The escape route for many was emigration. In the twenty-five years before the First World War more than 2 million Ukrainian and Polish peasants left Galicia, including an extraordinary 400,000 people, or almost 5 per cent of the province’s population, in 1913 alone. Some went to the new factories of Polish Silesia, some to France and Germany. But most took ship to Canada and the United States, founding today’s 2-million-strong North American Ukrainian diaspora.
Our grandmother was part of this.
