When the Best People are in Prison

By Oksana Bashuk Hepburn

Bereza Kartuzka, Yurij Luhovy’s film about political prisoners during Western Ukraine’s Polish regime between the two World Wars teaches a universal message: resistance to tyranny is eternal.

Many young faces on the screen are familiar.  Winnipeg’s Olha Bilas-Senchuk is crying.  Her uncle and brother were hanged by the harsh regime.  Volodymyr Makar, Homin Ukrainy’s editor, Theodor Baran, whose son Emil was a strong Canadian presence in post-independent Ukraine, and Dmytro Majiwskyj.  Shot by the enemy, his widow married Evhen Shtendera of “Litopys UPA” fame and taught hundreds of children in Ukrainian-language schools.  Yaroslav Preyzhlak’s commentary is invaluable as was his eulogy at tato’s - my father’s funeral in 1995.  Pani Kobzir, godmother to Kvitka Haywas, recalls the horrid conditions in Bereza Kartuzka Prison - rotting, inadequate food, overcrowding, and a toilet for all on whistle command: finished or not.

The Bereza political prisoners went on to become Ukraine’s leaders:  Taras Chuprynka founded an army; Stepan Bandera led an independence movement.   They were the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists’ (OUN) freedom fighters against occupational forces - Polish, Nazi and Soviet - and later, the backbone of Ukraine’s diaspora.

In Bereza , most of the incarcerated were students, held without trial for resisting Poland’s de-Ukrainization which led to the assassination of Polish Interior Minister Bronislav Pieracki, the minister charged with Polonization.

Here’s what happened.  The Treaty of Versailles legitimized new nations springing from the collapsed Austro-Hungarian Empire.  The Entente was deferential to Russia and its influence in Eastern Europe. Ukraine was sliced up with Western Ukraine handed into Poland’s “care” for 25 years.  But the devious Poles decided to Polonize the population and keep Ukraine.  Chauvinism, ethnic hatred, and violence reigned.  Ukrainians were kept out of businesses, professions and institutions of higher learning.  Speaking Ukrainian constituted insubordination to the Polish regime.  In response, popular resistance spread, directed by OUN.  The Poles retaliated with an aggressive anti-Ukrainian “pacification policy” exacerbating the situation further.  Beatings, widespread arrests, prisons like Bereza, and murders ultimately precipitated national resistance via the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA).

And there he is on the screen - Petro Bashuk, my father - rounded-up, incarcerated.  And real-life history changes like channel surfing.  Click!  It’s 1939.  Stalin collaborates with Hitler to invade Poland which includes Western Ukraine.  Will it, finally, be rid of the insufferable Poles?  Click!  The new invaders are as brutal as the Poles.  Click!  Both Nazis and Soviets are out for a few months.  Click!  It’s 1941.  The Germans return, this time without the Russians.  Click!  Ukraine captures the moment and declares independence!  Click!  The Gestapo arrests OUN’s leadership.  Several hundred, including Stepan Bandera, are herded into Nazi concentration camps.  My father spends much of the War period in the death mills of Auschwitz.

Click! The War ends but in Ukraine the Soviets are crucifying the people. The Allies, however, have clicked to “off”: There is little compassion for victims of their Soviet comrades.  A new don’t-ask don’t-tell policy allows the Kremlin to commit, then whitewash, atrocities for nearly fifty years.

Foreign occupiers - Poland, Germany, and Russia - of Ukraine’s interwar period are at it again.  Russia aims to control Ukraine, albeit through Ukraine’s own government.  Poland protests UPA and OUN’s resistance to atrocities by currying strategic alliances with Russia.  To placate Moscow, Germany undermines Ukraine’s NATO bid, energy advantages and persecutes a stateless John Demianiuk for alleged war crimes while exonerating its own War elite.

Producer/director Luhovy’s film is universal – the struggle for national self-determination.  It proclaims the inability of despots to suppress this human right enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

My father was incarcerated in Bereza, then Brigitky Prison in Lviv from which he, Yaroslav Haywas (Kvitka’s father) and Petro Kaniuka escaped, creating a national sensation and firing the spirit of resistance.  A bas-relief of three falcons breaking out from behind bars was installed in that infamous place at 33 Horodotska Street.  Please say Slava Ukraini! Herojam Slava! for freedom everywhere, should you visit.

Brigitky was as foul as Bereza and as brutal as Auschwitz: occupational forces are merciless!  Yet tato reflected, “Katset - incarceration was a university.”  In those institutions of “higher learning” he developed friends for life.  The katsetnyky were like no other fraternity.  Nelson Mandela, undoubtedly, knew this bond as did the dissidents of the Soviet regime - Levko Lukianenko, Evhen Sverstiuk and others inspired by and imprisoned for a cause.

How reprehensible that today, Ukraine’s freedom fighters are pilloried with the full might of Russia’s government assisted by “useful idiots”- Stalin’s moniker for the regime’s Western apologists.

Make no mistake, katsetnyky - from Bereza to the Gulag - are in the best of democratic traditions: upholding liberty, equality, fraternity; answering the call Give me liberty or give me death; or Zdobudesh ukrajins’ku derzhavu abo umresh v borot’bi za neji – You will deliver a Free Ukrainian State or die fighting for this end.  Fights from oppression are generally brutal and its freedom fighters are heroes, but not if the oppressor maintains power.  Then, it’s open season on them and theirs.

Around the time portrayed by Bereza Kartuzka, cousin Bohdan Bashuk, 18, was imprisoned.  He was tortured then dragged-half dead through the village as a warning: Banderivtsi bandits will be exterminated! And publicly hanged.  For what crime?  My mother was beaten by the Gestapo and incarcerated for failing to disclose my father’s whereabouts: she had no idea where he was hiding!  I was virtually orphaned. Entire villages were ethnically cleansed, forcibly removed to northern Poland, Soviet Ukraine or Siberia.  Or executed.  From 1919 to 1991’s independence, the human toll in Ukraine is about 20 million unnatural deaths.

The fight for self-determination continues.  Once again, Russia extends its reach for Ukraine through Ukraine’s government, which eliminates from its website references about the Kremlin’s most heinous of crimes against humanity - the starvation of some 10 million Ukrainians.  And all-the-while, Moscow makes it a criminal offence to talk about its wicked past; history text books are revised; Russia’s Black Sea Fleet digs in; Ukraine’s media is under siege with one journalist dead and others – Ruslan Zabilyj, Volodymyr Viatrovych - threatened.  Still lending support are the “useful idiots” - paid provocateurs? – who crow about the missteps of freedom fighters.  Does anyone dare defame the French Resistance?

But to the film.  After the War, the Bereza brotherhood went on to create vibrant communities around the world.   My father’s notable achievements include: the World League of Ukrainian Political Prisoners realized with, among others, two Winnipeg katsetnyky Dr. Mychaylo Marunchak and Rev. Semen Izyk; and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Taras Shevchenko Monument and Foundation in Winnipeg which dispenses millions in annual funding to worthy projects including a grant to Bereza Kartuzka.  My father organized credit unions, youth groups and some forty branches of the League of Ukrainian Canadians from sea to sea in Canada’s cities, and remote prairie and mining towns.   He loved his people and brought them hope - the fight for independence is never a lost cause.  Some day, their naschadky - descendents will see Ukraine free.

This was the mantra of the young Bereza prisoners.  After seeing the film you might realize, as I did, that today’s struggle in Ukraine is more of the same: the fight to get on with self-determination.  See the film and you will be energized to get on with whatever it takes to assist this emerging democracy in this universal quest.

 Oksana Bashuk Hepburn is a former Director with the Canadian Human Rights Commission.   She is preparing a publication and welcomes stories/material on Petro Bashuk.  Please contact her via email oksanabh@sympatico.ca or call collect 819-771-0723.

Bereza Kartuzka recently won the first prize Platinum Remi Award at the 43rd Worldfest Houston International Film Festival, in the Political/International issues category.

To order Bereza Kartuzka or contribute to the making of Genocide Revealed (Holod 1932-33) - English version - please visit www.yluhovy.com or write to MML Inc., 2330 Beaconsfield Ave., Montreal, QC, H4A 2G8, Canada.  For donations, Income Tax receipts available.

 Bereza Kartuzka, the film will screen in Ottawa at the Ukrainian Community Centre, 911 Carling Ave. on October 14 at 7:30 pm.

 PHOTO

Bereza Kartuzka Prison and memorial