Taras Kuzio’s Blog

Seeking The Past

When we are young most of us seek to escape our parents clutches and find freedom. This is at least true for myself who voluntarily left home at 18. But, what if one was involuntarily taken at the age of 15 to never again see one’s parents and to wait half a century before seeing one’s sister and brother? This is the difference between myself and my father who was taken to Germany as a Nazi slave labourer in 1942 and never to return home again until exactly 50 years later in 1992. I left home to go to University and, unlike Ukrainian Ministers of Justice, completed courses and received qualifications.

When my father returned to Ukraine in 1992 after a half century absence he did so then because he had not wanted to travel to Ukraine when it was a part of the USSR. British Ukrainians had little contact with Ukraine in the Soviet era. He has since returned on many occasions to Ukraine to visit relatives in western Ukraine (Sambir), the city of Kyiv and to take a river cruise along the Dnipro.

My father was part of a large majority of Ukrainians in Britain who never took out British citizenship, although they were entitled to it after decades living in the country. In 1997 the Ukrainian law on citizenship was changed to allow Ukrainians living abroad without citizenship to apply for Ukrainian citizenship. Applicants had to prove their birth in Ukraine but no longer had to live five years in Ukraine as a residency requirement. A year later my father obtained his first passport, a Ukrainian one, and in 1999 voted for the first time in his life in the presidential elections. The choice was easy in round one was easy but he found it very difficult to vote for Leonid Kuchma in round 2.

The latest foreign trip was both very different and at the same time inter-connected with earlier ones. It is a truism that one leaves the nest when one is young (there are exceptions among men I know who merely exchange mothers for wives) and return to one’s roots when one is older. In July Jozef Kuzio, my father, his Italian wife, Ersilia Toselli-Kuzio, and one of my brothers, Ivan (the other brother Roman works in Australia), did what Americans would call a “road trip” through northern Germany. The purpose was to retrace my fathers life from 1942, when he was brought to Germany, until 1948, when he emigrated to Britain.
Taking any kind of “holiday” with one’s family is not an easy affair, as many of you will know. Especially after a thirty year gap since the last family holiday when we were children. It can be nearly as stressful as having all of your family visit you at Xmas or to have relatives visit you from Ukraine.

My father had talked for many years about returning to Germany to retrace his World War II footsteps. But, this had only become possible after 1990 when the GDR collapsed and German reunification followed. Most of the places my father had worked in were located in what became the GDR and so he remembers the early Soviet occupation of eastern Germany.
The flight to Berlin took off from Manchester, a city with one of the largest concentrations of Ukrainians in Britain. Berlin was simply a staging post for the “road trip” as flights to Hamburg, where my father had awaited his emigration to Britain, were not available from Manchester.

Berlin was both a tourist leg of the “road trip” as well as a political lesson. As we walked the streets of Berlin my father constantly asked if we were in the “East” or in the “West”. We visited what was left of the Berlin Wall but commentators stated that three times more of the Wall had been sold than had actually been built in 1961 (I remember buying pieces of the “Wall” in 1991 from Polish vendors in Berlin). The highlights of the visit to Berlin were Checkpoint Charlie, the former US-Soviet border crossing point in Berlin, the museum next to the former crossing, the Brandenburg Gate, the new German parliament and the former GDR secret police (Stasi) headquarters. It was hard to believe that the billboards showing the history of Berlin and superpower confrontation from the 1940s to 1980s happened at Checkpoint Charlie as today it looks like any other up-market shopping area of Berlin. The GDR was the first to experience an uprising against communism in 1953, followed by Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and finally in the USSR.

The museum next to Checkpoint Charlie was a fascinating example of how a large number of Germans had come to equate Nazism and Communism as twin totalitarian evils. Many Western academics still refuse to accept that Communism can be equated with Nazism. The equating of the twin evils is important because Germans are still the only country of the Axis powers that also included Austria, Italy and Japan who have genuinely come to terms with Nazi crimes. My own father has received a German pension for three decades.

The museum’s exposes described and showed numerous ways in which Germans sought to flee to what they believed was “freedom” in the West. Many died trying to flee the GDR. The museum’s exposes covered other country’s besides the GDR. One room in the museum was devoted to totalitarian crimes in Ukraine, including material on the 1933 terror-famine, the great terror and repression of dissidents. This was a sign of progress: in 1983 the Ukrainian diaspora commemorated the 50th anniversary of the famine at a time when the Western public was still skeptical. It took until 1990 for the Communist Party in Ukraine to admit that the famine had taken place and 17 more years for the Ukrainian parliament to vote a law on the famine.

The law was not supported in parliament by the Communist Party and the Party of Regions. It is not surprising that the Communists would not support such a law but why would oligarchs in the Party of Regions feel threatened by a law dealing with an event that took place 7 decades ago. Ukraine still has an ambivalent attitude to the Soviet past, as does all of the CIS. Vladimir Lenin statues are still to be found throughout Ukraine (I recall receiving a video tape in 1990 of the first removal of a Lenin statue in the former USSR in the Galician town of Stryi).

Can a country that still has numerous statues to the first Soviet leader, including one in Kyiv, ever really hope to join the EU? Ukraine resembles a country where one half seeks to expunge the Soviet past while another continues to have nostalgic views of it.

Ukraine and the CIS are different to Europe in not expunging the Soviet past. But they nevertheless remain similar in another way. There remains an intellectual reluctance to equate Nazism and Communism as twin evils: only Nazi parties are banned in countries such as Germany and Austria whereas extreme left parties are allowed to function. In Ukraine the Communist Party was a virtual opposition that proved useful to Kuchma in the 1999 elections, in helping to remove the Viktor Yushchenko government in 2001 and in supporting Yanukovych and the Party of Regions in 2004 and 2006.

In the first twenty years of his life from 1926-1945 my father, just like many Ukrainians, experienced Polish autocracy followed by the twin evils of Nazism and Communism, first in 1939 with the arrival of the Soviet “liberators” and two years later with the Nazi invasion followed by his deportation to Germany. For that generation there is no debate as to Nazism and Communism being simply the flip sides of the same totalitarian coin.

The first stop of the “road trip” outside Berlin in the former GDR was to the small village of Blankesee between the towns of Neustrelitz and Neubrandenburg where my father worked on the railways from October 1943-June 1944. The train station still took passengers but the station building itself was boarded up long ago. Blankesee held a large Soviet prison camp when my father arrived in 1943.

The second stop was the village of Pasin near Butzow. Here my father worked for one year between September 1942-October 1943 on a farm after a brief spell in a transit camp. My father recalls that the farmer was a devout Nazi and that therefore his relationship to the “guest (slave) labourers” from Ukraine and elsewhere was poor. There was no sign of the Fust family farm remaining in the small village. The family, we were told in the hotel we stayed in, had died out a few decades ago.

In June 1944 my father ran away and ended up in another farm in a small hamlet of Pipperdorf near Boizenburg where he stayed until the end of the war. Here the farmer, Herman Zalman, was despising of the Nazis. My father recalled that the farmer said “Shit to Hitler!” The farmer was very kind to my father and treated him like a son.

As would become evident from the “road trip”, Germans – just like all nationalities – came in different types. National stereotypes that castigated all members of one group are common even in the West (British comedy shows are full of it). My father experienced different types of Germans. One farmer had been a chauvinist while another had been kind. A third German had saved him from drowning in a lake near Moelln.

The hamlet of Pipperdorf proved very difficult to find and when we asked local people they had never heard of it. Road signs did not show its location. In the Boizenburg town museum near to the village the curators explained that the Soviet occupation force had destroyed the village as it lay in the no mans land between the Soviet border and the border of the British occupation zone. After the loss of their farm, undoubtedly without any compensation, the Zalman family had been forced to move away and therefore we could not find their descendants to thank them for their kindness to my father.

A local villager took us to the place where the hamlet had once stood that had included the farm where my father had worked from 1944-1945. Nothing remained of the hamlet. The Soviets, just like the Nazis, knew how to totally destroy villages. The villager showed us where the crossing was from the Soviet East to the British West immediately behind the former village. This is where my father, then at the age of 18, crawled through the forest and fields attempting to not set off the Soviet alarms attached to wires. The former Soviet watchtowers had been left standing as a reminder that this was once a border between two occupation zones.
My father had successfully escaped across this crossing but had returned to illegal smuggle across the border a young woman and child after her mother, who waited in Hamburg, had pleaded with him. He successfully smuggled her across the border but on another occasion when he crossed the border at night he set off the alarms and Soviet troops captured my father. He remembers how the Soviet troops looked bedraggled with torn uniforms and mismatched boots.

My father was placed in the beautiful town hall in Boizenburg along with other captives waiting interrogation. He pretended to be “Polish” as Ukrainians were separated from other captives and most were either deported to the USSR while some were executed. Luckily thanks to Russian love of vodka my father escaped along with a German U-Boat captain. At one entrance into the town hall Soviet troops had begun an evening of drunken merriment with local girls and lots of vodka. The guards at the back door did not want to feel left out and so they joined them. The U-boat commander and my father made a dash for freedom and both successfully escaped. Nazdorovia! This saved him from a possible deportation to Siberia.

The former crossing point between East and West that my father had crawled through was eerie and calm. On the Western side of the one kilometer no mans land another village remained standing. Unlike the Soviet policy of destroying villages near borders this one was allowed to remain by the British. The only visible signs of the former occupation were a border post painted in French colours (perhaps a French unit had been stationed there?). There was also a very straight, concrete road obviously built for quick movement along the former West:East border for the British military in case of a war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact.
The contrast between the villages on both sides of this former border was striking. 17 years after the collapse of the GDR there was still a contrast between the poorer looking former GDR village and the prosperous village on the Western side. In former GDR villages it was obvious which buildings were built prior to the war and the ugly ones built under communism. The latter buildings resembled the typical ugly Soviet constructions also built in the USSR in the Khrushchev and Brezhnev eras.

In a number of places I asked former GDR citizens, such as a Museum curator and hotel owner, if life was now better after reunification. The German film “Goodbye Lenin” (http://www.sonyclassics.com/goodbye/) portrayed this mix of sadness and humour as eastern Germans adapted to life in the West. Their replies were always “Sometimes yes, sometimes no”. Nostalgia for some aspects of the GDR remains, particularly – as in Ukraine in the 1990s – for the economic stability of life under communism. The Ukrainian Academy of Sciences had asked each year since 1994 which group was most influential in Ukrainian society to which most Ukrainians replied ‘organised crime and the mafia’ (http://www.dif.org.ua/ua/publ/322/k3.vis).

50 years of communism had made eastern Germans different to western Germans even though they were still Germans. This is little different to Ukraine. In 1989-1991 the Ukrainian diaspora in Britain, which is mainly from western Ukraine, met a different western Ukraine that had, like in the GDR, lived under communism for 50 years. The pre-war and post war Galicians were both Galicians but at the same time they were different. We saw this when my father met his sister and brother in 1989-1990 for the first time since 1942. Nevertheless, Galicians retained a sufficient degree of national identity to mobilise in sufficiently large numbers for the orange revolution. Without western Ukrainians would the orange revolution have been such a success?

After the war, my father spent time as a DP (Displaced Person) in camps in Moelln, Lubeck and finally near Hamburg before emigrating to Britain. He had thought of Australia or Canada but settled on Britain. There were no signs of the buildings where my father had lived in these three locations. In Lubeck I asked in the Tourist Information office for the “Churchill Barracks” (as this had been the British occupation zone after 1945) but I received a blank look on the person’s face. In Hamburg the restaurant of the lady whose daughter and child my father had smuggled across the border had long ago disappeared.

Tens of thousands of Ukrainians, like my father settled in the West after the war. Few voluntarily wanted to return to Stalin’s USSR. They created Ukrainian diaspora organisations that endured until the 1990s although the question is whether they will continue to exist after that generation is gone. A visit to the annual zdvykh of the Association of Ukrainian Youth near Derby last weekend made me doubt that these Ukrainian diaspora organisations would survive.

These organisations and the community life sustained them in their difficult lives settling in new countries without financial or other resources. My father said he came to Britain with only ten fingers. Now there is a large new influx of Ukrainians. Some arrive, like my father, with few resources but a dedication to improve their lives. They are likely to eventually return to Ukraine. Others arrive with capitol accumulated in Ukraine and drive their children to Ukrainian Saturday school in London in expensive cars. These are unlikely to return to Ukraine. In Hamburg we also saw evidence of Ukraine coming to Germany. A recent emigrant played the cimbala on the street while a Ukrainian flag flew on the streets of Hamburg.

In the last two decades my father’s relatives have visited him in Britain and he has visited them in Ukraine. He has also visited the locations in Germany where his life was so dramatic in World War II and after. He had finally returned to his roots.