Bohdan Rostyslav Bociurkiw was born on September 2[1] or 3,[2] 1925 to Ilarion Botsiurkiv [uk] in the city of Buczacz, located in Tarnopol Voivodeship within the Second Polish Republic (now Buchach, in Ukraine's Ternopil Oblast).
[1] He was a member of an anti-Nazi Ukrainian nationalist underground group during the early stages of World War II; he was later captured by the Gestapo and imprisoned at both Flossenbürg concentration camp and its subcamp in Lengenfeld.
[2] Throughout the war and shortly afterwards, Bociurkiw wrote in Ukrainian nationalist magazines, including Yunak, Our Path and Independent Ukraine.
[6] His recruitment was a victory for university president Davidson Dunton, who emphasized regional studies and greater attention to non-Soviet ethnic groups within the Soviet Union, and Bociurkiw was tasked with reorganizing the Committee on Soviet and East European Studies into an institute of the university.
He joined the Shevchenko Scientific Society prior to 1967, but became deputy chair of its history and philosophy section in Canada in 1988, while a professor at Carleton.
The uncovering of previously-sealed documents from Soviet archives concerning the 1946 Synod of Lviv helped Bociurkiw to recover, and he later said, "I asked the Almighty for a sabbatical to finish the book and I regained enough strength to do it."