Paper Life: Nadia Olijnyk’s Notebooks

Abstract

My Ukrainian grandmother Nadia Olijnyk lived in Adelaide, South Australia, from the time she arrived as a postwar refugee in 1949 until her death at the age of 95 in 2009. She left a bundle of notebooks in which she had written down her memories, mostly in the final decade of her life. They include stories about her life in Ukraine, including from the early 1940s when her home city of Kharkov was at the epicentre of a series of momentous battles. This paper has two purposes. The primary purpose is to present one of Nadia’s stories as a first step towards bringing her notebooks to light with a view to sharing and protecting them in a spirit of intergenerational custodianship. The second is to offer a framework for understanding them by engaging with ideas and theories that relate to memory, self-narration, and writing as a means of post-traumatic healing.