Hi Harry,
I've only just seen your request on Wikitree. I have been learning Ukrainian and do know its Cyrillic text. I would love to be able to offer my help with the transcription, but I know that I am very bad at reading people's handwriting, and would I would be hopeless at transcribing Cyrillic cursive writing. My interest is that my father, who is unknown to me, was brought to England in the 1940s and could well have been one of those soldiers who were in the Rimini Camp. In which case he would have been transferred to one of the PoW camps near Grantham where I was born. Very likely this would have been at either Allington or Horbling.
Are you aware of the book by Michael Paziuk, (1993), "Victim of Circumstance"? He describes being taken at age 16 from his family in a village near Lviv, and forced into the German Army. He was part of the surrendering troops that were put into the Rimini Camp in 1945, and brought to England in 1947. His second book, "The Right to Equality", (1998), describes his time in PoW camps in Lincolnshire at Wellingore, Moorby, and Blyton. The rest of the book describes his life in England after he left the camp around 1949.
I have downloaded a lot of the naturalisation registers from the National Archives. These are typewritten with transliterations into English of the names. Of course, the west of Ukraine was occupied by Poland at the start of WWII, and so all of the people who had come from that region had Polish papers, even though they might have described themselves as Ukrainian when they put themselves into British hands. I have found Michael Paziuk in the list.
Is there any other way in which I could provide some help with your project?
Best wishes,
Mike Parker
