The Ukrainian volunteer became a laureate of the “Memory of the People” award in the Czech Republic

Ukrainian Nadiya Kalinchenkova became a laureate of the Czech “Memory of the People” award. She is a 73-year-old volunteer from Donetsk region, who has been helping Ukrainian soldiers and displaced people for ten years.

The “Memory of the People” award should be presented tonight during a solemn ceremony at the National Theater in Prague with the participation of the President of the Czech Republic, Petr Pavel. On November 17, the Czech Republic celebrates the Day of Struggle for Freedom and Democracy.

This year, four more representatives from the Czech Republic and Slovakia who resisted communist regimes and political repression won the award: Milena Sedlackova and Jaroslav Vrbensky from the Czech Republic, Fedor Gal and Emil Sedlacko from Slovakia.

“We owe it to these people that we live in freedom,” said Mikulas Kroupa, director of Post Bellum and founder of the “Memory of the People” award.

Post Bellum is a Czech non-profit organization dedicated to documenting the historical memory of the 20th century.

Nadia Kalinchenkova was born in Glukhiv, Sumy Oblast, from where the family moved to Donetsk Oblast. She graduated from the Kramatorsk Industrial Institute, after which she worked as an engineer. In 2014, she joined the volunteer movement “Kramatorski bees”, where she helps weave protective nets for the Ukrainian Defense Forces.

When weaving nets, volunteers never talk about death, Nadiya Kalinchenkova told the Post Bellum project, which collects an archive of oral histories.

“Here you have to be focused only on defense, only positive, so that this positivity through our nets is transferred to our guys. It was transmitted through the socks we knit, through the blankets we make for the seats, through the blankets, through the sniper gloves we knit. We made kikimori. Just to be positive that it is a person wearing this kikimora, a person is hiding under this mesh. Let her really protect her,” says the volunteer.

Since 2010, the Czech non-governmental organization Post Bellum has recognized more than 70 personalities, including several Ukrainians:

• in 2024, among the awardees was Olga Geiko, human rights activist, former dissident and political prisoner;
• in 2023 – Orthodox priest and military chaplain Vasyl Vyrozub. He told Radio Svoboda about torture in captivity and how he tried to take the bodies of dead Ukrainians from Zmiiny Island;
• in 2022 – philosopher, vice-rector of the Ukrainian Catholic University, former dissident and political prisoner Myroslav Marynovich;,
• in 2020 – Leonid (Levko) Dovhovich, who at the age of 14 joined a group of resistance to the Soviet government in Transcarpathia and was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Later, he became the president of the European Congress of Ukrainians.