Remembering Filip Konowal: a visit to his village in Ukraine (04/16/00)

Remembering Filip Konowal: a visit to his village in Ukraine

by Dr. Lubomyr Luciuk

Hanna was plucking chickens when we arrived. We weren't expected. Sure, she had heard rumors about Canadians coming. And, one day, not too long ago, a few slabs of concrete appeared at the village crossroads. Those blocks, some claimed, were for a community center. But, like nearly everyone else, she knew there's no money for new building. Could the tidings that someone was going to honor the local-boy-turned-British-Empire-war-hero, the fellow none of them could ever publicly acknowledge during all the decades of Soviet rule, be true? No one knew.

So Hanna just got on with life. There are more important things to do in today's rural Ukraine than speculate about what was or might be. Getting food ready for table is one of them. Hence the plucked poultry.

Then I appeared on her doorstep. At the very same house in which her mother, Maria, the only daughter of Cpl. Filip Konowal, the only Ukrainian Canadian ever to have won the Victoria Cross, once lived. It's where Konowal's first wife, Anna, starved to death. I had come to confirm the plans of Toronto's Branch 360 of the Royal Canadian Legion. On August 21 a bronze sculpture and trilingual plaque commemorating her great-grandfather's valor will be unveiled in Kutkiv, the Konowal family's native village.

Hanna stood astonished. I had caught her off-guard. But then she pulled my hands into hers, profusely thanking me for bringing this welcome news. As suddenly she released her grip, apologizing for the coarseness of her clasp, her hands rough and dirty from her recent barnyard chores. I didn't mind, and told her so. What she then said staggered me.

Three generations of the Konowal family had secreted a keepsake of Filip's, which no one had seen for many years. Out those relics came two American $20 bills, of 1913 vintage. Both had been carefully folded over and over again, rendering them not much bigger than a collective farm worker's thumbnail. Konowal had mailed them to his young wife and child just before the first world war and the 1917 Bolshevik coup severed him from them, forever. Worthless today as currency, these bills represented a small fortune in the early decades of the last century. They could have more than paid for enough food to keep Anna and many of her fellow villagers alive through the 1932-1933 Famine, if only she had been able to use them. But she could not.

To possess foreign currency was a crime among the Soviets. They would have demanded that Anna explain why she had U.S. dollars. They would probably have accused her of being an agent of Western imperialism, a spy, an anti-Soviet Ukrainian nationalist. The entire family might have been liquidated. And, of course, the Communists weren't interested in Ukrainian lives being delivered. Stalin and his minions deliberately orchestrated a genocidal famine to crush Ukrainian resistance to Soviet rule. Millions perished, among them Anna.

When Filip Konowal emigrated in 1913, he joined many others who came to Canada to earn enough to ensure a better future for their loved ones in the old country. He must have worked very hard to save $40 and get it home before war broke out in August 1914. He had no intention of abandoning his family. His separation from them was intended to be temporary. It became eternal.

Anna concealed the money that should have saved her and died slowly of hunger. Maria survived, but also kept hidden her father's gift. She died in 1986.

Meanwhile, Filip, who had proven himself in the trench warfare of the Western Front, fell upon hard times in Canada. His final years were spent as a janitor, cleaning Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King's offices on Parliament Hill. By then, considering himself cut off from his homeland forever, he remarried. His second wife was a French Canadian widow, whose children he adopted as his own. He learned French so that he could become one with them. But he never forgot that he was a Ukrainian Canadian.

Filip Konowal died in Ottawa in 1959. He was buried not far from where Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier rests, in Notre Dame Cemetery. Until 1996 Konowal's grave was barely marked. Prodded into doing so, Veterans Affairs finally installed a proper grave marker, emblazoned with the Victoria Cross. Thanks largely to Branch 360 of the Royal Canadian Leagion, four tri-lingual memorial plaques have been unveiled across Canada, commemorating Cpl. Konowal.

Yet, oddly, federal officials have remained largely indifferent. Canada Post's Stamp Advisory Committee refused to issue a Konowal stamp. Assorted birds and boats take precedence over Canadian heroes. And the mendicants of the Canadian War Museum refuse to explain how Konowal's Victoria Cross was somehow lost or stolen from their supposedly secure facility. More galling is that neither Canada's prime minister, John Chrétien, nor any member of his Cabinet have, as yet, agreed to participate in this summer's memorial service in Ukraine. Presumably they're all too busy.

I visited Filip Konowal's gravesite recently. Reuniting the family symbolically I left a few stones from the limestone quarry where his father once worked and earth from his daughter's final resting place. Since his brave wife Anna's remains were dumped into a mass grave, site unknown, I brought no token from her save this story of her sacrifice.

As I stood there I found myself thinking about how witless today's politicians are. Mouthing platitudes about Canadian unity is something they often do. Harvesting lessons about what it means to be a citizen of Canada from the often-trying experiences of this immigrant, who served his adopted country with distinction, remains, however, a nation-forging duty that they have utterly failed to discharge.

Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario.

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