Peacefully, on January 2, 2019, Tina (nee Tatjana Pastoshchuk) Daschko passed away at St. Joseph’s Health Centre, Toronto. She was born to Ivan and Iryna (Vereshchak) Pastoshchuk on April 17, 1924, in the village of Krasnosilka, now Zhytomyr oblast, Ukraine.

She leaves, in deep sorrow, her sons Yuri (Marla Waltman), Walter (Marta Yurcan), and Alexander (Vera Petrashkewych), and grandchildren, Lev, Luke and Alexandra. She is predeceased by her beloved husband of 70 years, George (Jurij) Daschko.

Tatjana grew up in a happy, loving family with seven brothers and sisters. She remembered the joys of her early childhood with great love but this happy time was darkened by Soviet policies. First, collectivization led to the brutal death of her father. Then the genocidal famine, the Holodomor, resulted in her younger brother starving to death, with Tatjana barely escaping the same fate. Her beloved mother, whose selfless efforts during the Holodomor kept Tatjana and her remaining siblings alive, died in her arms shortly before the Nazis invaded their land. Under Nazi occupation, Tatjana was sent by cattle-car to Germany as a slave labourer, an Ostarbeiter, in 1941. In Germany, on the first day of work she met another Ukrainian exile, a young man, Jurji Daschko. They both fell in love but were not allowed to marry until after the fall of the Nazis in 1945. In 1950, Jurji brought Tatjana over to Canada, where he had immigrated with the help of the Canadian government the year before. They spent 65 years together in their “golden Canada”. Together they raised their family with great love and shared this love with their children and their beloved grandchildren, passing on a deep love of Canada, a devotion to family, their Ukrainian roots, culture, justice, and a commitment to building a better world.

The horrors Tatjana experienced in the first twenty years of her life left their mark on her memory but not on her. She was loving and optimistic, full of joy and always ready to either make a joke or laugh at one. She worked hard – not only raising three sons but also holding down various factory jobs, house cleaning, or back breaking work in greenhouses. And yet she was always cheerful, always concerned about the welfare of her family and her community, actively doing volunteer work in her parish as well as singing in the church choir.

In lieu of flowers, the family asks that donations be made to either the Ukrainian Canadian Documentation and Research Centre or Help Us Help the Children.