COMMENTARY: Wasyl Odynsky a victim of modern-day witch-hunt (03/25/01)

COMMENTARY

Wasyl Odynsky a victim of modern-day witch-hunt

by Lubomyr Luciuk

To you he's just an old man in Toronto. Maybe you've heard he's a Nazi. He's not. To me he's actually a victim. Let me tell you why.

Just over three years ago federal investigators came, unexpectedly, to his home. They questioned him about what he did in the war. There was no interpreter present, and no counsel. He tried to be helpful. He shouldn't have. His own testimony was later twisted against him. Soon thereafter he was served with papers alleging that he misrepresented himself upon immigrating to Canada. Then his nightmare began.

Reporters came pounding on his door, frightening his wife, then scribbling headlines with an inflammatory spin: "Did you know there is a Nazi war criminal living in your neighborhood?" But how, you wonder, can a man be labeled a war criminal even before his trial is done? The answer can be summed up with three words: ignorance, prejudice, indifference. I've met Wasyl Odynsky only once. He is certainly not able to answer reporters' questions as cleverly as they are usually asked. And, yes, he has an East European accent, is elderly and is of limited means. But, instead of evoking sympathy, his condition made it even easier for a braying media to stereotype him as evasive and obviously, in their unlettered opinions, guilty as charged. Tellingly, not one journalist made any serious effort to hear his side of the story. They couldn't care less. All they wanted were scintillating headlines. After all, next to sex, what sells better than swastikas?

Before the trial began I thought the state might drop its case. After all, there was not a shred of evidence that pointed to Mr. Odynsky having been involved in any war crime, as even the government's lawyers admitted, early on. But they pressed on. I guess I was naïve. I should know by now that these proceedings have never been about justice. They are exercises in selective memory, in bias.

So let me tell you a few things about Mr. Odynsky. He was born in a small village in western Ukraine. He finished Grade 5, then had to leave school to work on the family farm. When the war broke out, and the Nazis came, he was a teenager and was forcibly conscripted. He never saw his parents again. After the judge heard this, and much more, he pondered his decision. And, on March 2, after 13 nerve-wracking postponements, Justice Andrew MacKay of the Federal Court of Canada found what we had known all along. Mr. Odynsky was not a Nazi. Mr. Odynsky was never involved in a war crime. Mr. Odynsky is not a war criminal. And when Mr. Odynsky served in an auxiliary guard unit it was under threat of death. The learned judge even found that Mr. Odynsky has been nothing less than a good citizen since immigrating in 1949. Good news, right?

Nope. None of these findings count. What does is that Mr. Odynsky may have lied at Canada's gates - a half-century ago. And, for that, he can today be denaturalized and deported - a decision that rests with Cabinet.

Even worse, if you read the headlines of major Canadian newspapers, like The Globe and Mail (Judge Won't Bloc Deportation of Ex-Nazi), or The Toronto Star, (Ex-Nazi Lied to Live Here, Judge Rules), you would have thought Mr. Odynsky was exactly what the judge found him not to be, namely a Nazi. Adding disinformation to defamation, the only commentaries solicited about the ruling came from spokesmen for lobby groups that long ago had prejudged Mr. Odynsky, assuming his guilt not because of what he did, but because, simply, he was Ukrainian.

During what were three paralyzing years for the Odynsky family, I witnessed, unbelievingly, how their lives have been disrupted, their life savings drained and their honor besmirched by the organs of a country that Mr. Odynsky and his wife, Maria, so lovingly helped build over the course of years of hard work.

I would never have believed that a witch-hunt could happen in modern times, least of all in Canada. Yet that is exactly what has happened to Mr. Odynsky, as surely as if he was being tied to a stake to be burned.

Still, I am not one of those who intends to plead for clemency. Mr. Odynsky is not guilty of any crime that merits so cruel and unusual a punishment as to be stripped of one's Canadian citizenship and deported to a foreign land. No one should have to beg for a pardon for an innocent man.

For the record, let everyone understand that if he is exiled, far from his wife and family, then we as a society will be doing nothing less than sentencing him to a slow death. Those who orchestrated this travesty should remember that. Many of us won't forget. And if Mr. Odynsky is deported then it will be Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and his Cabinet who will have to live with the knowledge that they sent an innocent man to his grave.

Lubomyr Luciuk, Ph.D., is director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. His latest book, "Searching For Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory" was published by the University of Toronto Press (2000).

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