Mama died 31 years ago. This past March 31 she would have been 100 years old. She was there when I was born and there for my brothers and me as we were growing up.
Among my earliest memories of Mama is our bedtime ritual where she jokingly ordered in Polish: “Renze dogury!” I’d obediently raise my arms for her to slip off my shirt and put on a pajama top. Sometimes she’d say it in German, “Hande hoch,” or Russian. It didn’t occur to me until years after she had died that she knew how to submit to military thugs in several different languages, later translating it into a game with her infant son.
Alexandra (Lesia) grew up in a bucolic, blood-soaked corner of Western Ukraine. As a 20-some year-old mother, separated by war from her husband, she endured Nazi occupation starting in 1941. Decades later, once I had become old enough to understand and during the infrequent moments she felt moved to talk about it, she described seeing Nazis rounding up Jews in nearby villages and towns to be deported to death camps. Under the NKVD after the Soviets came in the spring of 1944, she and fellow villagers were forced to watch a mass execution of young men who had taken up arms against the Germans and then turned them against the Soviets. They called out patriotic slogans just before nooses tightened around their necks.
In 1946 our father, Alexander (Liunyk), having survived the war in Vienna as a student (and later political prisoner of the Nazis), breached the East-West divide with forged papers to bring Mama and then 5-year-old son George to a displaced persons (DP) camp in Austria, where I was born a year later. Miraculously, we came to America to a small town in Pennsylvania where our brother Peter was born, three years before we moved to Cleveland in 1954 and I enrolled in the second grade, bringing home a form to certify my immunization history.
You never had any, Mama said, and signed the permission slip for the school to administer shots against diphtheria, tetanus, etc. Shuddering at the pending trauma, I asked why. Because, Mama said, she had bribed the nurse at the United Nations DP camp not to give them to me. No further explanation.
In the decades afterward, I pretty much forgot that episode, yet on a subliminal level, I think I resented my mother as an unsophisticated, superstitious peasant woman who rejected modernity.
It’s impossible to describe what Mama meant to our family. She ran our daily agenda, cooked and cleaned, taught us values and, working night shifts at a garment and later an electronics plant, contributed to the family finances to help put my brothers and me through college. She planted a bountiful garden on a small plot in the backyard, located in the shadow of the factory that employed our father. All summer and fall, we enjoyed delicious fresh vegetables and fruit. Trying to stem their sons’ inexorable assimilation into America, our parents stressed Ukrainian language and culture, in the process shaping an identity between our two worlds which was not always as seamless as it is now.
I’ve been lucky: the skills, values and education I got steered me during the Cold War to work in the broad-based, global opposition to Soviet oppression in Ukraine and elsewhere. That led to a career on Capitol Hill, where fortuitously I worked for Cleveland’s congresswoman, which became particularly important when Mama, by then a widow, was dying of cancer and I spent time in the district office, including September 5, 1985, my birthday. I was at Mama’s bedside at St. Augustine Hospice and asked her to tell me about the day I was born.
Oh, I was so happy, she said, but also terribly scared. I was puzzled. Scared? Why so? I was so afraid they would do away with you, she said and explained: When she became pregnant, United Nations officials at the DP camps pressured her to have an abortion. You’re a refugee, they told her, with no certain future. But you’re also young, they said, and can have another child once the family establishes a stable life.
I was stunned. That evening, I poured a beer and reflected. Mama, I realized, having endured Nazi, then Soviet atrocities and living in refugee limbo, was not about to let people she didn’t know poke a needle into her baby. So she bribed the nurse, then seven years later authorized the school to administer necessary immunizations. Mama died 10 days after my 38th birthday. I was with her when she passed.
For this year’s Mothers’ Day, I reflect on the remarkable person who gave me life, then defended it and spent her every day working so her sons would become good, decent, productive members of this amazing country.
Reading this, many of you may recognize your own mother and father, aunts and cousins, male relatives and grandparents who survived war, their stories no less dramatic and in many cases more so, than that of my parents. So few of them have been told and indeed are now forever lost. But not all. At the Ukrainian Museum-Archives, Marta Mudri organized an oral history project to preserve a few of those stories, many of them tragic beyond words. There’s the mother who buried her infant son beside the railroad tracks, the train having stopped just long enough for a grave to be dug and then moved on. Families were separated by battle fronts and imprisonment; mothers were forced by circumstances to leave a child behind; a 14-year-old girl, now in her 90s, was forced into slave labor by the Nazis and ended up a mother and community leader in Cleveland.
We see similar horrific scenes today, people fleeing wars in the Middle East; 2 million internally displaced Ukrainians escaping mayhem in the east. As it often was before, Russia is at the center of these crises, stoking conflict, deliberately creating refugees to destabilize Ukraine and the European Union. It’s urgent that we press our leaders as well as candidates for office to remain resolute in confronting Russia, even as we assist those in need. Mothers have always coped as best they could in the midst of heartbreaking circumstances. They need our help as much as ever.