Malaniuk lived the typical life of a refugee – one laced with zigzags covering a wide geographical area. In 1923, he moved to Czechoslovakia and studied at the Ukrainian Economics Academy in Podebrady. He married Zoya Ravych, a medical student at Charles University, published his first two collections of poetry, returned to Poland, actively cooperated with literary periodicals, divorced and remarried. His son Bohdan was born in 1934, and 10 years later, in 1944, he again found himself in camps, this time in Germany. In 1949, Malaniuk, now 52, left Europe where Soviet special services were after him and spent the last 19 years of his life in the USA, a country that was very foreign to him.