It was New Year’s Day 1909 when the second child, Stepan, was born to Andrii Bandera (1882–1941), a Greek Catholic priest of Staryi Uhryniv, and his wife Myroslava (1890–1921), the daughter of Volodymyr Hlodzins’kyi, another Greek Catholic priest of Staryi Uhryniv and the nearby village Berezhnytsia. Myroslava died at the age of thirty-one from tuberculosis of the throat. She left behind three daughters: Marta (1907–1982), Volodymyra (1913–2001), and Oksana (1917–2008), and four sons: Stepan (1909–1959), Oleksandr (1911–1942), Vasyl’ (1915–1942), and Bohdan (1919–1944). Her fourth daughter, Myroslava, named after her, died as a baby. Stepan’s father had obtained his education at a high school in Stryi and later at the theological faculty of Lviv University. He and his family lived in Staryi Uhryniv until 1933, when they moved to Volia Zaderevats’ka. Four years later his family moved again to the village of Trostianets’, to which Andrii had already been relocated in 1934. He raised his children in the spirit of patriotism and religion.[292]
During and after the First World War, Andrii took part in the struggle for a Ukrainian state. He organized local Ukrainians into military units, and in November 1918 he was engaged in the struggle for power in the regional capital of Kalush. Andrii was a deputy from the Kalush region in the ZUNR. In 1919–1920 he served as a chaplain in the UHA.[293] In biographical data compiled for visa purposes in April 1959 for the United States consulate in Munich, to which we will refer as a brief autobiography, Stepan emphasized that events relating to the attempt to establish a Ukrainian state—and the lost war against the Poles, which followed—had a substantial impact on him.[294] In addition to his patriotic and religious upbringing, these factors might have resulted in his enduring compulsion to continue the interrupted struggle for a Ukrainian state, in which his father had engaged and for which he had been persecuted by the Polish authorities after the First World War.
Stepan did not attend a primary school, because the teacher in Staryi Uhryniv was drafted into the army in 1914. He and his siblings were taught at home by their parents. Between 1919 and 1927, he attended a Ukrainian high school in the town of Stryi, about eighty kilometers from Staryi Uhryniv, living at his grandfather’s. While