Historic medal awarded to Filip Konowal is found (05/16/04)

Historic medal awarded to Filip Konowal is found

by Christoper Guly
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

OTTAWA - Lubomyr Luciuk, the 50-year-old research director of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA) has spent the last decade helping to draw attention to the heroism of the late Filip Konowal, one of several thousand Ukrainian-born immigrants who served with the Canadian Expeditionary Force during the first world war. Konowal was the only Ukrainian Canadian to be awarded the British Empire's highest bravery medal for his actions, as a member of the 47th Canadian Infantry Battalion, in single-handedly taking out three German positions and killing 16 German soldiers over a two-day period in August 1917 in France.

Up until recently, the missing link in Konowal's legacy has been the whereabouts of his Victoria Cross.

Sold for $3,750 (about $2,750 U.S.) to the Ottawa-based Canadian War Museum in 1969 by a dealer who had purchased it from Konowal's second wife, the medal mysteriously disappeared about four years later. But now, Dr. Luciuk believes it has been found.

A week before Easter, he received an e-mail message from a British war-medal enthusiast in England notifying him that Konowal's VC was to be sold at an auction in Hamilton at the end of May.

Dr. Luciuk, who teaches political geography at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario, and holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, says he immediately contacted Wendy Hoare of Jeffrey Hoare Auctions Inc., based in London, Ontario, which had issued a news release announcing the May 30 sale of the "historically important Victoria Cross awarded to Acting Corporal Filip Konowal."

Dr. Luciuk says that Ms. Hoare assured him the medal was "genuine" and that the individuals, who remain anonymous but who consigned the VC to the auction house for sale, had the "legal right to do so."

She also told him the medal's asking price was listed at $120,000, though the medal is believed to be worth about $250,000 (Canadian).

Dr. Luciuk then alerted Joe Geurts, director and chief executive officer of the Canadian War Museum, who subsequently contacted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. After seizing the medal, the RCMP began an investigation prior to releasing it to the museum for authentication.

While experts have yet to determine whether it is Konowal's VC, even more questions remain unanswered as to how it got lost in the first place.

As Dr. Luciuk said: "When was it removed, who removed it, where has it been in the last 30 years and how did the prodigal medal end up in London, Ontario?"

The story he's heard is that Konowal's VC was "misplaced" around 1973 when it was removed from its case to be photographed and allegedly not returned to its proper place.

The Ottawa-based War Amputations of Canada, which re-ignited interest in the missing medal at an August 2000 tribute to Konowal jointly organized by the Ukrainian Canadian Professional and Business Association (UCPBA) of Ottawa, claims the VC was loaned "to persons" outside the museum for an exhibit.

Dr. Luciuk believes that somebody "stole" the medal. "The medal was removed and sold," he said. "Whether it was sold to whoever put it up for auction, or whether the original person died and passed it on, I don't know."

In November 2000, War Amps founder and CEO Cliff Chadderton, a second world war veteran who lost his right leg during combat overseas and who personally knew Konowal, wrote to RCMP Commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli and called for an investigation into the medal's disappearance.

The Mounties informed Mr. Chadderton that the VC was entered on the missing article databank of the Canadian Police Information Center and that the RCMP had asked Interpol to include the item in its databank to protect it "from being sold by international auction houses without prior knowledge of the true owner."

Mr. Chadderton suspects the medal's disappearance was "an inside job" at the museum and blames officials there for taking "no action" to recover it. "The War Museum was negligent in its duty to the Canadian public by failing to engage the normal criminal investigation," says Mr. Chadderton, who also serves as chairman of the National Council of Veteran Associations (NCVA), which posthumously awarded Konowal its Order of Merit.

In a recent letter to Canadian Heritage Minister Hélène Chalifour Scherrer, the NCVA called for "a major investigation" to determine "any possible dereliction" of duties by museum staff regarding the missing medal. "It is preposterous to accept the explanation from the War Museum that the medal was merely 'misplaced,'" wrote Mr. Chadderton.

"Museum staff took no action to further the investigation until the medal showed up at the auction," he said in an interview.

However, Dr. Luciuk credits Mr. Geurts for "acting instantly" to save the Victoria Cross from sale.

"Other than the original thief, there are no bad guys in the story," Dr. Luciuk explains. "Not even Jeffrey Hoare, which issued a press release well in advance of the sale and which alerted people to the sale of this rare medal."

Eagerly anticipating the outcome of the museum's process to verify whether the medal is Konowal's, the UCCLA is planning to further honor a man who was only one of 94 Canadians to receive a VC since the Crimean War.

The association has asked the Ukrainian government to issue a postage stamp in his memory.

In October, Canada Post Corp. will issue a commemorative stamp featuring the VC and the names of all the Canadian recipients, including Konowal.

The UCCLA lobbied the federal Department of Veterans Affairs to set up a new headstone at Konowal's previously nondescript grave at Ottawa's Notre Dame Cemetery, as well as setting up trilingual (English, French and Ukrainian) markers in Toronto, where a branch of the Royal Canadian Legion was named after him; in New Westminster, British Columbia, home of the 47th Battalion; in Ottawa, home of the Governor General's Foot Guards (the regiment he first joined); and at a crossroads where the village of Kudkivtsi, his Ukrainian birthplace, was once located.

Dr. Luciuk said the UCCLA is also attempting to erect a trilingual plaque in Lens, France, the site near Vimy Ridge where Konowal earned the VC. King George V presented Konowal with the medal as he lay in an English army hospital with a severe head wound.

Currently, there is a Konowal monument at the Selo Ukraina Memorial Park in Dauphin, Manitoba. In addition, Dr. Luciuk and Ron Sorobey, a member of the UCPBA in Ottawa and a former serving officer with the Ottawa-based reserve unit the Cameron Highlanders, authored a trilingual booklet in 2000 titled "Konowal: A Canadian Hero."

"This is a guy who really persevered despite some pretty hard blows in his life," explained Dr. Luciuk.

Though his origins in Russian-controlled Ukraine spared him the internment his countrymen from western Ukraine under Austro-Hungarian control would face in Canada for years after he arrived here in 1913, Konowal lost his wife, Anna, to the Great Famine in Ukraine. His daughter Maria, who was also left behind in Ukraine, survived.

The day after he returned to Canada leading a peace parade through Ottawa's streets on July 20, 1919, Konowal got caught up in a dispute involving two Ukrainian Canadians in Hull, a city in Quebec now known as Gatineau that is located across the river from Ottawa.

According to Dr. Luciuk, Konowal came to the aid of a friend who was being attacked by a man allegedly involved in bootlegging. "The attacker barricaded himself inside a house. Konowal grabbed a knife from the restaurant next door and went up to the door of the house and tried to get in. He shoved the knife through the door and killed the guy," related Dr. Luciuk. "Konowal dropped the knife on the ground and stood there until the police came."

Konowal spent six years in a Montreal asylum on grounds of insanity attributed to a head wound he sustained during the war. Following his release, he worked as a janitor on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. His heroism remained largely anonymous, though the prime minister at the time, Mackenzie King, was aware of the VC winner in his midst and had him transferred to work for him as a special custodian.

Konowal - who by then had remarried a widow, Juliette Leduc-Auger - died in Ottawa in 1959 at the age of 72.

Dr. Luciuk hopes that once authenticated, the Victoria Cross that went AWOL will be on permanent public display at the new War Museum, which is scheduled to open in May 2005 so that "all Canadians can learn about the sacrifices of people like Konowal."

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