BOOK REVIEW: An autobiography, and an adventure, by a member of the wartime generation (10/17/99)

BOOK REVIEW: An autobiography, and an adventure, by a member of the wartime generation

"Shliakhamy Molodosti i Borotby: Spohady, Statti, Lystuvannia," by Ivan Stebelsky, with an introduction by Osyp Zinkewych. Kyiv: Smoloskyp, 1999. 366 pp. $15.

by Andrew Sorokowski

One rainy day in October 1938, five young men surreptitiously left their homes in the Boryslav-Drohobych oil-producing region to illegally cross the mountains into autonomous Carpatho-Ukraine. Days earlier, the Munich agreement had given Hitler the green light to seize Czecho-Slovakia's Sudetenland, while Poland bit off the southern Teschen district. Armed with hunting knives and old revolvers, and fired by nationalist dreams of building a Ukrainian homeland, 23-year-old Ivan Stebelsky and his comrades slogged in the mud and rain through shabby Carpathian mountain villages and gloomy forests, carefully avoiding the Polish police and their local informers. Abandoned by their guide (who later reported the village priest who had lodged them to the authorities), they finally crossed a snowy field into Czecho-Slovakia.

Thus begins the Ukrainian-language autobiography of Ivan Stebelsky - patriot and community activist, sportsman and soldier, businessman and benefactor, restaurateur and raconteur. It is in some ways a typical story of the idealistic generation of the 1930s, but in other ways it is unusual: Mr. Stebelsky the nationalist was neither a "bourgeois" nor a peasant, but a son of the emerging western Ukrainian proletariat. His father, an oil driller, was no Ukrainian nationalist, but a Bolshevik sympathizer who had worked in the oil fields of Baku. Mr. Stebelsky's account of his own organizational activity in working-class Boryslav and Drohobych reminds us that the Ukrainian national movement was not limited to peasants and intellectuals.

It was the Galician nationalists' enthusiasm for Carpatho-Ukraine, however, that set the stage for the young Mr. Stebelsky's first disillusionment. Once in the capital of Khust, the five companions discovered that the glowing accounts of the Lviv press had been highly exaggerated: for all its support by the OUN-sponsored Carpathian Sich, the Rev. Avhustyn Voloshyn's government at Khust was a sorry affair. On the great chessboard of European high politics, Hitler would soon turn Carpatho-Ukraine over to the Hungarians. That would be the young patriot's second political disillusionment.

Meanwhile, Mr. Stebelsky had been spirited off to Feldafing, near Munich, to a training camp sponsored by the Wehrmacht and the OUN. Col. Roman Sushko's anti-Polish legion (Bergbauern-Hilfe) saw little action, however, for no sooner had they crossed into Poland at the outbreak of war in September 1939, than it turned out that Hitler had given the predominantly Ukrainian Eastern Galicia to the Soviet Union. Disillusioned a third time, Mr. Stebelsky left the legion and spent most of the next two years in a small town as a translator for refugees from the Soviet-occupied territories.

With the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, Mr. Stebelsky briefly joined the OUN's expeditionary groups to eastern Ukraine, but soon was back in Boryslav attending to his family. There he started a successful business; one of his coups was to supply much-needed axle-grease to the headquarters of the union of cooperatives (Tsentrosoiuz) in Lviv. Among his employees were two Jews, whom he saved from the Gestapo by providing them with special documents.

In an excursus, the author recounts the story of his acquaintance Dr. Mykola Terletsky, who had been installed as mayor of Boryslav by the German occupation authorities. A respected physician friendly with Jews and Poles, as well as Ukrainians, Terletsky persuaded the Germans to halt a pogrom of the town's Jews. Years later in post-war U.S.-occupied Austria, as he was changing trains in Salzburg, two Holocaust survivors pointed him out to the American MPs. Soon he was facing a military court in Munich on war-crimes charges. Threatened with deportation to Poland, where he would surely be executed, the physician slit his wrists to render himself unfit for transport. Mr. Stebelsky sought in vain to find witnesses on Terletsky's behalf. One, a Jew from Boryslav who had worked for Mr. Stebelsky and knew the accused physician, privately acknowledged his innocence but refused to testify "against his own people." Yet when it came time for the two accusers to identify the alleged war criminal in a line-up, they could not recognize him, and the judge dismissed the case. It later turned out that the "eyewitnesses" had never even lived in Boryslav or Drohobych. This illustration of the chilling facility with which innocent people can be charged with war crimes proved prophetic for Mr. Stebelsky himself.

As the war neared its end, Mr. Stebelsky was sent to Neuhammer, Silesia, where he narrowly avoided following the SS Division "Galicia" to the disastrous battle of Brody in July 1944. He sat out the rest of the war with relatives in the Sudetenland, started another business in post-war Munich, and emigrated to the United States where he began yet a third enterprise after settling in Denver in 1956.

It may be the kiss of death to say that this book will be of interest to historians. But the first two chapters of this book, covering Mr. Stebelsky's life in Europe, supply the living color that historical accounts often lack. They not only provide vivid details of Ukrainian social, political and military life in the 1930s and the war years, but offer insights into the mentality of a generation still living, yet eons away from the temper of our times. Furthermore, his questioning of historian Evhen Stakhiv's account of the Saubersdorf training camp shows how differently two eyewitnesses and participants can relate the same events. OUN history buffs will take note that he disputes Petro Mirchuk's assertion that district organization head Myroslav Turash was killed by order of Col. Andrii Melnyk after the OUN's Rome congress. More importantly, Mr. Stebelsky meticulously refutes the claims of one Prof. Weiss, a member of the Israeli Knesset, that local Ukrainians were responsible for the Boryslav pogrom.

In the course of Mr. Stebelsky's account we encounter fleeting but memorable cameos: a cultivated German general of the old school, a Bavarian and a Catholic, who dislikes Hitler and warmly sympathizes with his Ukrainian volunteers; at Neuhammer, two Waffen SS officers who warn him to escape, pointing out that the Germans have lost the war and would only use the Division as cannon-fodder, but who fatalistically go to their deaths at Brody.

While the opening chapters are the most exciting, it would be a mistake to ignore the rest, which recount the author's activity in the diaspora (Chapters 3-4) and contain articles by and about Mr. Stebelsky as visitor and benefactor - and forthright critic - of his homeland (Chapter 5), as well as some of his correspondence (Chapter 6). For Mr. Stebelsky, who served as head of the Denver branch of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America and was active in the Republican Party, his most significant achievements as an émigré nevertheless involved his wartime experiences. When Denver's Jewish community planned a park in memory of the Jewish victims of the wartime massacres at Kyiv's Babyn Yar, Mr. Stebelsky and other Ukrainian community leaders worked doggedly to ensure that Ukrainian victims were honored, too, despite accusations of Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis. Crucial to their efforts were their discovery that public funds were being used, their decision to work directly with the Denver Parks Department, and their donation of a substantial sum to the project. They would not have succeeded, however, had they not provided careful and credible documentation, confronting their opponents where necessary but also knowing when to compromise. Babyn Yar Park was dedicated on October 2, 1983, with the late Gen. Petro Grigorenko as the main speaker.

This community achievement was all the more extraordinary inasmuch as the previous January world-famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal had published Mr. Stebelsky's name in his bulletin, which was regularly sent to the U.S. Department of Justice. Apparently relying on Soviet-supplied evidence, Wiesenthal alleged that Mr. Stebelsky was a war criminal who had fought in the German Brandenburg Division, served as a military instructor at Krynica, and been a member of the Nachtigall and Roland legions. Had Mr. Stebelsky's activity in defense of Soviet dissidents, and his cooperation with American Jews, prompted the Soviets to try to neutralize him? In fact, a careless review of the evidence might have led some to doubt his innocence. Mr. Stebelsky had indeed been to Krynica - but only for a brief skiing holiday. He had also been in Saubersdorf, where "Roland" would be trained in 1941 - but he had been there earlier, in the spring of 1939. He had even been at Neuhammer, where Nachtigall had been formed at roughly the same time as Roland; but that was later, in 1944.

More to the point, Mr. Stebelsky had never committed a war crime or persecuted Jews. Rejecting the advice of some associates, he neither hid nor fled. Instead, he prepared his defense by obtaining the testimony of his former Jewish employee, Lech Nowak, and the aid of Yakiv Suslensky, the well-known promoter of Ukrainian-Jewish understanding (who turned out to be acquainted with Neal Sher of the Office of Special Investigations). But, first of all, he called a press conference in cooperation with the New Jersey-based organization Americans for Human Rights in Ukraine, at which he declared his innocence and challenged the Department of Justice to present the evidence against him. None was forthcoming, and Mr. Stebelsky was never indicted.

This handsomely designed paperback volume is accompanied by over 50 photographs. Although many of them are the stuff of family albums - individual and group portraits, photos of athletic teams, souvenirs of ski trips - they do remind us that, even in wartime, ordinary life goes on, with its leisure and its diversions. Of the shots from émigré life, the close-up of one of the two granite monoliths at the entrance to Babyn Yar Park reveals the dedicatory text that was hammered out in painful and protracted negotiations. The final frames, showing the octogenarian author visiting his boyhood towns of Boryslav and Drohobych, are particularly touching.

This is, as the title promises, a story about "youth and struggle." It is, in particular, a story about character - that virtue which, like virtue itself, sounds so quaint in the 1990s. Of course, it soon becomes clear that the author is indeed "a character": his dispute with Mr. Stakhiv, we learn, is not limited to competing versions of history, but may have stemmed from their competition for the attentions of a high-school girl from Saubersdorf; in 1985, at the age of 70, Mr. Stebelsky concludes a European travelogue with 14 observations, the first of which concerns the comparative pulchritude of French and English women. But his story is about character-building, too, from the first disillusionments of youth to the stern tests of war and occupation. Unflinchingly, he takes responsibility for the deaths of his father and sister during the Soviet occupation of Galicia. Two near-fatal mistakes teach him not to defer to the poorer judgment of others. Yet there are ambiguities: proudly refusing to bribe an official, he ends up at the assembly point for the Galicia Division, and narrowly escapes leaving his family widowed and destitute. These experiences, in turn, prepare him for later trials - for Babyn Yar Park and for Wiesenthal's false accusations - challenges requiring courage, as well as tact, honesty and judgment.

This is, finally, a marvelous adventure - one that only a person of Ivan Stebelsky's generation could have experienced, and one that only an individual of his qualities could have survived.

The book may be purchased for $15 from: Ivan Stebelsky, 18232 W. Third Place, No. 2, Golden, CO 80401.

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