EDITORIAL: The summer of 1939 (06/27/99)

EDITORIAL

The summer of 1939

One of the major breaks in world views between those who lived under Soviet rule after World War II and those who emigrated to the West is the very idea about when the second world war began. For most post-war immigrants from western Ukraine, as well as for other Europeans and Americans, World War II began 60 years ago this year, with the German invasion of Poland and the Soviet invasion of western Ukraine in September 1939. However, for fourth-wave immigrants to the Ukrainian community, many of whom do not come from western Ukraine, Europe's second world war is known as "The Great Patriotic War" and did not begin until almost two years later - on June 22, 1941 - with the German, not Soviet, invasion of western Ukraine and Belarus.

According to the Soviet version of history, the invasion of western Ukraine by Soviet troops on September 17, 1939, was not an act of war or occupation, but a welcome liberation from Polish oppressors, which is how Lviv's Communist newspaper Vilna Ukraina reported the events at the time. The term "reported" needs to be understood loosely, since the paper had been printed prior to the actual invasion of Lviv. The pre-printed newspaper - a favorite Soviet propaganda tool - described the invasion that had not yet happened as a victory; it was distributed in Lviv after the Soviet army entered the city on September 20.

Whereas for many fourth-wave immigrants June 22, 1941, is a moment of historic divide psychologically, even if they did not live through that period, for most post-war immigrants from western Ukraine the moment of historic divide is September 1939. And it is the events in Europe of 1939 that most defined not only the personal lives of millions, but also that of our community in North America for the past 60 years. As Prof. Roman Szporluk of the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard has noted in several of his presentations within the last year, just as the baby-boomers in America remember where they were when President John F. Kennedy was shot - an event that shaped a generation - members of the war generation from Eastern Europe, remember where they were when the second world war began and collectively carried this moment with them westward.

For those who lived through the war, the summer of 1939 was the last summer of peace. Those who did not experience the war have heard stories from parents and grandparents, neighbors and friends, about what they remember of those final months before the war. For those who were children, it would be their last memory of a bucolic, and a carefree Ukrainian summer. For those who were older, however, and especially those who had any connection with political movements or civic leadership, a sense of pervasive danger lingered.

Sixty years ago a Lviv photographer and architect, the late Oleksander Pezansky, traveled throughout the Carpathian Mountains and the foothill regions in the spring and early summer of 1939, extensively photographing Hutsul Easter celebrations, wedding festivities, spring plantings, early summer sheep-herdings, the informal gatherings in hillside villages. Fortunately, some of the photos survived his post-war flight to the West and were later published in several collections and journals. When later asked why he chose that particular spring and summer for several months of intensive work, he told friends and family that he felt compelled. "I had an ominous sense, that I needed to record our lives," he would say, "that life as we knew it would soon end, never to return."

| Home Page |