"I promised their story would be told," says chronicler of internment operation (05/15/94)

"I promised their story would be told," says chronicler of internment operation

Below are excerpts from Fran Ponomarenko's interview with Yurij Luhovy in Matrix, Number 40 (Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue, Quebec).

Q: What brought you to the idea of doing a film on the Internment Operations?

A: This project has been on my mind since 1974 when I stumbled on information about the existence of internment camps during World War I. I'd heard about Spirit Lake Internment Camp in Quebec and, although I tried in earnest to find it on contemporary maps, I couldn't. So I approached a cartographer in Quebec City who helped me out. Spirit Lake turned out to be 8 kilometers from Amos. Later the name changed, and today it's called La Ferme.

I filmed the site with one of the original barracks still intact. When I returned last year, the barrack was no longer there. There were some efforts made to erect a plaque to commemorate the internees of Spirit Lake, but the people were listed as Austrians and Germans. Yet 1,200 Ukrainian internees had been sent there.

All this gave me the urge to locate other internment camps to see if there was still any visible evidence elsewhere, and there was. My worry was whether enough photographs could still be found documenting the actual internment during World War I. During the 1950s, many valuable documents were destroyed in the National Archives for reasons yet to be ascertained.

The challenge was to hunt for private collections and in small museums, and I came up with the most extraordinary finds. Stylistically, in the film, I try wherever possible to use the technique of matching old photos to the actual sites today.

Q: During the process of filming you visited several of the sites of the internment camps. How many of these camps were there across Canada?

A: There were 26 internment camps across Canada, plus four receiving stations. If you go to Castle Mountain in Alberta, you'll still find the barbed wire lying on the ground and posts with rusty nails in them.

When we were in British Columbia looking for the Field Internment Camp, we almost didn't find it. It was a Parks Canada employee who led us to the actual site. We made a grueling trip on mountain bikes through the forest along a dirt path. I hadn't been on a bicycle for over 20 years! Because the camera was too heavy, it had to be dismantled, and each crew member carried a section of it.

You can't imagine what we found. There, at the bottom of a ravine, stood the internment camp. Some of the original houses lay collapsed on the ground. The severe winter climate of this region, where the temperature drops to minus 60, preserved not only the wood in the old structures, but even articles that the internees once wore. Coming out of that, I felt as if we were thrown 75 years back into the past. Many Canadians have probably visited some of the internment camps without even being aware of it, such as The Citadel in Halifax and Fort Henry in Kingston.

Q: You interviewed a few of the last survivors when you were making your film. How did they feel about your project?

A: The first survivor I interviewed made a lasting impression on me. Nicholas Lypka of Winnipeg was interned at Brandon, Manitoba. Later he was transferred to Castle Mountain Internment Camp in Alberta.

When I met him he was 93 and living in an old age home. He was a spry fellow. The day I did the pre-interview with him, he told me he couldn't sleep all night because this was the first time he would share his story.

He cried when he described what happened to him and his friends in the camps. He saw all kinds of things - internees getting prodded with bayonets, slapped and forbidden to speak. Lypka himself was put into solitary in the so-called "black holes" or dark cellars. The camp guards really abused and mistreated the men in this camp. They lived in camp, and Mary told me that when she recounted her story to her children, they did not believe that such a thing could happen in Canada. It was only a few years ago that they realized their mother was telling the truth.

Q: How do you think this experience has affected the Ukrainian community here in Canada?

A: The internees were forever traumatized. In some cases this left a mark on the children who tried to hide the fact that their fathers had been arrested as "enemy aliens." It probably accelerated assimilation too. Canadian history books still do not address this episode, and it has only been in the last eight years that the internment operations have sparked a renewed interest amongst researchers and academics.

I'm still moved by my visits to the internment sites. At Kapuskasing, while the crew was packing their equipment, I returned alone and bid farewell to the internees. Feeling their presence around me, I promised that their story would be told.

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