Baba Babee Skazala

-Funding for this program was provided in part by the......Philadelphia. Turning personal financial goals into fantastic realities. Do more with your money. People helping people, since 1951.

Also by... Save big, support locally, bank confidently near and far. -We were between two evils. It was the communists and then the Nazis.

The war did not stop for us. -There were Ukrainians from Eastern Ukraine and Galicia and from Volyn. And we all with horses and wagons, we were moving west. We didn't know where we're gonna go, but we needed to flee away from the Russians.

-The Soviets -- their track record was atrocious. The German track record was atrocious, and they wind up, as it were, between hammer and anvil, between a rock and a hard place. -Some people may be ashamed or want to forget this whole story. To me, what's important to pass on to my children is their heritage, to know that they come from a nation that has a lot to be proud of.

-The Nazis and the Soviets sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop agreement. This is in August of 1939. The Germans attack Poland, and then the Soviets respond, and they occupy Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, or if you like, Eastern Poland. And, the rationale for the occupation is not that this is an aggression, but that they are liberating Ukrainians and Belarusians from Polish landlord rule and annexing them to the Soviet Union.

Gunfire

-When they crossed the border, Polish radio was saying, "Oh, they're coming across they're the border, they're coming," but we don't know if they're coming to help us or what. -As the Soviet Army occupied Western Ukraine, the vast majority of the soldiers were Ukrainians who spoke Ukrainian, sang Ukrainian songs. Alright, and for many Western Ukrainians, this was simply a shock. It was like, "Oh, my God, nashi." Right?

"Our soldiers are taking over." So there was a, you know, kind of, let's say, something between neutrality and welcoming. -My father was a priest in the village, and we had a wonderful children's life. We had a big garden, and we had fruit trees, and I was climbing all the way

laughs

to the top. It was free, free of worries. Now, when the Russians came, it was a different story. -When the Russians came, they thought that my family was kurkuli, which means we're the rich ones, so they decided to take everything away from us.

They put a notice out into the village that anybody can come and buy whatever they want from the house and around the whole estate. Initially, Soviets targeted Poles and Jews. Several hundred thousand are deported from Western Ukraine off to Siberia. By late '40, it's the Ukrainians' turn.

There's a crackdown on the church. There's a crackdown on academic institutions. There's a crackdown on cultural institutions. Right, and this, of course, is part and parcel of the imposition of a Stalinist order.

-It was your duty under the Communist system to tell the government about your neighbor. So you spied on me, I spied on somebody else, somebody else spied on you, and they kept records. Furthermore, they would reward some of the people who'd tell on their neighbors and severely punish the, quote, "guilty ones." And, that system created tremendous fear. -As a young girl, I cannot forget it.

In the morning, when I went to school, I could see trucks loaded with people crying because they were sent to Siberia. So then, after school, I used to go to a market and look for our villagers, and ask them if my parents are still home or maybe they are sent to Siberia and I was left orphaned. -When the Soviets came to the village, within a week, a member of the village council came to my father and said, "I saw a list of people from the village that are supposed to be arrested, and you were on that list." As soon as he heard that, they started making plans to escape. Within about a week, they took their horses and wagon and left.

When we came to the river right on the border, they found out exactly when the border patrol were changing. So they got into the river, they looked back, and the new patrol was approaching.

Indistinct radio chatter

And one of the horses started to lie down.

Radio chatter continues

Voice breaking

Now, I always get emotional when I... talk about that, because it was like a miracle. She had a Blessed Virgin Mary icon, and she pulled it out, and she said, "Please help us!" And she said like a miracle, that horse got up and started going. -Because my father had been a political prisoner, and because he was working as a journalist, he was almost certainly targeted for execution, certainly arrest, and so my mother and father, they fled Lviv and ended up in what was then Nazi-occupied Poland.

They got a letter from my mother's sister who was in Soviet-occupied Ukraine. And she writes, "Life has never been this good. We're just so pleased that the Soviets have come, and everything is so great. I think I can only compare it to the great time we had, remember that wedding on June whatever, 1938?" Well, that was the night my grandfather died.

And, so this was her way of saying, you know, "God, it's awful. This is hell." -All of a sudden, we hear the shooting on both sides of the river. And on one side are the Ukrainian underground. On the other side, they're Russians because they're withdrawing.

And my father says "Let's run quickly under the bridge, you know, and hide under the bridge." And we hear the bullets coming down --

mimic bullets whizzing

Gunshots

I was petrified. And my father says, "We probably will die, but it's okay because we're gonna be together." I truly thought that that was the end of my life. And then, would you believe, all of a sudden comes a German Jeep.

Gunfire

-By the time the Germans attack, I'd say the vast majority of Western Ukrainians have now developed a very strong antipathy to Soviet rule. That's then enhanced by the fact that, as the Germans attacked, the Soviets had something like 30,000 political prisoners in West Ukrainian prisons. In that week between June 22nd and roughly July 1st, they systematically kill the vast majority of those prisoners. -That's our factory in Staryi Sambir.

That's my brother, oldest brother.

Men shouting

Shouting continues

-Not only do they kill them, in many instances, they first torture them in bestial fashion, doing things like poking out their eyes, cutting off their breasts if they were women, cutting off their genitals if they're men. I mean, sort of really awful things taking place. And then they kill them. As the Soviets withdraw, at each step of the way, the Ukrainians open up the prisons in order to free their friends, and they come upon heaps and heaps of rotting bodies.

-

Crying

-An uncle of mine was one of the victims, and my mother related to me that when the prison was opened, they found no prisoners in the prison. And then someone started stomping around in the backyard, and they noticed that the ground was soft. And they started digging up the ground, and they realized that they came upon a mass grave. And she was there.

She was actually a witness to this. And they were taking out the bodies one by one, and his wasn't there. And she thought that maybe he escaped, or maybe they were evacuated, right? In any case, he seems to have survived.

And before leaving, she decided to take one last look into this huge ditch, and she saw a hand sticking out of the mud. And they dug out the body, and it was him. -Oh, here. Here's my parents when I went to First Holy Communion, the day before he was murdered.

He's right here, my mom, and this is me. "At the end of June 1941, the female witness talked to two political prisoners who had managed to escape alive out of the town prison. The witness SD estimates the number of persons who were murdered at 105 tortures and executions which were carried out on June 22nd and June 23rd. Usually took place in the cellars.

Many of the victims were scalded with boiling water. Of those who were murdered, the bodies of Dr. Roman Kulchytsky, a lawyer of the town, and Andrij Bodnar -- my father -- both inhabitants of the town, were identified." So, this is the story of the -- the whole story.

Group chanting

-So the entrance of the Germans coincides precisely with the uncovering of these atrocities. And if there were any doubts on the part of Ukrainians that the Soviets were evil, this dissipated those doubts altogether. So there was a welcoming. Germans come in, and people see them as liberators.

Crowd cheering

-I remember when the Germans came, people were happy because they didn't know who the Germans were. I know that my parents thought that they were cultured people. They expected something good from them. And they knew what they had lived through.

that they had lived through 1933 famine. -It's called the Holodomor, when Stalin, through forced collectivization, created a famine in Ukraine, in a land that is the breadbasket of Europe. I mean, this was not due to drought or any kind of natural disasters. It was man-made famine.

-My grandfather died of starvation. He was 57. My uncle was 19. So we knew what the communists were, and we did not know what the Nazis were.

But we found out very soon what the Germans were. -The Germans had brought about the Enlightenment. They were considered to be the most cultured, most civilized nation of Europe. No one was expecting them to bring Auschwitz, as it were, into Ukraine.

-If you read "Mein Kampf," Hitler tells exactly what he's gonna do. He said he's gonna reunite the German-speaking territories, which he did. Second, get rid of the Jews, which is what he tried to do with the Holocaust. Three, he said he's gonna annex what he called Lebensraum.

Lebensraum is living space, and Lebensraum -- Ukraine. And why Ukraine? Because of its food production. The people who lived there, the Ukrainians and other Slavs, he called them Untermenschen -- subhuman.

They would become the slaves to the Germans. As the German nation grew, Germans would then become inhabitants of Lebensraum, at which point, the Untermenschen, the subhumans -- they would be exterminated. -Jews were made to wear the yellow star of David during the Nazi era. Ukrainians and other Slavs wore this patch, "OST," East.

My mother's letters to my father -- they survived. She lived through Nazi occupation. She called them smarkachee, snot-nosed Nazi soldiers. She witnessed massacres and people being hanged......the round-up and deportation of Jews......and young people forced to work in the Nazi economy, either in factories, coal mines, farms.

-I remember one boy, he was from Ukraine, and he got sick on the field. And that man, that boss, that was behind him with the cane, and he says, "You better get up and go to work or die." -Because of our connection with the Ukrainian National Movement, somebody, who probably, you know, unfortunately, there are always some people that tell Gestapo, and one night the Gestapo arrested my father, my cousin, and myself. This was the last time I saw my father. We were transported to Ravensbruck.

Ravensbruck was the largest concentration camp of women. There were 18,000 women from all over the Europe. And on the other side, there was a crematorium, where they were burning night and day all the prisoners that they were dead. And you had that smell constantly.

-Finally, the time is coming that the Germans are beginning to lose on the Eastern Front. And as they were losing the war, we began to worry what was going to happen when the Russians come back. We decided that we're not gonna make it the second time around. And we decided to flee.

-This is my mother and father, their wedding day. A lot of young men, and especially the young intelligentsia, joined the German army to fight against the Russians, but only on the Eastern Front. They would never fight against the Allies. And, unfortunately, they were betrayed by the Germans because once the battle began, the Germans retreated, and they were left to fight the Russians alone.

Consequently, a vast majority of these people perished, my father being one of them. We never saw him again. -By the spring of 1944, the front had moved past where my mother was. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army, UPA, were hiding in caves around her village.

And she was forced, along with the other villagers, to witness young men being hanged by the Red Army, and this was very traumatic for her. -In 1944, we decided to move west, and we knew that my father would have been very under scrutiny for his patriotic work in Ukraine. One morning, we woke up. An officer visited the house, and he gave me a gun and said, "Malchik," little boy, "who shall we shoot today?

Germans or Russians?" And, naturally my parents froze because our family was not only against Germans, but were vehemently against the communists. So, they were concerned what I was going to say. And I said, "We are going to shoot the Germans. The Russians are our friends." He took the gun away from me, and he said, "Okay, soldiers, we're leaving.

Everything is fine." -The front was only 6 kilometers, which is, what, 4 miles away? We didn't have a car. And, so my father loaded the wagon driven by horses. And you should see the road.

The road was packed with people, children, and we were almost walking because our wagons were loaded with whatever parents could remember to put on. -We were leaving the city in the middle of the night, or going on towards morning, and my mother's brother and sister, I guess, were there. And they were trying to take my little coat off. They said, "No, what are you going to do with two little children?" My sister was literally a few months old.

And, "We'll keep Areta at home. She'll be fine. And once the war is over, once this fighting is over, you'll be reunited." At the last minute, my mother just took my little coat, put it back on me, and she says, "No, where I go, my children go with me." -I was left behind with my mother to take -- look after the property, the home, because everyone believed that in a few years, or whenever, the war would blow over and they would come back. No one would believe that they kept going on and on west.

It took some months, but the underground soldiers helped my mother go through the mountains. We were saved really by whatever my mother saved of the gold jewelry, gold pieces. She traded that for our freedom. So they would pick up the fence, you would crawl to the other side of the border, and they were saying, "If they catch you, we didn't see you." -My mother did a terrific job shielding us from all these horrors of bombing, the tortures, or anything that people were going through, by telling us stories of Hans Christian Anderson.

I mean, it was like stories of "A Thousand and One Nights" and also reading some of the little Ukrainian stories that she brought with me. And I still have to this day -- I still have those couple books. All of this, I believe, and my mother did firmly too believe, that it was all in God's hands. If you were not a believer, you certainly became a believer at that time.

Train chugging

Weapon fire

-Again, the Russian front was approaching very close, so our parents -- they had to pick the most important things that they could carry with them to go to the station. I remember my mother had a large pillow case full of dry bread, and she had a beautiful fur coat. When we got to the railroad station, it was too heavy for her.

Voice breaking

She said, "Well, the bread is most important." So she put the fur coat on a lamp post and just left it there. But she took that dry bread with us. And, believe it or not, we lived on that dry bread for probably a week because we had no food at all except for that dry bread. The Soviet planes started bombing, so we all went into the ditches next to the railroad tracks to protect ourselves, and people got killed right -- very nearby.

Then the train started moving. People started screaming, you know, "Run to the train!" So we all run to the train. -We were washed... and stripped.

We were in a camp that had barbed wire, that had soldiers or guards guarding us with guns.

Exhales

We were starved.

Siren wailing

And, uh, we were slaves. -The number of people who had fled the communists were probably close to about 25 million. Of that number, something like 13 to 14 million were Germans who were fleeing from Eastern Europe and parts of the former German state. Then there were roughly 13, 14, possibly more, millions of East Europeans, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, Balts, Poles, and many others who were also fleeing westward.

So you're talking about, you know, let's say anywhere between 20 and 30 million people who suddenly show up in Germany in 1945, '46. I mean, this is an astoundingly large number. And not only do they show up in Germany, but it's a country in ruins. -I was released by the end of the war.

And at that time, well, my cousin was in Ravensbruck, too. And she was, and then we found my mother and my aunt, and we start living

chuckles

as good as we could, you know. -They said, "Roust, roust, leave, leave!" and we left. And we didn't know where to go. Just keep walking.

No food. Nothing. We were sleeping in ditches. And then the Americans came.

My sister always called American soldiers our saviors. She just didn't call American soldiers, no soldiers, just saviors. -We were taken care of. You didn't have much of anything, but from day to day, you were fed, you got some clothing -- nothing fancy, hand-me-downs from Americans, so forth -- but you were taken care of.

-See, this is life in DP camps. We were living in barracks like this. The walls were just separated by sheets or blankets. Think common bathrooms, you know, showers and things, so there was hardly any privacy.

-Even though we didn't have very much to eat, our life was so full. It was even better for me than in our country. We were sorry to leave our country, and here we had everything -- churches, schooling, even opera. It was organized, and they traveled from one camp to the other and performed opera.

-Camps did something for us that we really needed, the young people particularly needed, because we were able to go to school, we had SUM, the Ukrainian Youth Organization, we had Plast, the Boy Scout group. -

Singing in Ukrainian

-That was the best part of my childhood, was in Displaced Persons camps. For me, it was home because I didn't -- the home that I remembered was horrible! -In a way, every little camp was a mini Ukraine. And, it's within this mini-Ukraine context that you establish friendships, contacts, you build institutions, you build organizations, right?

You're able to practice your language. There's no one to tell you you can't speak Ukrainian. You're able to practice your culture. There's no one to tell you that you can't do that.

Constantly attending lectures, getting involved in fistfights

chuckles

over politics. They were publishing magazines. They were publishing newspapers. Tons of organizations, tons of activities, from the most political to the least political.

Birds chirping

-These are some of the publications from the camps. "Father Frost is Fleeing." George Orwell's "Animal Farm." Camp Leader, Clay. And so you can see these are people of considerable accomplishment, you know, who are in limbo. And what do they do?

They made the best of their situation. So I think the key here to understanding what was going on in those three, four, five years is that Ukrainians were being forced and trained to be Ukrainians. These camps were a crucible of Ukrainian culture in civil society. To the credit of the United Nations, the United States, these folks were well taken care of, with the exception of those that were forced to go back in Operation Keelhaul.

-For the first year or so, Russians were allowed to roam the west American zone as they wanted. And they would say that all of the people here are traitors, they are Nazi collaborators, we want them back. -Everybody has memories of some kind of massacres, of some kind of Soviet atrocities, of Soviet repression. So when they wind up in the camps and the Soviets are sending in commissions to repatriate, as it were, former citizens, I mean, this is, of course, a source of enormous fear and anxiety.

And these weren't just Ukrainians. I mean, they were also Russians, Belarusians, and many others. -They were putting the young men and closing the doors. Well, there were some soldiers guarding the place with rifles.

The ladies got very upset, and they started to move against these soldiers. And my mother was one of those ladies that went, and she took the rifle away from the soldiers. My father and I, you know, we became petrified, not knowing what was going to happen to our mother. Luckily, there was an interpreter that came in and tried to explain what the problem was, what was happening,, and finally, the soldiers said, "Well, you know, I don't know.

Something is -- maybe we should find out what is what." -That operation was eventually suspended when there was an increasing awareness of just how brutal the Soviets were, that there was little difference, if any, between them and the Nazis in terms of how they treated people. -Everybody was desperate to get out of Germany. My parents were convinced, like many thousands of other parents, that our survival opportunity is to get out of Europe, anywhere. -People were going to South America.

People were going to Canada, to Australia. My father wanted to go to America. -The United States had an open-door policy at the beginning of the 20th century. Millions upon millions came to the U.S.

And then in the 1920s, I mean, those quotas were significantly reduced. Borders were not exactly closed, but were certainly made more impermeable. And as you may also know, I mean, the U.S. policy towards Jews in Europe was also pretty much a closed-door policy.

-Many people called, said that these displaced persons were degenerates, criminals, who would make no positive contribution to America and, in fact, that the Soviets would use this as a way of infiltrating Communist spies, Communist agents. Obvious echoes to today. There was a great deal of support from the already existing ethnic communities in the United States who were lobbying Congress, who were looking for sponsors for people who were coming here, people who need jobs and homes. -When we finally found a sponsor in America, somebody who would sign papers for you, that they would guarantee you work, they would, you know, accept you and so forth.

We went on General Blatchford, big Army ship, my sister, her husband, and my mother and father and I. Took seven days to cross the Atlantic. -It was something else to remember because you were getting wonderful food. But the only thing is, you couldn't eat

chuckling

because of the ship that was moving around. Everybody was getting sick from being there. -We come in into New York Harbor, and you see the Statue of Liberty. And you see the city all lit up.

Chuckling

I'd never seen that much light during the war. The cars are driving and so on, and we're standing there, and I'm saying to my father, I said, "Is this real, or is this propaganda?" Because we grew up with the propaganda, you know. "Or is this propaganda to show us how great it is in America?" And, my father says, "It's real." -For me, when I came to United States, I was -- first of all, it was not very pleasant impression. I went through -- my first stop was in Louisiana somewhere, New Orleans.

And when I saw those, "For Colored Only," or we stopped, wanted to have the beer where the Black people were drinking, and they said, "No, you cannot have it." And, for me, it was almost like I'm back in Nazi Germany, I mean, believe it or not. And, I was sort of, "Well, why did I come here?" And for all the time, I was somewhat planning that I would go to Ukraine, that that's the place where I supposed to be. Well, I went, but I was coming back here because there was another reason for me to come here -- she's the reason. -We came in through New York, like everyone else, through Ellis Island, and then we went directly to Cleveland.

This is when we were coming to the United States, our arrival in the United States. And that's my mother. Mother had some friends that already settled in Cleveland. So by the time we came, they already bought a house, and they gave us their apartment that they rented, which was right across from the Ukrainian Catholic Church on 7th Street.

Many of these first immigrants, they were strictly an economic immigration. The immigration after World War II, they left for political reasons, and for them, there was no way to go back. Consequently, they brought all the cultural stuff with them.

Speaks Ukrainian

UVAN. They formed their own professional organizations, and, of course, they started Plast again. And the same thing was happening in cities across the United States. -We developed a family feeling for one another.

You know, I still have friends that are still alive from camp. When I see them, it's like seeing a brother or seeing a sister, and not somebody that I know, not another acquaintance, not a friend, but it's really a family type of relationship. -I remember my father would say, "Ah, I know him, I know him, I know him, I know him." Someone in Detroit, someone in Chicago, someone in Toronto, someone in Philadelphia, DC. And, you know, "How do you know these people?" But the answer is very simple.

For four years, they bunked together, they went out drinking together, they went on dates together, they were studying together, they were doing politics together. You suddenly have this entire network of friends, and after a number of years, they all move around, but you still know them. And that's one of the reasons for the vitality of the diaspora in the 1950s, '60s, because the vitality of the camps was essentially transferred to the vitality of the U.S. -The community made sure that everybody stayed in touch.

You did go to festivals. You did go to concerts. They would invite groups to come and perform. You know, always went caroling, always learning songs.

Also camping, Sviato Vesny, Ivana Kupala, where we were doing wreaths and throwing them in the water and then wherever your wreath ended up, that's who you were going to marry. So all these traditions, you know. -After I married and we had kids, we decided that our home is Ukrainian home. And I thought that the only thing that I can do for my country that was occupied by Russians, that I can keep Ukrainian home, teach my children Ukrainian, and teach them to be proud to be Ukrainians, and not to be afraid to say who they are and what they are.

-For all these years, we have really, you know, had here at home all the holidays, teaching the children to do the eggs, then the Easter baskets that go to church to be blessed. Whatever we could do to pass on the culture of Ukraine and make the distinction that you are not Russian, you are Ukrainian. -You know, people talk about the United States being a melting pot. I believe the United States is a garden of flowers, various varieties, but all these flowers with their colors, and they bring beauty to this country because the country is intellectually mature enough to understand that this is not in conflict with being an American.

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Singing in Ukrainian

-Funding for this program was provided in part by the......Philadelphia. Turning personal financial goals into fantastic realities. Do more with your money. People helping people, since 1951.

Also by... Save big, support locally, bank confidently near and far.