in
Lviv Gel was born on 17 July 1937 in the village of
Klitsko, which was then located within
Lviv Oblast within the
Ukrainian SSR. He was born into a peasant Greek-Catholic family. He was the son of Andriy Hel (born 1901), who volunteered for the
Ukrainian Galician Army and served during the
Polish–Ukrainian War. He later was the head of
Prosvita, a society aimed at preserving
Ukrainian culture, within the village of Klitsko and then participated in the
Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) before being arrested and sent to the
gulags in 1950. Through his mother's side, he was part of the family of Tershakovets, which was well known for producing leaders of the OUN. He initially attended school in
Komarno, but upon his father's arrest in 1950 his grades dropped dramatically as he was forced to work, and in 1952 he announced his refusal to join the local
Komsomol for which he was expelled. As a result, he illegally obtained a passport and fled the area, going to work as a loader at a bread factory and completed night school in
Sambir. After graduating, he attempted to enter the Faculty of History at
University of Lviv. However, he was denied, as he told the entrance examiners that his father worked in a
kolkhoz, even though his father was imprisoned in
Tayshet, for which he was accused of lying. He then worked as a mechanic at the Lviv Forklift Plant. From 1956 to 1959 he served in the army. After demobilization, he entered the department of the History Faculty of
Lviv State University. On August 24, 1965, he was arrested and sentenced to 3 years in a strict regime camp for "anti-Soviet propaganda". On January 12, 1972, he was arrested for the second time and sentenced to 10 years in a special regime camp and 5 years in exile, recognized as a particularly dangerous recidivist. He served his sentence in Mordovia (Sosnovka) and in the Perm region (Kuchino). He participated in hunger strikes in the camps, including a hunger strike demanding political prisoner status. Total duration of hunger strikes was over 300 days. Ivan Gel returned to Ukraine on January 17, 1987, and created and headed the Committee for the Protection of the
Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. He was a deputy and deputy chairman of the
Lviv Oblast Council of the first democratic convocation (1990–1994). He headed the Lviv Regional Commission for the Restoration of the Rights of Rehabilitated Persons. He died on March 16, 2011, in Lviv and was buried in the family grave at
Lychakiv Cemetery. ==Awards==