NEWS AND VIEWS: An author's reflections on preparing a book about displaced persons (11/19/00)

NEWS AND VIEWS

An author's reflections on preparing a book about displaced persons

by Lubomyr Luciuk

When the photographs first started arriving I did not find what I was looking for. Most captured scenes of Ukrainian refugee life in Western Europe in the immediate post-war years are of schools packed with pupils, makeshift Catholic and Orthodox churches overflowing with the devout, committees of displaced persons deliberating.

Yet, as the son of political refugees, I knew my parents' crusade had little to do with securing adequate food, shelter and sanitation in the DP camps. What infused their lives with purpose and, over decades, gave meaning to many sacrifices, was their participation in the struggle to free Ukraine.

Their uncompromising opposition to Nazi and Soviet tyranny had made them refugees, displaced from their motherland at the edge of Europe, from a place which, until quite recently, their adversaries said never existed and never would. As their enemies tried to erase Ukraine from the maps of the world they turned the land into a Golgotha, a place of skulls.

Yet, those who plotted Ukraine's extinction failed, in part because of the post-war DPs. Forced to flee from their homeland, they nevertheless refused to forget who they were, where they came from, or why. And, steadfastly, they rebuffed all those - and there were many - who tried to undermine this diaspora's hope.

I knew that their resolute vision must appear on the cover of the book I had written about their pilgrimage. What I did not know was how hard it would be to find the right photograph. Nor did I have any inkling of what would find me as I was looking.

I searched the usual places, starting with the papers of the late Bohdan Panchuk, a veteran of the Royal Canadian Air Force. His dexterous interventions with the British and Canadian mandarins overseeing refugee relief and resettlement operations saved thousands from forcible repatriation to the Communists' gulags. Later the Central Ukrainian Relief Bureau (CURB) team he led secured asylum for many more in England, Canada, Australia and the United States, rightly earning themselves acclaim as the "heroes of their day."

Photographs aplenty remain in CURB's archive but usually they portray daily life in the camps and are unlabelled. And Panchuk, patriot though he was, never quite appreciated that the DPs being rescued were not like the Ukrainians who settled western Canada at the turn of the century. While the refugees shared a language and cultural heritage with those Prairie pioneers, they were driven to migrate not by economic considerations but by the foeman. Having survived the enervating traumas of exile, they could only think of someday returning home, to Ukraine.

That zeal precipitated much friction here. For they encountered a community whose collective experience of being monitored and manipulated by the federal authorities, accused of harboring "divided loyalties," left those still willing to publicly identify themselves as Ukrainians in Canada far more circumspect about how, when and why one should do so.

If Panchuk did not focus his camera or, usually, his mind on the politics of this post-war immigration it was not because he was naïve. He chose not to emphasize the DPs' ardent nationalism because he knew that, even during the Cold War, public bromides notwithstanding, the Anglo-American powers never really wanted, nor felt they needed, a free Ukraine.

Mostly, Canada's gatekeepers let in the DPs because we needed laborers. As for their predictable clamoring for Ukraine's independence, Ottawa's men not only lamented how the DPs' politics retarded their acculturation but worried that those Ukrainian nationalists would complicate "good Canada-Soviet relations." Since neither consequence was desirable, concerted attempts were made to mute the memory of the DPs. Indeed what a Ukrainian needed to do to become a "good Canadian" was even once defined, rather precisely. Such a person would willingly revise a no doubt unpronounceable surname, marry an Englishwoman, be content to farm and, most importantly, would "never leave Canada for Ukraine, however free."

Still looking for a suitable photograph I advertised in Ukrainian-language newspapers, asking for DPs or their children to share what they may have cached. I had just about given up on that last stratagem when a Winnipeg acquaintance of a friend from Calgary mailed in some black and white photographs taken by his father in the spring of 1948 in Munich.

The originals were so small I was not certain of what I was looking at, apparently an anti-Soviet protest. I asked for an enlargement and a cover mock up. And that is how I came to see something I had never hoped to glimpse. Marching in the front ranks of that demonstration, a half century ago, is someone I know - caught on film by a man he did not know. There moves my father, Danylo, a DP, starting on his own search for the place that would become our family's home, Canada.

My parents went into exile but never forgot Ukraine. Over the intervening decades they insisted that, someday, nationalist truth would triumph over Communist lies. They never allowed me to forget that, if they should fail to complete the liberating mission their lives were dedicated to, it would be my duty to carry on, regardless.

Their vindication came in 1991, when Ukraine re-emerged as a recognized state in Europe, opponents notwithstanding. While today's Ukraine is not the place they pined for, and, paradoxically, there is no place for them there, the long enduring of the DPs, and of their children, is now over. We can all, finally I think, become Canadians.

Lubomyr Luciuk is a professor of geography at the Royal Military College of Canada and author of "Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada and the Migration of Memory" (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000).

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