‘Schuylkill County in eastern Pennsylvania is home to the highest concentration of people claiming Ukrainian heritage in the whole of the United States’ 

Frackville is a little more than 100 miles north west of Philadelphia in Schuylkill County which has the highest percentage of people of Ukrainian descent in the country

‘My teenage kids want to go fight. I say go ahead.’ How the horror of Putin’s war has stirred Schuylkill [County], Pennsylvania, the most Ukrainian county in the US

• Schuylkill County in eastern Pennsylvania is home to the highest concentration of people claiming Ukrainian heritage in the whole of the United States 
• Passions are rising there. Paula Duda-Holoviak says her teenage sons Vladimir, 19, and Alex, 13, are ready to go fight against the Russian invasion of Ukraine
• She has told them ‘Go ahead’ if they want to travel to their ancestral homeland and fight Putin’s forces 
• Her mother Rosemarie Duda, 84, says the situation there harkens back to Stalin’s day when Ukraine was part of the USSR
• Messages from Lviv, where the families of many in the county  hail, tell of air raid sirens going off four times a day, forcing citizens to head for shelters
• English professor Matthew Kenenitz left Lviv and returned to Pennsylvania as Putin’s intentions became clearer
•  He says things will only get worse. ‘We as a world are delusional if we think Putin will stop at the Polish border,’ he tells DailyMail.com. ‘Evil does not stop itself’

By Dan Lieberman In Frackville, Pennsylvania, For Dailymail.Com

Published: 08:15 EST, 1 March 2022 | Updated: 10:09 EST, 1 March 2022

It’s 10:00 AM on Saturday and English professor Matthew Kenenitz is sitting at a pierogi cafe in rural Pennsylvania making video calls on Whatsapp, trying to reach his teenage students in Ukraine. 

A few weeks ago, he would have been in class teaching them in the western city of Lviv, less than 50 miles from the Polish border.

One student, 17-year-old Maksym, picks up the professor’s call. ‘I’m stressed and sad,’ he tells Kenenitz. He and his family are safe, for the moment, but fears what will come next.

A text comes in from another student. It reads, ‘I hear the 4th air siren of the day, we are making our way to shelter.’ 

‘I’m telling them they need to sleep in shifts in case something happens,’ says Kenenitz, 40, who has been teaching English to college students in Lviv since 2019.

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