A quiet resident of New York City ... and former inmate on death row in Lviv (03/14/99)

A quiet resident of New York City ... and former inmate on death row in Lviv

by R.L. Chomiak
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

WASHINGTON - You might meet this slender, quiet, conservatively dressed lady in Manhattan's Ukrainian Village shopping in one of the delicatessens, or cashing a check at the Self-Reliance Credit Union, or seated in the audience at a lecture in the Shevchenko Scientific Society building, or entering her parish church, St. George's on East Seventh Street.

And you would never suspect that 58 years ago she was an inmate on death row. In Lviv.

In September 1939, Soviet rule came to Lviv. A year later the NKVD (the precursor of the KGB) arrested Luba Komar along with 58 other young people in their 20s and teens, most of them, like her, university students, for membership in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN).

After months of investigation and brutal interrogation, all 59 were tried in January 1941. Most were condemned to death; the others to long terms in the Siberian gulag of concentration camps.

Ms. Komar was among those who drew the death sentence, but she lived to chronicle what became known as "The Trial of the 59" - the story of just one group of young people who wanted an independent Ukraine, and who joined the clandestine OUN to struggle for it, first against Poland, then against both Hitler's Germany and the Soviet Union. Similar trials were held in other parts of western Ukraine that as a result of the Soviet-Nazi (Molotov-Ribbentrop) Pact of 1939 became part of the Soviet Union.

Of the 22 women and 37 men tried in Lviv in January 1941, only a handful lived to see their goal fulfilled. Eight of them gathered in Lviv for a reunion in 1992.

One result of Ukraine's independence was access to the KGB archives. For half a century this and other trials of OUN members were kept secret. The Soviet rulers of Ukraine did not want it known that young people had to be condemned to death because they were a threat to Soviet power, telling the interrogators and judges that they wanted to see Ukraine independent. Over the years Ms. Komar had written articles about the interrogations and the trial of the 59. She described the unvanquished and unrepentant spirit of these 20-somethings on death row. Now she had access to court documents to authenticate what she remembered.

The result is a volume of her prison memoirs backed up by addenda that includes full names of all the defendants, their dates and places of birth (one was an American-born girl whose parents sent her to school in Ukraine) and their background - something the chronicler was not able to recreate fully in her earlier writings. There is a facsimile of an NKVD warrant for her arrest - "Komar L. is a courier of the national executive of the counterrevolutionary organization OUN ... ," the document states - and several pages of the final verdict. Individual photos of 16 of the 59 "enemies of the Soviet state," as well as a picture of the 1992 reunion of the inmates also are part of the book.

Its title is "Protses 59-ty" (Trial of the 59) published by the Shevchenko Scientific Society in Lviv in 1997.

How did Luba Komar survive to write about the trial? She is one of those people who escaped being executed - twice.

While she and 10 other women were in a death row cell in Lviv, the wheels of Soviet justice were turning, and after a couple of months most of the women inmates had their death sentences changed to 10 years' imprisonment in the gulag and five years of exile.

They then began the journey to Siberia in stages. The first stop was Berdychiv, in eastern Ukraine, where they were held in a prison before the next transport east. But this was June 1941, and Germany had attacked its ally, the Soviet Union. As the German troops were approaching, and the Luftwaffe was bombing Berdychiv and its prison, the inmates broke out of their cells only to be met by machine gun fire from NKVD troops who had regrouped after initial confusion. Some inmates were killed, some wounded. Ms. Komar again avoided being shot and during the confusion of another air raid most of the inmates, including some who were wounded, escaped from the prison.

According to archival documents, one of them, Natalia Vynnykiv, wrote on the interrogation summary that she refused to cooperate "because I want independent Ukraine." She, too, escaped from the Berdychiv prison, then went to work underground in Kyiv - already under Nazi occupation - and a year later was shot by the Germans at Babyn Yar.

Ms. Komar joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), worked as a radio operator and courier, and married a fellow OUN member and one of the founders of the revolutionary government established in 1944, the Supreme Ukrainian Liberation Council (known by its Ukrainian acronym as UHVR).

After World War II she emigrated to the United States, where she is better known by her married name: Luba Prokop.

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