CANADA COURIER: The fear of compensation (09/26/99)

CANADA COURIER

by Christopher Guly

The fear of compensation

As the 20th century winds down, the sins of the past 100 years are hard to forget.

Victims of past injustices want to live the rest of their days with some restitution or at least acknowledgement of the suffering they endured at the hands of tyrants.

Those who survived the horrors of Nazi Germany don't want to be forgotten. Numerous recollections of the Holocaust have helped to remember the huge loss experienced by Jews during World War II.

The names of the infamous concentration camps - Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchenwald and Dachau - are as ingrained in our imagination as are the images of the victims who either perished or survived.

But there were other victims of the Third Reich, including countless Ukrainians.

Since the end of the war, the German government has paid out $54 million [U.S.] in compensation to victims. Recently, lawsuits have been filed seeking funds from some of Germany's major corporations, the likes of Daimler Chrysler, Volkswagen and Deutsche Bank.

This summer, the Ukrainian Union of Prisoners/Victims of Nazi Persecution and the Ukrainian Association of the Anti-fascist Resistance gave the go-ahead to the filing of a class-action lawsuit in a New York federal court against several German companies for their reliance on the slave labor of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians. The plaintiffs claim there are nearly 300,000 of these people still alive in Ukraine.

Some live in Canada, too. Most of the 35,000 to 40,000 post-war immigrants who arrived here were those forced into labor by the Nazis. Less than 10 percent were political prisoners who spent time in concentration camps.

While the German government has given some of those from the slave-labor category small pensions, none of those who were identified as members of the Ukrainian underground that fought the Nazis have received anything.

Furthermore, talk of any compensation has been muted by fear.

Based on the 1945 Yalta agreement in which the Allies carved up post-war Europe, anyone born within the boundaries of the Soviet Union as they existed on September 1, 1939, and who was living outside the Soviet Union at war's end, was to be repatriated back to the Soviet Union whether or not they wanted to be. Repatriation meant death or labor camps in Siberia. Though the Western countries officially supported repatriation after the first wave, when it became known what would happen to repatriated refugees, Western officials stopped being so insistent about the process.

Those originating in western Ukraine were unaffected since Poland controlled the territory before the war.

It was a different story, however, for those who hailed from Soviet-subjugated eastern Ukraine. As a result, eastern Ukrainians entering Canada as displaced persons often lied about their origins. For some of these older folks to come forward now and perhaps admit they fudged their stories when they entered Canada and became citizens could mean denaturalization and deportation.

Recent attention within the Ukrainian Canadian community to the federal government's ongoing investigation into the presence of alleged war criminals on Canadian soil has put a chill on admissions or explanations by any Ukrainians as to why they might have had to misrepresent their biographies when they arrived.

Those forced to do slave labor in wartime Germany who were involved in no political activity may have little, if anything, to fear in coming forward now to seek compensation or recognition for what they endured, even if Germany consulted with Canada over the filing of a claim.

It's time for Ottawa to clarify that, suggests Lubomyr Luciuk, research director of the Toronto-based Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

"I've never heard the government say it's okay for someone who was a Soviet citizen - but who didn't tell us that - to come forward now in terms of compensation. The government's denaturalization and deportation effort is based on the simple statement: 'You lied when you got your citizenship, therefore you got it under false pretenses therefore we may not be able to prove you're a criminal but we know you lied, and since you can't prove otherwise, out you go.' "

But Prof. Luciuk, a political geographer at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario, explains that the issue "should be more about memory than about money."

Certainly, a paltry pension doesn't represent suitable compensation for someone forced to do long hours of manual labor, face beatings and exist on a meager diet. Then again, anything may be better than nothing, and any decisions on this front should best be left to the victims.

But the issue of redress is complicated, acknowledges Prof. Luciuk, who has long been involved in a campaign to receive Ottawa's recognition of the forced internment of thousands of Ukrainian Canadians during World War I. "You're asking a German in 1999 to compensate someone who suffered in 1943, so someone who wasn't even born at the time is paying taxes in Germany to compensate someone who may have been exploited or abused by their grandparents. How long does this go on?"

For some, it's not going anywhere.

Eighty-year-old Stefan Kuzmyn of Kingston, who spent more than two years in Dachau and Buchenwald and worked for German industries during the war, has sought compensation. He's given up after Germany referred him to Ukraine, which recognizes him as a Canadian citizen.

Though he participated in the anti-Nazi underground and fought for what many today would consider freedom, Mr. Kuzmyn won't receive, "one plug nickel," Prof. Luciuk points out.

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