass is complete, congregants will lay wreaths at the base of a pillar dedicated to Ukraine’s heroes, the soldiers who fought Russia and died. Church, prayer, language, camp, for Ukrainians they all mean the same thing: Resist.

“The feeling I get from Ukrainians here in the United States and in Ukraine is: This is it. We can’t endure this any more,” Bishop Chomnycky, speaking after mass, said of Russian rule. “Either we go to the end with this, and throw off the Russian shackles, or it’s going to be the end of us. One or the other.”

The little church is new. Its walls are tight, its many rooflines are straight. Elsewhere at Oselia CYM camp, this is not the case. In the lodge this summer, old pipes burst, flooding three rooms. The old bungalows close to the highway have holes in the exterior walls. Their porches list. The camp road, once paved, now resembles a hiking trail.

On a recent tour, Harhaj-Kudryk, pointed to a line of newer bungalows with flaking shingles.

“We call this ‘The New Camp,’” she said. “It’s 30 years old.”

After Harhaj-Kudryk’s grandfather emigrated from Ukraine in the 1960s, he worked in New York City as a janitor. Her grandmother cleaned offices. They didn’t own a car, so on weekends they caught a bus from Port Authority that stopped right in front of camp.

On arrival they walked up the hill, passed their children to the camp counselors, changed back into their work clothes, and set about building the camp.

“They came up here to be in the fresh air, but they kept working,” Harhaj-Kudryk said. “They built all of this.”

The children of those immigrants moved to the suburbs, but they attended colleges in New Jersey and New York. They lived close enough to the old cities – Passaic, Yonkers, the Lower East Side – to drive their children to Ukrainian school every Saturday morning, and to camp every summer. On July 4th weekends, families from across the Northeast descended on the camp to play sports, march in parades, and hear the most popular bands in Ukraine play their music live.

“It was 500 kids and 2,000 people,” said Harhaj-Kudryk, “so many people you could hardly walk.”

Next came the third generation, and they went to college all over the United States. Colleges started classes earlier in August, preventing older campers from returning as counselors. Young Ukrainian Americans became computer scientists and accountants, not plumbers. They spoke Ukrainian, but maybe not fluently. They returned to Oselia CYM camp because it was the only place to see their childhood friends.

But they visited less often. Many sent their children to American camps for science or soccer. To lure those who remained, the youth association kept prices low, less than $1,000 for three weeks of camp.

The camp had no more free labor. Very little money. Every winter, the camp had to borrow money from the national association to pay taxes and the electricity bill.

“We don’t charge enough for our camps,” Harhaj-Kudryk said. “Even before the fire, we realized there is a lot of work to be done.”

Then came COVID. The camp closed. By the time Russia invaded Ukraine, hundreds of people had left the Ukrainian American Youth Association – only 1,200 members remained.

The war complicates things. With no kitchen or cafeteria, the facility couldn’t host campers for the third summer in a row. But all summer, the bungalows and barracks were full. Hundreds of families drove to the camp on July 4th weekend and camped in fields by their cars. For the first time in years, Harhaj-Kudryk said, the camp won’t need to borrow money over the winter to pay its bills.

“Even if we’re just a little in the black, we’ll take it,” she said.

When it comes to the camp’s larger financial crisis, however, the war makes everything harder. The youth association raised $35,000 in two weeks to buy summer uniforms for Ukrainian soldiers. Then it raised $45,000 for binoculars. The group’s members are not rich, Harhaj-Kudryk said. They can afford to buy supplies for Ukraine’ army, or they can afford to rebuild their camp.

They cannot do both.

“It would be nice to raise $45,000 in two weeks for this place,” said Harhaj-Kudryk. “But we have to prioritize. We go home every day. I don’t have to worry that someone is going to shoot a missile at my house.”

Winning by remote

It was a hot afternoon in August, and Harhaj-Kudryk retreated to the bar in the basement of the banquet hall to hide from the sun. The bar has two television screens. In the evening a Ukrainian boxer, Oleksandr Usyk, was scheduled to fight a Brit named Anthony Joshua to defend his heavyweight titles.

All weekend, Ukrainians from New Jersey, New York, and as far away as Cleveland drove to the camp to play in the annual baseball tournament. By Saturday afternoon they were hot, beer tipsy, and eager to watch the fight.

So Harhaj-Kudryk huddled in the shade of the bar with her phone, the TV remote, and her friend Lesia Myhal, trying to order the fight on pay-per-view.

“If it’s $200? We could probably swing that,” she said.

They punched some buttons. It took a few minutes. Soon they discovered the true cost of screening the fight on two TVs for an audience in a bar.

“Whoa. It’s $800,” Harhaj-Kudryk said. “Yeah, we can barely keep the lights on. We can’t do that.”

Outside, on the field by the creek, the baseball tournament ended. Winners, losers, and spectators walked up the hill, and huddled around a Toyota pickup. Everyone had their cell phones out. Everyone was yelling. Every other word was in Ukrainian.

Chris Gojdycoz made the announcement: Success.

“Hey!” he said. “We got the fight!”

The war with Russia has made Ukrainians famous for doing amazing things with scraps. This fight is no different. Using a complex pairing of Bluetooth, a hotspot and stray bits of wifi, this group of drunken baseball players managed to broadcast the fight’s live audio stream through the Toyota’s speakers. Ihor Sehinovych, 31, flew from Chicago to play in the baseball tournament. He held his phone in his left hand, propping his forearm against the gunwale of the truck until his arm fell asleep.

Fifteen people scrummed around, watching a heavyweight boxing match in Saudi Arabia from a summer camp in the Catskills.

“We’re all watching on that one little phone?” Mike Kuzemczak, 25, said as he walked up and joined the pack. “That’s fire!”

For a few seconds, the tenuous connection dropped. Everyone groaned. Then the fighters reappeared on the tiny screen.

“Dude, I’ve got T-Mobile,” Sehinovych said. “I’m surprised this works in the first place.”

The fight went 12 rounds. The heavyweights danced and jabbed, but neither planted his feet for a knockout punch.

“Usyk is totally winning,”, said Michael Nona, 27. “Of course, we’re biased as hell. He has a whole country behind him.”

“He has to win!” said Alex Hirota who, as owner of the Toyota, became the gathering’s de facto host. “He has to!”

The fight ended. The Ukrainians waited. Eventually the judges in Saudi Arabia announced their decision: Usyk. The Ukrainians – sweaty, tired, and still a little drunk – momentarily lost their minds.

“WHOOO!” Nona said, raising both hands above his bald head. “USYK WON!”

The Oselia CYM camp is still struggling. It will not be fixed in a triumph of last-minute hacking, like an episode of MacGuyver. It will take years of fundraising, and months of hard work, to rebuild the buildings and attract a new generation of Ukrainian campers. Simply removing debris from the fire will cost half a million dollars, Harhaj-Kudryk said, at a time when old Ukrainian donors and young Ukrainian soldiers are consumed by the fight with Russia for their nation’s survival.

But their grandparents did not build this place to play baseball or watch fights. They came to keep the dream of Ukraine alive. In this way, perhaps the catastrophe of this war contains a blessing.

“As kids we used to come up here and memorize poems. And we never understood why,” said Steven Porada, a third-generation Ukrainian who drove to Oselia CYM from his home in Jersey City.  “Now we know.”