UCCLA wants answers about Konowal's missing Victoria Cross (08/01/99)

UCCLA wants answers about Konowal's missing Victoria Cross

by Christopher Guly
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

OTTAWA - The Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has gone to battle with the Canadian War Museum over a prestigious wartime medal awarded to a Ukrainian Canadian soldier. The UCCLA has chastised the Ottawa-based museum for losing the Victoria Cross presented to World War I veteran Filip Konowal by King George V in 1917. Mr. Konowal, the only Ukrainian Canadian to receive the distinction, died in 1959 at the age of 72.

Five plaques across Canada celebrate Mr. Konowal's achievement with the 47th Canadian Infantry Battalion of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, and the Ukrainian Canadian community has asked that he be included in a series of stamps commemorating Canadian Victoria Cross winners.

But, for the moment, the UCCLA is leading the charge into finding out what happened to Mr. Konowal's VC in the first place. In a strongly worded letter to the editor of the Canadian national daily newspaper, the National Post, John Gregorovich, UCCLA chairman and president of the Royal Canadian Legion's Konowal Branch in Toronto, wrote that "veterans would be ill-advised to deposit important historical memorabilia" with the museum. He said the museum's curators "don't seem to care" that the medal is "missing."

Indeed, the VC has been MIA for about a quarter of a century shortly after the Canadian War Museum purchased it for $3,750 (Canadian) from a collector, according to the museum's director and chief executive officer, Jack Granatstein. Though the missing original was replaced with a replica, three years ago the UCCLA asked the museum to locate the real medal. Now the association wants some answers.

In a July 20 letter to Volodymyr Halchuk, newly elected president of the Ontario Provincial Council of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress, UCCLA Research Director Lubomyr Luciuk wrote that, "Despite a written promise to find out what happened to Konowal's medal, the museum has, to date, not provided any further information on how such a rare item could go 'missing' from its presumably secure facility."

However, Mr. Granatstein told The Weekly, "there is no clear way of determining what happened" to the medal, "whether it was stolen or misplaced." Mr. Granatstein, a military historian who assumed the leadership at the museum last year, said the "inherited wisdom around here is that it was not stolen or misplaced and apparently got thrown out, which is appalling."

He said that none of the staff employed at the museum in the early 1970s is around to provide any clues. Furthermore, there were no computer databases maintaining detailed records of inventory and the "procedures in the museum were a lot less thorough than they are now," explained Mr. Granatstein. Furthermore, the warehouse storing such historical artifacts has since been relocated.

"It is almost completely irretrievable unless it was misfiled - mis-stored somewhere - and turns up in the normal course of events," Mr. Granatstein said.

He said the best solution the museum could devise would be to highlight Mr. Konowal in a special exhibit in the museum's Hall of Honor, which regularly focuses on Canadian servicemen who have represented their country with "great distinction."

Alternatively, the UCCLA could approach the British government to have the VC replaced at considerable cost and in a lengthy procedure. But such alternatives don't seem to be in line with the UCCLA's thinking. Dr. Luciuk has suggested the museum has never extended an apology to either Mr. Konowal's descendants or to the Ukrainian Canadian community at large.

"Dr. Granatstein's assertion that he 'cares' is welcome, but only if he follows up with an official inquiry and report on how Mr. Konowal's Victoria Cross could have been lost or removed from the Canadian War Museum's collections," Mr. Luciuk wrote in his letter to Mr. Halchuk. That type of rhetoric has gotten Mr. Granatstein's dander up, he said, calling such tactics "straight-out blackmail" by the UCCLA, which has been lobbying to secure a presence in the museum dedicated to Mr. Konowal in a permanent exhibit that would focus on Ukrainian Canadian internment during the first world war.

Mr. Granatstein, a graduate of the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, where Mr. Luciuk teaches political geography, said there's "no way he will play that game" of negotiation.

Furthermore, in an e-mail message to Mr. Halchuk, Mr. Granatstein replied to the suggestion the museum doesn't care about the Konowal medal. "It does and I do care," wrote Mr. Granatstein, adding that it was "upsetting" the UCC had widely circulated correspondence on the issue "without even seeking" the Canadian War Museum's views. While he acknowledged the Ukrainian Canadian community's interest and pride in one of their own being heralded for wartime service, Mr. Granatstein said the issue of the missing medal should not be the Ukrainian-Canadian community's concern.

"I don't think these folks have anything to do with it," said Mr. Granatstein about the UCCLA's campaign. "This is a medal won by a serviceman in the Canadian Army. This is not the community's medal. They have neither right nor privileges here. This is simply something that we will treat in the way we treat all other heroic Canadians."

But all hope may not have disappeared in the search for the missing medal. A pocket watch owned by Mr. Konowal, presented to him by the Ukrainian Canadian Veterans Association in 1954, which had been lost for several years, recently turned up in Winnipeg.

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