As the world commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz this month, I am painfully reminded that my father was incarcerated there. Auschwitz is the reason why I’m a Canadian; so is the ethnic cleansing perpetrated on us and others living around the new border between Poland and the Ukrainian SSR; so is the entire bloody war and its aftermath. It brought the end to one despot but allowed another to create hell and to hold it until 1991. And still at it.
Like other patriots, my father wanted sovereignty for Ukraine. The German Reich did not. After the war neither did Russia. Both occupational forces wanted the second largest country in Europe for themselves.
No, I’m not Jewish. The Jews have told their story. My story is that of some 10 million Ukrainians killed during the war; 2-3 million banished to the Gulag; 1.5 yanked at gunpoint from ancestral territories as we were; and the decades of misery under Soviet rule.
The Nazis were punished for their crimes. Germany atoned and rose to become a leading European nation. Nazi remnants or wannabes are not tolerated.
Not Russia. Its horrific atrocities of yesterday—20 million dead in the USSR; 120 million worldwide under its tutelage– remain an inexcusable, unpunished crime which the Kremlin wants the world to erase from its historic memory especially now with the focus on the War.
This is very important to President Vladimir Putin. He seeks exoneration for his own use of Hitler’s methods –war, forced exile, ethnic “re-education”, propaganda favoring the “great” leader, arrests and incarceration of critics, murder, and ultimately ethnic genocide in places like Chechnya, occupied Georgia, Crimea, and Donbas.
It is ironic that Russia’s president uses the 75th anniversary of victory over Nazi fascism to promote his own fascist ways. Adding insult to injury today’s fuhrer misappropriates facts to serve his “great Russia” myth conveniently forgetting that the Red Army comprised mostly non-Russians.
Seven million Ukrainians served in it. Its 6th Division accepted Germany’s defeat in Stalingrad while the 1st Ukrainian Division liberated Berlin and Auschwitz.
Other “experts” or “useful idiots” deliberately or unwittingly repeat the perversions. In a recent Bloomberg piece, Leonid Berdinsky, its East European specialist, credits Russians– not even Soviets—with the historic events.
My father was free in Europe after Auschwitz. But the Iron Curtin fell and my mother and I, a preschooler, were imprisoned with the rest of the over 250 million in the Soviet concentration camp.
We escaped through the help of Ukraine’s Insurgent Army which stood up to the post-war atrocities of the Soviet regime. Its resistance was so significant that even today, the Kremlin authorities besmirch it and smear any patriotic fervor by Ukraine as Nazism. It works for the Kremlin: If history is erased the right lessons are not learned.
Alas, we have not learned them. We punished yesterday’s war criminal while allowing today’s to puff himself up; an insult to all who perished. The world would be better served if the commemorations devoted to his punishment. Victory over tyranny should be teaching lessons on how to deal with other—all– tyrants. Instead, Putin is celebrating the victory of despotism over democracies because democracies are stymied as to what to do with his criminality.
For starters, no decent head of state should attend his show. Instead, punish the criminal by increasing sanctions, stopping Nord Stream 2, removing Russia from SWIFT, and placing him on the sanctions list.
After our escape, we reconnected with my father in the West and eventually immigrated to Winnipeg.
My mother wrote memoirs about the time when the war ended for most but for her nor the others behind the Iron Curtin.
Her purpose was to share the truth about man’s inhumanity to man perpetrated not just by Hitler but by despots with absolute power. She also wanted to testify to Ukraine’s heroic effort against foreign domination. She would be proud of its current stand against Putin’s occupation and by Canada’s support.
She would abhor Putin’s show meant to cover up a wobbly, second-rate economic dictatorship that forces a third-world existence on its people while manipulating the entire free world. It’s lunacy, she would pronounce and caution that if he had learned the lessons of World War II, as we have learned it, he’d end the war in Ukraine, release all political prisoners, stop ethnic cleansing in Crimea. His exploitations in other countries — elections, cyber warfare, ugly propaganda– would also stop.
He has not learned that. Instead, he learned how to get away with murder just as his idol Stain had done. His upcoming victory show is but another hoax to con the fools again. Us!
Oksana Bashuk Hepburn writes for the international press on political issues. She has translated her mother’s memoirs “The Borderland: Memoirs From Beyond the Curzon Line” by Natalia Leontowych Bashuk and is seeking an English-language publisher. The memoirs have been published in Ukraine and Poland.
