Saturday, November 17, 2001
Once upon a time, there were the Hardy
Boys and Nancy Drew. These young
sleuths got to solve neat mysteries and
have loads of fun without ever drawing a
gun or getting horizontal with the opposite
sex.
And unlike Kat Baliuk, the teenaged
heroine of the new young adult novel
Hope's War, Nancy and the Boys didn't
have to solve the mystery of their
grandfather's past. They didn't see their
lives fall apart because of a federal law
that can deport lovable old grandfathers
unjustly accused of being Nazi war
criminals. Nor did they become ensnared
in bitter relations between Canada's Jewish
and Ukrainian communities.
Hope's War (Dundurn Press) was written
by Marsha Skrypuch, a Brantford, Ont.
author of Ukrainian heritage. To write it,
she received some financial help from the
Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras
Shevchenko, but says her book is based on
facts, not on ethnic loyalties or ethnic
hatred.
Hope's War is Skrypuch's fifth book for children. Like her latest, one
other was aimed at teens. The rest were picture books for a younger
crowd. Skrypuch's topics have included the Armenian massacre, the
internment of Ukrainian-Canadians during the First World War and
Stalinist repression.
Not exactly Hardy Boys material, but as the 46-year-old Skrypuch
says, she doesn't do stories about boys' skateboard adventures.
Besides, she says, adults often underestimate children. Kids are often
brighter than adults and can handle difficult topics in fiction.
Skrypuch loves being around teenagers, she says, and often goes to
schools doing readings from her books. Last week, she was in Ottawa
reading from Hope's War to a group of Ukrainian students.
"I don't go for this thing that because someone is a certain age, they
don't understand things," she says.
There is a lot to understand in Hope's War, in which young Kat's
grandfather is accused by the federal government of failing to tell
immigration authorities when he came to Canada that he had served as
an auxiliary police officer to the Nazi occupiers of his Ukrainian
homeland during the Second World War.
Under federal law, people who lie about their wartime activities at the
time of their immigration can be denaturalized and deported, even if
there is no proof they actually committed any war crimes. Because the
government destroyed old immigration records, the courts do not even
have to prove someone lied, just that he probably lied.
Kat's grandfather faces such a trial, but not before being branded a war
criminal in the news media and facing harassment from a persistent
protester outside his home. The protester turns out to be an elderly
Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. The tensions between Jews and
Ukrainians is a recurring subplot of the book. In the end, the
grandfather is ordered deported. We are left to speculate about the
future of the old man and his wounded family.
In real life, accord ing to Skrypuch, he would not be deported but just
left to live out his days, broke and reviled in Canada. That, at least,
is
the record so far, she says.
In the back of the book, there is an author's note pointing out the cases
of three real individuals who were ordered deported in the past few
years but remain in Canada. The three are Helmut Oberlander of
Waterloo, Ont., Wasyl Odynsky of Toronto and Vladimir Katriuk
from the Montreal area. A fourth man, Serge Kisluk of St. Catharines,
Ont. was also ordered deported but died before action was taken.
"People aren't deported," says Skrypuch. "They die." The government,
she claims, holds the deportation hearings to placate those demanding
alleged war criminals be brought to justice. But the government, she
adds, is unwilling to enact the deportation orders because of the lack
of compelling evidence the accused actually committed war crimes.
Judges trying some of these cases have publicly said they believe the
accused lied to immigration authorities about their wartime activities
but have cast doubt on accusations they are war criminals.
For example, Mr. Justice W. Andrew MacKay of the Federal Court of
Canada ruled last March that the government had the right to deport
Odynsky, a Ukrainian immigrant who apparently tried to hide his role
as a guard at Nazi forced labour camps. But the judge had a caveat.
"There is no doubt that Mr. Odynsky's service at Trawinki and
Poniatowa (labour camps in Poland) and even with SS Battalion
Stiebel, was not voluntary. He believes he would have been shot if
captured after leaving and that he would have put his family in
jeopardy."
And the judge added: "There was no evidence at trial that Mr.
Odynsky participated personally in any incident involving the
mistreatment of prisoners or of any other person during his service
with the SS guard units."
Skrypuch puts similar words into the mouth of the fictional judge who
tries Kat's grandfather, a man who claimed to have been a Nazi
"infiltrator" rather than a "collaborator," and who did nothing worse
than order Jewish prisoners to do pushups.
In Hope's War, Sol Littman, the real-life Nazi hunter, a Jew and a
former head of the Toronto branch of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, is
labelled as the culprit who unleashed the process that has resulted in
innocent men being branded Nazi war criminals. Kat's parents explain
that Littman's assertion in the 1980s that 774 Nazi war criminals were
living in Canada was wildly inaccurate, that half of the names on that
list were people who had never even set foot in Canada, yet the list
was the impetus for the establishment in 1985 for the Deschenes
Commission into War Criminals.
"'It (the list) was made up by the self-styled Nazi hunter, Sol Littman,'
explained her father. "'And, in fact, the whole commission was set up
in response to his false accusations.'"
In the book, Kat's grandfather is harassed and dogged by an elderly
Jewish woman protester. In a chance encounter on the street, the old
woman tells Kat her grandfather is a war criminal.
"'They were all like that,' said the woman. 'They are all war criminals.'
'Do you mean to tell me that you think every single Ukrainian
auxiliary policeman was a war criminal?' asked Kat. 'Every one,'
replied the woman emphatically. 'You and your family should kneel
down and pray. Pray for forgiveness until your knees bleed.' Kat was
taken aback by the hate in the woman's voice. Kat could think of
nothing to say. She turned from the woman and walked back to the
courthouse.
The old Jewish woman and Kat's family eventually make peace with
one another. In real life, disputes between Jewish-Canadians and
Ukrainian-Canadians do not always end so happily.
On the day of the Odynsky ruling, David Matas, senior legal counsel
for the Jewish human rights organization, B'nai B'rith Canada, urged
the government to strip the ethnic Ukrainian man of his Canadian
citizenship.
"There has been a lot of tension," Skrypuch says. And, she adds: "On
this issue, there has not been much talk."
Skrypuch says she showed her manuscript to some writer friends who
are Jewish. "There are frustrations on their part, too; and there are
prejudices in their communities."
Both the Nazis and the Soviet communists turned the Ukrainians and
the Jews against one another in Ukraine during the Second World
War, says Skrypuch. Here is how Kat's grandfather puts it: "There was
much distrust between Jews and Ukrainians when the Germans first
arrived. Ukrainians associated Jews with the communists and Jews
associated Ukrainians with the Nazis. We were both wrong."
Skrypuch notes the Nazis killed five million Slavs, including many
Ukrainians. Accusing Ukrainians of being war criminals is a "double
slap," she says. "It says the people who are the victims are the
perpetrators."
The author says she has no agenda with this book although she would
be happy if the government changed its law about deporting people
like Kat's grandfather and stopped accepting evidence gathered by the
old Soviet KGB.
At the back of the book there are several Web sites listed as "teachers'
resources" to educate students about war crimes issues. Most of the
sites recount history from the Ukrainian point of view.
Skrypuch says she tackled the issues in Hope's War because she is
attracted to stories where people are falsely labelled and are victims
of
prejudice. An important subplot of Hope's War involves the prejudice
experienced by a teenage boy who chooses to dress in Gothic clothes.
Skrypuch's own grandfather, who came to Canada from Ukraine in
1912, was labelled an "enemy alien" and interned along with many
other Ukrainian-Canadians during the First World War. As a child,
Skrypuch was labelled "stupid" because she didn't learn to read until
she was nine. Her mother was labelled a "whore" because she was
divorced. And Ukrainian-Canadians are being labelled war criminals.
"They're damning a whole ethnic group."
Copyright 2001 The Ottawa Citizen