Yaroslav Hunka’s blog post

“The new “liberator” of the Ukrainian people – Führer Hitler – reigned over the Berezhansk land. Portraits of Hitler in a long overcoat with a raised collar covering his menacing face with small, as if artificially attached whiskers under his sharp nose, and with the inscription “Hitler-liberator” hung in each classes.  The Führer immediately revealed his plans for Ukraine, liquidating the provisional Ukrainian government in Lviv and imprisoning Ukrainian leaders in concentration camps.

“A new wave of arrests followed. It was easier to confront the new enemy because: a) he was easy to recognize, b) he spoke a foreign language to us, c) he did not permeate our society with sexots (secret informants), as the Muscovite did.”  –Yaroslav Hunka, 2011

The 98-year-old Ukrainian veteran Yaroslav Hunka was invited to Canada’s House of Commons to hear Zelensky’s speech. He appeared overwhelmed by emotion as the crowd gave him a standing ovation to recognize his military service.  Now it has come to light that the outfit he served with has a less than savory reputation (“14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician)” is now being heavily edited) , and people are calling for the resignation of the politician who represents his district and who invited him.  I wonder if the guy knows he is in the middle of an international incident?  I wonder if he knows about his unit’s reputation, or was an eyewitness to any of it. Or does he even speak English?

His home town was the village of Urman. This is where he went away to school, Berezhany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berezhany

 

Yaroslav Hunka wrote about his wartime experiences here.

• https://komb-a-ingwar.blogspot.com/2011/03/blog-post_21.html

It’s in Ukrainian, but I will attempt a translation.

Monday, March 21, 2011

MY GENERATION

Memories

Yaroslav HUNKA
Canada

My generation was united by two great forces: faith in God and love for Ukraine. We grew up on the glorious and proud land of Berezhansk. We trampled this land with our bare feet and breathed into our souls and hearts its magical aromas, and our eyes forever recorded the beauty of the cities, villages and landscapes of our native land on memory tapes.

My generation became the heir of the glorious sons of this land, our predecessors. Her glorious sons and guests sowed the land of Berezhan with their powerful words: Fr. M. Shashkevich, Andrii Chaikivskyi, Fr. Sylvester Lepky, Lev Lepky, Roman Kupchynskyi, Bohdan Lepky…

Who among us has not sung rifle songs by Roman Kupchynskyi, Levko and Bohdan Lepky since kindergarten? The song “How from Berezhan to the cadre” was probably sung by our mothers over the cradle. The battlefields of the USS (Ukrainian Sich Riflemen) near the villages of Konyukha, Kuropatniki, Posukhiv, Vilkhovets, Potutory captured our young fantasies about the heroes of our people. Mount Lysonya was a holy place for us teenagers. We not only went to her “barefoot”, but stepped on her with bare feet out of a sense of holiness and boundless pride. The spirit of this mountain, like some strange radiation, permeated my soul and all my senses. I also had a native hero of whom I was very proud – this is my father’s older brother, Hryhoriy Gunka, who fought in the ranks of the USS.

My native village of Urman, it seemed to me then, was the most nationally conscious village in the district. The flame of national revival, in the years between the two wars, shone brightly over the village. The church and “Prosvita” reading room became the central engine of the national life of the village under the parental guidance of priests: fathers Omelyan Havryshko and Stepan Horodetskyi. The village had a “cooperative” consumer store, a library, a choir, a “Lug” youth society, a kindergarten and a drama club. The last was my favorite. This group gave 4-5 performances a year in the reading room.

We all (the younger generation) knew that there was also an underground organization of nationalists in the village – OUN, but we did not know who belonged to it, but we imagined that all the older boys and some girls must enter there, because they often whispered to each other…

The OUN had a considerable influence on the behavior of people and the general life of the village. When the OUN directive was issued not to buy either alcohol or tobacco, because this is a monopoly of the Polish state, none of the young people neither smoked nor drank alcohol (would today’s Ukrainian citizen achieve such a commitment?). Even my grandfather, who smoked all his life, stopped smoking.

I have never seen alcohol in our house, nor in the house of my mother’s relatives (the Yakims), and in the village – never a drunk person.

September, 1939 – I am fourteen years old.

The Polish army and the civilian population are fleeing along the road in the direction of Berezhany in a continuous stream, and German planes are catching up with them from time to time. Every day we impatiently looked in the direction of the Pomoryans with the hope that those mystical German knights who give “bullets” to the hated cowards will appear. One day, instead of them, a column of horsemen with red stars on their caps arrived from Berezhany.

Education at the school in Berezhany became free and my father sent me to school in Berezhany. I stayed in a Polish bursa and started going to the fifth grade. The vast majority of young people at the school were, like me, from the villages of the district. The language of instruction at school was Ukrainian. Russian language lectures were taught by a Pole. He was old, tall, noble in character and carried himself proudly. He treated us like a good grandfather, and we soon fell in love with him. He was not with us for long. One very winter day in January 1940, he, one boy and one girl from the class were summoned and two enkavedists (special groups of the NKVD) led them “under escort” directly to the railway station, where their families, who had been brought from the villages at night, were already loaded into the wagons. I did not know that my beloved aunt and uncle Kobrin from Konyukh with their children Stefa and Volodymyr were also on that train ( Stefa, my age, died that winter near Irkutsk).

This was the first demonstration of “father” Stalin’s guardianship over us – the first echelons of “enemies of the people” to Siberia. More and more new ones followed them.

For the next school year, I moved to live in the Ukrainian Bursa on Raiska Street, where Professor Mykhailo Rebryk was the manager. In my sixth grade, out of forty students, there were six Ukrainians, two Poles, and the rest were Jewish children of refugees from Poland. We wondered why they were running away from such a civilized Western nation as the Germans.

Arrests continued in the city and in the villages, and people – “enemies of the people” – were taken to Siberia. This did not escape the schools and bursa. One Saturday, the director of the Tkachuk school called three tenth-grade students from the bursa, and no one saw them again.

Fear of the unknown enveloped us and the entire nation. The terror of Moscow Communism raged over the Berezhansk land. The NKVD had eyes and ears everywhere. Friend to friend and brother to brother could not speak sincerely for fear of betrayal. The worst thing is that the viper who terrorized us spoke our native language. Each time, a larger part of the population became “enemies of the people”.

At school, we had to sing songs of praise to our executioners, and the monthly wall newspapers that each class had to publish praised Father Stalin and the Communist Party to the heavens.

In July 1941, the German army occupied Berezhany.  We greeted the German soldiers with joy. Narid (the people) felt a thaw, knowing that there would be no more of that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night, and at least it would be possible to sleep peacefully now.

After entering Berezhany, the Germans occupied the new gymnasium under the administrative building, and our classes were moved to the old traditional place – the second floor of the town hall.

The new “liberator” of the Ukrainian people – Führer Hitler – reigned over the Berezhansk land. Portraits of Hitler in a long overcoat with a raised collar covering his menacing face with small, as if artificially attached whiskers under his sharp nose, and with the inscription “Hitler-liberator” hung in each classes The Führer immediately revealed his plans for Ukraine, liquidating the provisional Ukrainian government in Lviv and imprisoning Ukrainian leaders in concentration camps.

A new wave of arrests followed. It was easier to confront the new enemy because: a) he was easy to recognize, b) he spoke a foreign language to us, c) he did not permeate our society with sexots (secret informants), as the Muscovite did.

In the gymnasium, science took place in a national spirit with lectures on religion. We could freely talk to each other about various topics, including politics, without any fear. Now Professor Mykhailo Rebrik became the strictest, who decided to raise us all to be perfect gentlemen, which was impossible to do!

The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) organized its cells in the gymnasium and embraced many young people.

I just turned 16, and the next two years were the happiest years of my life. I had no idea that what I experienced in those two years would fill me with love for my native city in such a way that it would be enough for me for the rest of my life. I didn’t know then that dreams about those two years, about the company of charming girls, about carelessly cheerful friends, about fragrant evenings in the luxurious castle park and walks around the city would help me get through the anxious times of the following years. That the memories of the Berezhansk Gymnasium in the old town hall, with its professors and with its increasingly cheerful and noisy students, will support my heart and soul in a foreign land in the coming decades.

The forty-third year has come. The German armies “planned” retreated to the west. The thought of those beasts turned into human form with a red star on the forehead became real.

Time and events said that it was my generation’s turn to follow in the footsteps of its predecessors. And it went for the sake of the idea of ​​Unification of Ukraine. Our roads were different – because that was the fate of our stateless people. At the call of the OUN, many joined the ranks of the UPA. Others, at the call of the Ukrainian Central Committee, went as volunteers to the “Galichyna” division. In two weeks, eighty thousand volunteers volunteered to join the division, including many students of the Berezhan Gymnasium. None of us asked what our reward would be, what our provision would be, or even what our tomorrow would be. We felt our duty to our native land – and left!

Many students of the Berezhansk Gymnasium died a heroic death in the ranks of the UPA, in the “Galichyna” division. I do not want the reader to understand that my entire generation was ideologically motivated and spiritually conscious. “In a bag of healthy apples, there are also rotten ones.” It will depend on the relationship between those two qualities of apples in the course of a given generation.

On the last day of the war, the “Galichyna” division broke off contact with the Czechoslovak Republic in Styria (Austria) and surrendered to the British Army.

In a prisoner-of-war camp in Italy, I met many boys from various villages of the Berezhan region. I remember that Yaroslav Babunyak from the Berezhansk gymnasium was there, Stepan Kukuruza, Yaroslav Lototskyi, Lev Baglai, Volodymyr Bilyk, Ostap Sokolskyi, Lev Babii, Yaroslav Ivakhiv.

I think that it was God’s will that we should travel around the world like the tribe of Israel [NB: see Ukrainian diaspora], tell the world about Ukraine, and forty-five years later come to it with help. Our mission was difficult, because the world knew very little about us, and what it did know was falsely presented by our neighbors. For a Westerner, all the way east from Warsaw to Japan was a single “Russia”. Slowly, through hard work, personal contacts and cultural behavior, we attracted the general opinion of the Western peoples to “our side”.

Being separated by an iron curtain from one’s native land for almost half a century is a very long time in a person’s life. A foreigner, and how friendly, rich and humane she is, has a great power of attraction. One could even forgive those who lost their identity in such circumstances and “got lost”.  The Ukrainian emigration, the emigration of a stateless people, managed to preserve its identity: not only to preserve, but also to develop its culture and history. The road back to its native land was difficult and long.  It went through Western Europe, England and Canada. My first trip to Ukraine was in September 1989. No one and nothing can prepare a person for those emotionally shocking experiences that he has to endure when he comes face to face with his native earth after such a long time of separation. I would not advise people with a weak heart or the elderly to do this pilgrimage.

“Berezhany – You are the best city in the world! “- for many who spent their youth there. – “You were their dream for years in distant foreign lands. Who brought You to such decline and ruin? Who destroyed our dreams?”

The paths of our childhood were overgrown with weeds and weeds – the roads became impassable. The castle, which was the pride of the city for many generations and a lure for lovers, lies abandoned in ruins. From the famous Berezhansky pond, a big smelly calabanya remained. The same fate befell my beloved Urmansky pond. Out of desperation, I wanted to go to Mount Storozhisko and weep at the top of my voice over the shattered long-term dreams and over the ruins of Lepkov’s “Best City in the World”. What evil force has been walking here for the past half century?!

This obvious ruin of the environment, however, pales in comparison with the spiritual decay of the people. The Godless communism command system drove a person into a hopeless situation and it was visible in her sad eyes. The “Soviet” person surrendered to his fate, believing that he was powerless to have any influence on his life. In such a helpless situation, this person surrendered to extreme indifference. This indifference was observed at every step of life. Man became indifferent to his environment, to the needs and pains of his neighbor – “one’s neighbor”.

It was not easy for me to leave Ukraine, both after my first visit to my native land in 1989 with my eldest son Martyn and daughter-in-law Tereza, and after my second visit with my younger son Peter in 1991. A profitable and affluent life in Canada has become not very attractive. The soul gravitated to its own, albeit impoverished, native nest, to its land.

“I love you, my native land,
As if to my mother, I cry,
You cry – and I cry,
You laugh – and I laugh.”

(Vasyl Grenja-Donsky)

September 1989. 46 years old with my mother.