The first and foremost is I promise to be faithful to God and Ukraine!

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Mykola Stawnychy was born in 1927 in Kolomyia, in a lawyer family Roman Stawnychy and Mariya of Tchaikovsky family. Father studied at the Music Institute named after M. Lysenko in Lviv and was a conductor in “Boyan” choir. Mother was a daughter Andriy Czajkowskyy, a ukrainian writer and lawyer. She was a writer at magazines “Woman’s Destiny,” “World of Youth”, “Women’s freedom”. Family went in exile since his father, a social activist and lawyer, did not expect anything good coming from the Soviet occupation authorities. The train, which traveled with family Stawnychy from Kolomyia, suddenly came under attack Soviet tanks. Family was in exile in Vienna, then in Bavaria (Karlsfeld, Berchtesgaden) of 1949 in America (Buffalo, Washington). Mykola studied in Munich. Mykola became a member of Plast (ukrainian boy-scouts) during the Nazi occupation. A member of the Plast camp near the village of Pasichna, Halychyna, in 1942, and later in the Bavarian refugee camps. After graduating the high school in 1946 he entered the hut of “Lisovi Chorty”. In America, he was an active organizer of the Plast units, commander of Plast camps (in particular, the first commandant of the Plast camp for boys at the Vovcha Tropa, East Chatham, NY, commandant of “Lisova Shkola” (“Forest school”) in 1972, etc.).