PERSPECTIVES: And then the war came... (03/30/03)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

And then the war came...

"And then the war came ..." That was a phrase my parents and their friends, all a generation older than me, would often use as they told their life stories; how they were young, going to school, setting up a business or profession, doing whatever they were doing ... "and then the war came."

Only the phrase announcing the advent of war is much more dramatic in Ukrainian than it is in English. Wars don't just "come" like a stranger at the door or "break out" like some disease. In Ukrainian, wars explode: "vybukhla viyna."

My friend Franko Benko, now about 80 years old, was a teenager in June 1941. He lived in a village in western Ukraine, where family life and that of the church were set to the agricultural calendar, the mysterious cycle of spring planting and harvest in the fall. Soon, the young people in the village would be setting up families of their own, "and then the war came."

The village leader told the council that a quota had come down from the Nazis for men and women to work in the German economy. Franko was single, while others had a family and responsibilities. So he, along with others his age, was volunteered and put on a train to go to a factory far away.

Before long, Franko along with his compatriots and their enslavers, were subjected to Allied bombs, intended to destroy Germany's industrial capacity and break the people's will to resist. Many died, but Franko survived. When the war finally ended, he was homeless and hungry.

In the end, it all worked out, though. Franko soon found himself in a displaced persons (DP) camp in Germany, along with millions of other war refugees. After a rather unpleasant week or two on a ship to America, he ended up in Cleveland, where he worked in a factory, this time for decent wages in safe conditions and a nice pension when he retired. Franko sent his children to school, tended a garden at his suburban home, and, a few years ago, buried his wife at Ss. Peter and Paul Cemetery on Hoertz Road in Parma. Now remarried, he sends money to his ancestral village in Ukraine to help pay for the church, library and school. Not bad.

It didn't work out as well for my father's cousin, Sviatoslav, way back in the days of the Austrian Empire. He was an attorney and, apparently, quite a romantic. According to family legend, he woke his wife by strewing flowers on her body as she lay next to him in their bridal bed, "and then the war came" - Sviatoslav was mobilized in July 1914, just days after the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo. He died a few weeks later at the Battle of Ternopil, becoming one of the first of several million men his age to be killed in the first world war. They called them "the Lost Generation."

People, understandably, don't like war. To begin with, it's terribly disruptive of family life. Franko Benko, forced to work in place of soldiers occupying his land, left for Germany and never saw his parents again. As for Sviatoslav Fedynsky, he will always be young, in love and showering his bride with flowers. He and his wife never got to grow old together. The children they would have had were never even born.

Then, there's the sad story of the Kryshtalowych family, my parents' friends from the Old Country who remained our friends in Cleveland. In June 1941, they left home for a few days, leaving their infant son with their parents, "and then the war came."

They had no way of knowing, but the week the Kryshtalowyches decided to go out of town was also the time Adolph Hitler selected to betray his partner, Joseph Stalin, and invade the Soviet Union. Long-standing battle plans went into effect, front lines were drawn, and armies started marching. The Kryshtalowyches didn't see their baby boy for another half a century, until the Soviet Union collapsed and the baby they left behind had become a grandfather, making them great-grandparents.

For Franko Benko, the Khrystalowyches and so many others, World War II was a catastrophe, but it was a war that had to be fought. Hitler was forcing a program based on the immediate extermination of Jews, Gypsies and the disabled, along with the enslavement and eventual extermination of the Slavs. It's all there in "Mein Kampf," the best-seller he wrote in 1923. It's astonishing, when you think about it, how he managed to mobilize the energies and resources of the German people for a program like that. But that's what happened. Others fought back, including Ukrainians on both sides of the Atlantic; there were hundreds of millions of casualties and disrupted lives, but really there was no choice.

World War I, on the other hand, was as stupid a war as can be imagined. After the archduke was assassinated, diplomats issued ultimatums deliberately designed to be rejected. Defense ministers invoked strategic commitments and field marshals put their armies on automatic pilot. Not wanting to lose face, risk office or status, Europe's leaders let events unfold. In the end, four empires collapsed.

For the past half year, the vast majority of citizens in France, Germany, Italy, Chile, Mexico, Turkey, Russia, Ukraine - nearly every country in the world - have been voicing strong opposition to a Middle East War. Even billion-dollar inducements, threats and invocations of historic debts didn't change people's minds. These are nations that have experienced wars and know how unpredictable they can be and how disruptive.

Some wars cannot be avoided; others should never have been fought. Depending on how they're conducted and how the peace is structured, wars can solve intractable problems or sow the seeds for another conflict. World War I, which took the life of Sviatoslav Fedynsky and millions in his "Lost Generation," so embittered the survivors that otherwise civilized people were willing to accept the lunacy of an Adolph Hitler or Vladimir Lenin, making it inevitable that another world war would follow.

Today, a Middle East conflict is fraught with danger. Words that mean different things to different people - "jihad," "crusade," "democracy," "justice," "liberation," "aggression" - are used to invoke the use of force or promise to resist. What do they all mean exactly? In the end, diplomacy and political restructuring that follow any conflict will be as important as the war itself and the manner in which it is fought. Let us hope all of it is approached with wisdom and justice, whatever those mean. But one thing we can say for sure, once a war "explodes," nothing is ever the same.

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