APPEAL TO THE DIASPORA: Rehabilitation center in Kyiv in dire need of funds (02/27/00)

APPEAL TO THE DIASPORA

Rehabilitation center in Kyiv in dire need of funds

by Dr. Semyon Gluzman

For quite a long time a unique center - the International Medical Rehabilitation Center for the Victims of Wars and Totalitarian Regimes - has been functioning in Kyiv providing medical, psychological and social assistance to people who suffered repression during the years of the totalitarian regime. The average age of our clients is 72; many have no families; some are immobile because of diseases.

Our clients are UPA soldiers, Ukrainian dissidents and the so-called "enemies of the state" who lives were guiltlessly disrupted by "Stalin's" regime.

Unfortunately, now as before, all these people are not of interest to their country. Being sick, hungry and lost they have only one hope - our center. They find kindness and sympathy here; qualified medical assistance and free-of-charge medicines are offered to them here.

I have no illusions; nobody can return them strength, youth, life or a future. Our assistance has a much more modest goal: to give them their last consolation and the opportunity to leave life with dignity.

I was the initiator of this center, since I remember and love my camp friends. The UPA soldiers Yevhen Pryshliak and Dmytro Basarab, my "forest brother" in the underground Jonas Matuziavichus - they are gone, alas.

But there are the others, known to nobody - old men and women who continue to live in a strange land in their own country, where their long cherished blue-and-yellow flag is firmly in the hands of the eternally alive Soviet nomenklatura.

The majority of our center's clients will soon die. In five to 10 years only video interviews with these people, will remain to tell of their sufferings and their pride.

But now they are alive; my staff has warmly cared for them. I have no right to commit a sin by telling them the bitter truth: there is no money left to continue the work of the center. Former sponsors from the West have changed their priorities - what concern do they have about these incomprehensible and useless Ukrainian old people. Unfortunately, the world has gotten used to grief and pain.

There is no more money for medicines, no money for salaries for the staffers who nevertheless keep working every day. We go on smiling and expressing hope about the future.

I know it is immoral to ask for money. But I am not asking it not for myself. I, the director of the center, I am working free of charge - as a volunteer. (I could not be paid for this work.)

A relief fund for former political prisoners that was established by Alexander Solzhenitsyn has not found it possible to support us. Other foundations, too, are unable to help.

Please help the last living former prisoners of the gulag. They do not deserve to be forgotten.

Tax-deductible donations may be sent to 20th Century of Human Rights, 29 Sanford Terrace, Irvington, N.J. 07111. For further information, please call Nadia Svitlychna, (973) 371-6361.

Semyon Gluzman is a physician/psychiatrist, a former political prisoner of the Brezhnev regime in the USSR. He served 10 years of imprisonment and exile for conducting an independent psychological examination of Petro Grigorenko, a former Soviet Red Army general-turned-political dissident who became a founding member of the Moscow and Ukrainian Helsinki monitoring groups. Dr. Gluzman founded the International Medical Rehabilitation Center for the Victims of Wars and Totalitarian Regimes in 1994. For the last three years the center has been operating under a license issued by the Ministry of Health. The center has always been supported by grants and donations from Western sources.

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