Excerpt 1:
Escape through Hungary:
September 14, 1944: The train stopped at the western outskirts of Budapest. The conductor announced the train would remain in this location for the night. Everyone was unnerved by this announcement. Since we were sitting in an open field there would be no escape if enemy aircraft approached us. We were preparing to go to sleep when sirens blared mercilessly. AIR RAID!!! Where to run? I thought it would be safer to remain on the train. The two babies, Marta and Chrystyna, who were suddenly awakened from their sleep were crying uncontrollably. Their mothers tried to soothe them. After a few moments Slavko rushed toward me and said the conductor advised us to leave the train immediately.
Opening the door of the train we saw the dark sky illuminated with a myriad of searchlights. The sirens blared their urgent, shrill cry once again. I helped all the women off the train. In terror, my horseman and Yevka refused to leave the train.
With people fleeing from all 40 wagons of the train in panic, it was a chaotic scene. We headed in the direction of some homes surrounded by orchards at the outskirts of Budapest. In the darkness I lost sight of my sons and Slavka among the teeming escapees. Someone yelled that they had headed for the nearest gate. We followed in search of them. The sirens stopped abruptly, but Scheiriwerfer (searchlights) continued to flash across the sky.
Then we heard the horrendous roar of approaching enemy aircraft and the high-pitched whistle of bombs exploding around us. We ran toward an orchard . . . I called for my loved ones, but there was only silence. Exploding bombs were directly overhead. As the explosions became more and more frequent, I told my wife to lie down under a stone wall and continued to call the names of our missing family and friends.
Suddenly a trap door opened next to a stone house. I ran back to get my wife. By the entrance a huge man lowered us into a basement with three small windows. We walked down three steps and lay down hastily on the floor of the basement . . . the whistle of bombs was heard again. Trying to look around in the dark basement I could not see my sons or the others.
Suddenly we heard a terrifying scream in the field. Did the bomb hit the train? I raised my head to one of the small windows and saw our train glowing from the illumination of searchlights . . . a perfect target for enemy aircraft. People were running in fear and panic: some crawled under the train, while others scattered in all directions. Would a bomb fall? How many of our people would die in this foreign land tonight? What had become of Vlodko and Yevka? If bombs hit the train we would lose all of our provisions, papers and belongings. Yet material loss seemed inconsequential at this time in terms of loss of life.
Bombs continued to explode near us and total darkness descended as the searchlights ceased to play across the sky.
Exhausted, we lay down on the floor of the damp basement to avoid shrapnel from the bombs. Blessedly, for a moment, we fell asleep. Waking from a short slumber, I continued to hear the whistle and explosion of bombs. This air attack lasted from 10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.
Finally, the air raid warning ended and I climbed out of the basement to search for our family and friends. I found them in a very primitive shelter in the orchard. Miraculously, their lives had been spared. Assured they were safe, I immediately went to the train to investigate the state of our luggage. Upon entering the train, I spotted Vlodko and Yevka. Our group had survived this massive air attack! I thanked God for protecting our family. Surviving passengers re-boarded the train. Physically and emotionally exhausted by these traumatic events, we all managed to fall asleep.
Excerpt 2… (Forty nine years later)
Western Ukraine , Summer, 1993
As we were boarding the overnight train for Odesa, the conductor assigned to our coach was taking the last few puffs from a short, strong-smelling cigarette. I reached into my knapsack and pulled out a pack of Marlboros and asked him if he wanted to try one of my cigarettes. He was, of course, delighted and thanked me. I told him to keep the pack.
We were pleased to see our assigned seats were in a four-passenger sleeping compartment. Unfortunately, we had to share our compartment with two scruffy-looking men who spoke only Russian. They had an open bottle of vodka between them and had already dented it before we arrived. They were eating sausages, drinking and talking loudly. As we entered the compartment, they both eyed Chrystyna. (I wished she hadn’t worn such a pretty summer dress.) One of them said something I didn’t understand.
It was hot and stuffy in the compartment. We didn’t think we would get much sleep, and decided to spend most of our time on this overnight trip in the breezy corridors.
Just as the train was about to leave the station, the conductor entered our car. He surveyed the situation and asked the two men to step outside. A few minutes later, he returned and told us we didn’t look like we would enjoy the trip with those two men. He had placed them in another car so that we could have this compartment all to ourselves; we could lock our door and have complete privacy for the whole trip. He winked at me as he left the car.
“Incredible,” I thought. “All this for just one pack of cigarettes! Obviously, he’s looking for a much larger tip.” I was more than willing to provide one. I took out my wad of dollar bills but he waved me off, saying, “It’s O.K., you already tipped me.”
A good start to our Odesa odyssey, I thought.
About an hour into our trip, the train made a stop in Ternopil, the last stop in western Ukraine. The Ternopil train station building is a magnificent ornate structure, a mix of imperial Austrian, imperial Russian, and Soviet architecture.
I remembered stories my parents told about Ternopil. Ternopil was where they both went to school and where they met. They must have passed through this station dozens of times during the 1920s. I struggled to remember more of my parents’ stories. Their hometowns were just a few kilometers south of here. I hoped the train would turn south and pass by one of their villages. Unfortunately, it didn’t.
We were off again, and the train was picking up speed as it headed east. In less than an hour, we crossed the Zbruch River, the old boundary between Austrian and Soviet Ukraine. We were now well inside eastern Ukraine.
Sixty years earlier, Stalin’s famine took place here.
I remembered how agitated my parents became whenever they spoke of the famine. I remember the panachydas (memorial church services) and commemorative concerts held yearly when I was young, and how strongly Ukrainian immigrants in Canada and the United States felt about the famine and how occasionally people would break down in tears, remembering lost family and friends. My mother’s village, Ivanivka, in the easternmost part of Galicia, was located less than twenty kilometers from the Zbruch River. On the other side of this gently flowing river was Soviet-controlled Ukraine. My mother was a young woman during the early 1930s. Everyone knew the Soviets had created an artificial famine just across the river, but they also knew they could do nothing about it. People who lived on the western side of the Zbruch River didn’t fully believe a famine could actually be taking place, especially when the crops on the western side of the river were coming in normally.
Occasionally, someone would escape across the river from the east and would reveal what was happening there—stories of soldiers guarding grain supplies while children starved, of people being shot for trying to get food for their families. There was no drought, no unusual weather on the west side of the Zbruch.
As darkness fell, the conductor brought us two clean sheets and two pillows. A few minutes later, he brought two glasses of tea served in traditional Russian glass and silver goblets. I handed him two one-dollar bills. He thanked me, “No, but . . . maybe if you have another pack of cigarettes . . . ”
It was unbearably hot in the compartment. We couldn’t sleep, and we knew that no amount of cigarettes or other bribes would get us air-conditioning on this train. In search of relief, we left our hot compartment and joined a number of other passengers in the corridor. The windows were wide open, and a lovely soft breeze cooled us, if just a little.
A full moon illuminated the passing villages consisting of simple small houses with their tidy orchards and gardens. We could see huge expanses of wheat and sunflowers, orchards with apples, pears, and plums, and huge gardens planted right up against the tracks.
I asked myself, “How could there have been such a total famine in this fertile land?”
“How could millions have starved?”
And more importantly, I considered, “How could this have been kept secret from the rest of the world?”
It was well past midnight when we went back to our very much appreciated private compartment. The rhythm of the train put us to sleep in minutes. We were awakened by the morning sun about an hour before our arrival in Odesa. The landscape was a little different but we continued to pass fertile farmland and fields heavy with wheat and sunflowers.
It was only six in the morning but it was already very hot.
We pulled into Odesa right on time at 7:00 a.m.
Excerpt 3:
Stalin and Hitler
The two most brutal, murderous dictators of the twentieth century, or perhaps ever, Hitler and Stalin, found themselves in power at the same time, in capital cities separated by only a few hundred kilometers. Millions were murdered on their direct orders, and millions more died as a result of their brutal policies.
Between these two demons lay Poland, Ukraine, and the Baltics. Both dictators had designs on these lands. Hitler looked eastward to the rich farmlands of Ukraine to create Lebensraum, or “living space,” for his people; Stalin looked westward to increase the size of his empire. Though their politics were very different, and they mistrusted each other, in August 1939 they signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Germans received promises of much needed grain and oil imports, and the Russians got a few more nations to add to their empire. Both made promises that they would not attack each other. Ten days after this pact was signed, on September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland and precipitated World War II. Seventeen days later, the Bolsheviks invaded eastern Galicia, Polish-occupied western Ukraine. As a result, all the Ukrainian ethnic lands were now in Soviet hands.
The Polish occupation of Galicia during the twenty years between the wars was brutal and very unpopular among Ukrainians. With memories of the murderous Soviet policies in eastern Ukraine still fresh in people’s minds, however, the Russian invasion was even less welcome.
For the next nineteen months, eastern Galicia was subjected to bloody, senseless Bolshevik occupation. The Polish government structures were demolished. Roman Catholic and Uniate churches and priests faced persecution, resisters were jailed or summarily shot, and the Russian language was imposed on the Ukrainian population. Eastern Galicia became part of the Ukrainian SSR.
On June 22, 1941, Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. German armies invaded Soviet western Ukraine and crushed the Soviets. After a brief period of hope among Ukrainians, who believed that nothing could be worse than the Bolsheviks, the full extent of Nazi brutality became evident and Ukrainians faced yet another inhumanly brutal oppressor.
Three years of Nazi terror followed.
Hitler never had any intention of honoring the non-aggression pact his minister, Ribbentrop, signed in August 1939. He was simply too busy in the west and just needed a little more time before launching his attack to the east.
Stalin, on the other hand, was a fool to have believed Hitler—or perhaps it was hubris.
When the massive German armies crossed into Soviet-occupied Ukraine on June 22, 1941, Stalin was unprepared. He was so surprised that he didn’t react for several days. The Germans destroyed the Soviet defenses and Soviet aircraft and marched into eastern Galicia virtually unopposed.
When the Germans marched into Lviv, they were warmly welcomed by Ukrainians.
The simplistic analysis of this event was that Ukrainians were supporters of the Nazis and their policies. Lost in this line of thinking is that Ukrainians held a profound enmity towards their Soviet occupiers.
After months of Soviet rule in Galicia, and the mass murder of their brothers in eastern Ukraine in the forced famine-genocide just a few years earlier still fresh in their minds, most Ukrainians felt that anything would be better than the Bolsheviks.