Yizkor

On Remembrance Day (elsewhere Armistice or Veterans Day, November 11) there were observances everywhere. That in Vancouver was again in Victory Square and seemed like a repetition of the August celebration described earlier (I didn't go but wore my campaign medals; out of sight). The national event in Ottawa for the first time did not have any World War I veterans, only five of whom are still alive.

Peter Mansbridge had a program with three Auschwitz survivors responding to questions of school youngsters. So let me here recall those who died fighting the Nazis in the ghettos and forests of Poland, Lithuania and elsewhere. That seems especially appropriate now, since this
blog has just been concerned with the part of my life which intersected with that of those people.
There have been other things I should, and meant to, write about first. Maybe later. Here only something on the ceremony at which I became a Canadian citizen. I had looked forward to it for what it meant, not for what would go on, but it turned out to be pleasant and interesting. The presiding judge evidently enjoyed herself, notably the interaction with the children involved. She was of Ukrainian origin so this also fits in well with where I had interrupted the account.

The neat little map below, found on the internet, provides a number of good features to show how "historic events", like wars, can move people across international boundaries from one sovereign state to another without their ever leaving their place of birth. Starting as we approached (cyan line) from Lublin toward Kowel, both in then independent Poland, the boundary line to Volhynia on this map is along the river Bug, as it became again a day after we passed and is to this day. But the town about midway was not yet Chelm, which we passed, but was rendered as Kholm, or Khelm. That goes to show that, when that map was published, this part of Poland was part of the Russian empire, where sounds rendered in Polish or German as ch were written like an X in the Russian Cyrillic and transcribed as Kh in English.


[ To view a larger, more detailed version of this image click on it. If you are using Internet Explorer, click then on the icon at the lower right of the resulting image. ]

As we moved south from Kovel, the boundary, just to the west, was still as it again became just then and is today, along the river Bug; until just to the west of Lutzk. There a new, very prominent, border is shown on the map; where there is none today. That was the border between two empires which fought each other in WWI and then disappeared: the Tsarist Russian and the Austra-Hungarian Habsburg empires.

Lemberg, the big city to the south had been the main city of Eastern Galicia. The Lembergers then became inhabitants of Lwow in newly independent Poland; until Eastern Galicia became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic along with Volhynia as the Red Army moved in in 1939, and as we were walking around there. They then were transferred to Lvov for about 50 years, when the newly independent Ukraine converted them into inhabitants of Lviv. We got to Lvov for the first time in early October 1939 after hiding out in Lanovitz for a couple of weeks, then again in November when we managed to make contact there with the zionist underground in the process of formation; specifically with Oskar Handler, already mentioned earlier as "guardian angel" in a quotation from Yitzkhak Zuckerman's memoir (June 28, 2005 posting).

The people of Czernowitz, the city further south on the map, became Ukrainians only at the end of WWII. They also had been subjects of the famous Habsburg Kaiser Franz Joseph until WWI, but then belonged to Romania until the victorious Soviet army came in the last winter of WWII. Kief, to the East, more often written Kiev (now officially Kyiv, I believe), has been the capital of Ukraine (and originally of "Kievan Rus). But there is no mention of "Ukraine" on the map; presumably because it was not recognised by the tsarist regime of that time as a separate national/ethnic or geographic entity. Just above Kief, however, the map has very prominent lettering (Littl), which in the complete map, not found on the internet, is likely to have read "Little Russia". I only paid attention to that now because a major hullabaloo touching on this surfaced while I was completing this posting: after the Canadian Liberal Party's minority government under prime minister Paul Martin was voted out of office by a no confidence vote (something that would require armed revolution in the USA). Harvard Professor Michael Ignatieff is returning to his native Canada after 30 years and was nominated to run as a star candidate for Liberal party MP in a Toronto riding (constituency) with a substantial ethnic Ukrainian minority. A group of these had earlier taken control of the local party organisation and is contestng the "parachuting" of Ignatieff into the riding. He has a paper trail, including a book in the 80-s with passages claimed to be offensive to Ukrainians. He claims to have opposed only Ukrainian nationalism, the way he opposes all nationalism (the definition of which varies). Specifically, he apparently referred to "Little Russians" as distinct from "Great Russians", from whose upper class he is descended. I have no way of judging whether that reference should cause offence. My guess is that he did not mean it seriously as a putdown. But that may not be good enough, especially since he is rumoured to be in line to succeed Paul Martin as leader of the governing Liberal party (something like the latter even armed revolution couldn't achieve in the US).