4 The RAPS Sheet October 2020 In memoriam: Basil Dmytryshyn, 1925-2020 applying to several universities, he chose the University of Arkansas, where, according to an article in the winter 1986 edition of PSU Perspective, he felt confident “he wouldn’t run into people with whom he could speak any of the several European languages he knew.” The young woman who processed his first tuition payment was Virginia Roehl. They married on July 16, 1949. After earning a B.A. in 1950 and an M.A. in 1951 from Arkansas, he completed a Ph.D. in 1955 at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1956, after a year of postdoctoral work, he accepted an assistant professorship at Portland State. Professor Dmytryshyn spent his career examining Russia and became a recognized authority. He published more than 20 books and more than 150 articles and reviews in professional journals around the world on diverse aspects of Russian and Soviet history. Among his books are A History of Russia and USSR: A Concise History and the source books Medieval Russia and Imperial Russia. Research and teaching stints took him to Harvard University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Hokkaido University in Japan, and the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He was also a fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington, D.C. Professor Dmytryshyn spent 1967-68 in Germany on a Fulbright Fellowship, reviewing and assessing Slavic research and studies centers at European universities. Back on the Portland State campus, his teaching and research earned him two consecutive John Mosser Awards for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. In 1985, he was selected for the Branford Price Millar Award for Faculty Excellence. He retired from Portland State in 1989 and was appointed professor emeritus. His continuing research and publications were recognized by the Retirement Association of Portland State with the Outstanding Retired Faculty Award; he shared his life story with RAPS members in October 2006. He was predeceased by his wife, Virginia, who died in 2018, and his parents and two sisters. He is survived by daughter Sonia, son-in-law Ben, granddaughter Elizabeth, grandson-in-law Kehl, and daughter Tania. Contributions in Professor Dmytryshyn’s memory may be made to the Oregon Historical Society, University of Arkansas Foundation, Portland State University Foundation, and Corban University. BASIL DMYTRYSHYN, who served Portland State for more than 30 years as a professor of history, died August 27 in Salem at the age of 95. Professor Dmytryshyn was born in Poland to Ukrainian parents, Euphrosenia and Frank Dmytryshyn, on January 14, 1925. The youngest of three children, he grew up on a farm in Barvinok and was educated both at home and in boarding schools. By fall 1943, Professor Dmytryshyn was an elementary school teacher in Zyndranova, a town about two miles from the family farm. One day in midDecember, a German police officer came into the principal’s office. Professor Dmytryshyn was called into the office and placed under arrest; it was part of a sweep by the Germans, who were rounding up “potential troublemakers”—teachers, students, and intellectuals. According to a memoir the professor wrote for his family, he grabbed the officer’s weapons and ran. It was the beginning of a harrowing journey that led Professor Dmytryshyn to fighting with a Slovak resistance unit, evading the German SS, narrowly avoiding a one-way trip to the Soviet Union, and, after the war ended, a long and difficult journey to the West. He eventually learned that many of those who were rounded up that December day in 1943 were shipped to Auschwitz and Dachau. In April 1945, with the war in Europe nearing its end, his partisan group was traveling westward to Monrovia. “One day, in a casual conversation with a Soviet soldier, I told him I was a Ukrainian,” he wrote in his memoir. “Next day, I was arrested.” Incarcerated, interrogated daily, roughed up, and eating little, he was transferred a month later to Bratislava, where the Soviets had established a repatriation center for those who had fled the USSR. “I wasn’t a Soviet citizen,” he wrote, “and to this day, I don’t know why I was put there.” Professor Dmytryshyn slipped out of the repatriation center and headed home to Barvinok. There, his mother and sister told him that Polish communist authorities were inquiring regularly about his whereabouts. He left and headed to the Czech border. He eventually reached Germany, where he made his way to a displaced persons camp in Mittenwald. Eighteen months later, in January 1947, he disembarked from the SS Ernie Pyle in New York City. His daughter, Tania Thompson, explained in an article written in 2006 that her father learned English through “English for Foreigners” classes and “endless showings of Abbott and Costello and Hepburn and Tracy movies.” After PSU Archives Digital Gallery 1985
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