October will be my parents’ 80th wedding anniversary. Four people were at the ceremony: the priest, the diak (cantor) and the two of them: my father, Alexander (Liunyk), 24 years old and my mother, Alexandra (Lesia,) 23. Neither had any idea what the near-term would bring, let alone what to expect with the rest of their lives. Only that they would be together.
Tato was an inveterate collector. After he died in 1981 at age 66 and Mama four years later at 69, I discovered the letters Liunyk received from Lesia, the first one from 1932 when he was 17. She was 16. Both attended the same academic gymnasium in Stanyslaviv (now Ivano-Frankivsk). “Loving Liunyk… Correct this homework for me, I ask you very much… I greet you sincerely and kiss you, Lesenka.” Amazing that he kept this note, along with hundreds of others for the rest of his life for his son to find decades later.
Two years after receiving the note from Lesia, Liunyk was in prison – arrested for conveying revolutionary tracts for distribution among Ukrainians under Polish administration. My mother sent him letters which he also saved. They were heavily censored, but what is clear is my mother’s love, along with misgivings about linking her destiny to someone serving time in jail.
They remained a couple after Liunyk was released. Years later, my brothers and I were amused when Tato asked Mama to recreate the delicious soup he had in prison. “Impossible,” Mama said. “They kept you on starvation rations and nothing I prepare can measure up to the hunger you had then.”
But back to October 1939 and my parents’ anniversary. It was clear they were committed to each other. We have photos: young, happy and good-looking, enjoying a summer’s day in a village in Podillia and a park in Lviv. I doubt they had any plans at that point to get married. That all changed thanks to Hitler and Stalin.
After two years in prison, Liunyk got a job with a Ukrainian-oriented newspaper, Dilo, in Lviv. He knew shorthand, and even kept a prison diary with hieroglyphic-like script. His job was to monitor shortwave radio, record the evening news and bring it to the office in the morning for publication. There was a whole lot of it – now history. He most certainly heard about the Munich Conference in September 1938 when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler and the thrilling Carpatho-Ukrainian declaration of independence in March 1939 and how days later Nazi-supported Hungary crushed the new republic.
But nothing was more stunning than the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty of August 23, 1939, dividing Europe between two dictators. A week later, Hitler invaded Poland from the west, the country’s anachronistic cavalry bravely and futilely defending against Wehrmacht tanks. On September 17, the Red Army invaded from the east, annexing western Ukraine. The two armies celebrated with a joint victory parade. Ironically, the Soviet military commander cum Nazi collaborator Nikolai Vatutin was killed in an ambush five years later by Ukrainian Insurgent Army guerrillas fighting for Ukrainian independence, an unintended and immensely consequential result of the pact.
History records how the agreement led directly to tens of millions of deaths around the globe while changing the course of hundreds of millions more. Situated between East and West, Ukraine became a prime killing ground for both military and civilians. The Soviets targeted Ukrainian political and cultural figures. Polish leaders there were similarly victimized. Two years later, the Nazis targeted Jews.
As a journalist and former political prisoner, Liunyk would almost certainly have been deported to Siberia or executed. His younger brother Myroslav, studying for the priesthood, was indeed arrested; he died somewhere in Siberia in 1940 – no one knows exactly where or when. And so, knowing the fate that awaited him in Lviv, Liunyk fled from the Soviet occupation into Nazi-occupied Poland, asking Lesia to go with him. They married days later.
Shielded by the Non-Aggression Pact, Hitler promptly conquered France, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Belgium while trying to bomb Great Britain into submission, even as Stalin supplied Nazi Germany with food and raw materials.
On June 22, 1993, I was in Kyiv, part of a U.S. Commerce Department delegation. Watching the morning news in my hotel, I saw a Ukrainian military honor guard laying a wreath on a monument. “No one needs to be told what day this is,” the announcer said without elaboration. “We all know.” Well, I didn’t. Later at lunch, Deputy Prime Minister Mykola Zhulynsky explained. Twentieth century Ukraine, he said, suffered two horrendous massacres: the Holodomor in 1932-1933 and World War II; that very day was the anniversary of the Nazi invasion in 1941.
When the Wehrmacht invaded, Ukrainians welcomed them as liberators only to quickly realize that they had come as conquerors and overlords. One of the neglected and unappreciated aspects of the war was the seizure of young people to work in the German economy. Two million of them were Ukrainian, replacing the soldiers who were laying waste to their land and killing their countrymen. After the war, most of the forced laborers were repatriated to the Soviet Union against their will, but a good many others were welcomed to the U.S. and elsewhere.
Growing up, my closest friends were immigrant children like me, born in Austria and Germany. My mother and father were political refugees, fortunate survivors of the war, but not without dire consequences. Lesia, seeing Nazi soldiers rounding up Jews in her village and then forced by NKVD operatives to witness boyish guerrillas being hanged, suffered Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Liunyk’s health was undermined by what he endured, including months in a Nazi prison in Austria in 1943-1944.
The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, one of the most evil acts in history, is a taboo in Russia today; indeed citing it is a criminal offense. Which is why I’m writing this. Nazi-Soviet collaboration was shameful and so is Russia’s whitewash of that crime. Its horrific legacy must be remembered and condemned. Otherwise the lesson is lost.
On a personal note: Mama used to say there’s nothing so bad that good can’t come of it. The war gave me wonderful parents and led to me becoming an American, from that safe haven, we supported Ukraine’s struggle for independence.
To be continued…
Andrew Fedynsky’s e-mail address is [email protected]