"Interned Madonna" recalls national internment operations (07/22/01)

"Interned Madonna" recalls national internment operations

by Roman W. Zakaluzny

SPIRIT LAKE, Quebec - Twice during the last century Quebec's Abitibi region played host to Ukrainians. But only the second group, those who came decades after the first world war, wanted to be there.

January 13, 1915, saw the opening of one of the largest concentration camps ever to have existed in Canada. Known today as La Ferme, this tiny hamlet was where some 1,200 frightened and disoriented men, women and children were disembarked for a two-year confinement during Canada's first national internment operations of 1914-1920. Many had been arrested in cities like Montreal or Toronto.

Eighty-one years after the cessation of the internment operations, a group of Ukrainian Canadian activists unveiled a memorial at the site to recall the suffering of the internees.

"It must have been terrible for these families," said Vasyl "Marcel" Lesyk, mayor of nearby La Morandiere. "To leave a big city like Montreal, to be transported 400 miles north into the deep bush. There was no civilization around here - little [town of] Amos was just starting. It must have been something terrible to live through."

If anyone knows the Ukrainian Canadian history of the region, it is Mayor Lesyk. Born in the 1920s in Quebec to Ukrainian parents, Mayor Lesyk was christened by Father Joseph Jean, a French Canadian convert to the Ukrainian Greek-Catholic Church. His family was part of the second group, those who settled here voluntarily.

Unbeknownst to this second group, a lot of land had already been improved by people whose only crime was having immigrated to Canada with an Austro-Hungarian passport. At the start of World War I, some 5,000 of these "men in sheepskin coats" were arrested as "enemy aliens" and their property seized, as they were interned in 24 concentration camps spread from Nanaimo to Amherst. A further 80,000 had to register with the police. Their civil liberties were suspended as a result of the War Measures Act - the same law used to intern Japanese Canadians in 1941 and French Canadians in 1970.

"I had been told it was a German camp," said Mr. Lesyk. "And even my parents never knew there were Ukrainians there. So we were quite surprised when we looked at the names and saw so many Ukrainians had been interned."

On Saturday, June 16, the Corporation du Camp Spirit Lake, a group dedicated to preserving the memory of the internees at Spirit Lake, in association with the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko, unveiled a statue by Kingston sculptor John Boxtel, which was then blessed by the Revs. Lev Chayka and Ihor Kutash of the Ukrainian Catholic and Orthodox Churches, respectively.

Titled "Interned Madonna" and based on a surviving photograph, it features a Ukrainian mother holding her swaddled infant son as her daughter clings to her petticoats. "By chance our family happened to see another internee statue by Boxtel, near Banff," said Ihor Turjansky, of Toronto, explaining why he drove 1,500 kilometers to attend the unveiling. "We were driving along the Bow Valley Parkway when we saw it near Castle Mountain. We stopped to remember the men held there. Standing there you realize that what was done to them wasn't right, so we just had to be here for this unveiling."

To date 15 trilingual plaques and three statues have been placed by UCCLA and its supporters at internment camp sites, without federal assistance, despite Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's 1993 promise that he and the Liberal Party of Canada would support redress to the Ukrainian Canadian community for the injuries done to it during this period.

"Today's ceremony went really well," said Ghislain Drolet, coordinator of the Spirit Lake Corp. "It just goes to show that people are more and more interested in seeing a Spirit Lake camp interpretative center developed." And Anne Bouchard, representing local Bloc Quebecois MP, Francois Gendron, said "Clearly what happened here must be remembered."

Following the unveiling ceremony, attendees took a 20-minute hike through the bush to the location of a hidden cemetery. Found in the middle of a muddy forest, infested with insects and overgrown with vegetation, the cemetery would be virtually unmarked today were it not for some sympathetic French Catholic nuns who 30 years earlier had erected wooden crosses and a sign to commemorate the "German" dead laid to rest there.

"One of most moving parts of today's event was seeing the cemetery," said Mr. Turjansky. "It raises a lot of questions. Who are the people buried in the cemetery? Do their relatives still look for them? Are they gone and there's no more to be said about them? Does anyone care or even remember that they were once alive, and in this place?"

His wife, Anna, was very moved by the sight of this decaying cemetery, and particularly troubled that the land it sits on was sold by the Canadian government to a private farmer. "I was very saddened to see the crosses that had fallen down, thinking as I did about how these poor people came to this land to better themselves only to end up being interned, then buried in such a remote place, now almost forgotten," she said.

"I don't believe we've learned much as yet about what happened here," said Mr. Drolet. "That's one dimension we will pursue in our proposed museum. Civilians can have their civil liberties suspended just like that in times of war. Remembering what happened to these people at Spirit Lake can be an important lesson in what can occur when we don't learn the lessons of our past."

Ihor Turjansky has a request of Ottawa as well: "Our government shouldn't forget about these internees. They weren't here because they did something wrong. They were forced to be here and they were made to work, against their will. They were robbed of whatever chance they believed they had of bettering themselves when they immigrated to Canada. The government should acknowledge that and help us ensure that what happened here is not buried along with the bones of the innocent men, women and children of Spirit Lake."

Roman Zakaluzny, a journalism student, represented the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association at the unveiling of the "Interned Madonna" statue at Spirit Lake, Quebec, on June 16. To learn more about Canada's First National Internment Operations and the UCCLA's efforts to seek restitution, visit www.infoukes.com/uccla.

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