"Eternal prisoner" Danylo Shumuk returns to Ukraine

by Oksana Zakydalsky

TORONTO - Danylo Shumuk, who served 42 years in various prisons and camps of Poland and the USSR - the longest serving Ukrainian prisoner of conscience, who was once referred to as "the eternal prisoner" - returned to Ukraine in November.

Allowed to leave Ukraine in 1987 - thanks primarily to the efforts on his behalf by the Canadian government, the Ukrainian community in Canada and Amnesty International - he lived in Canada for 15 years, at first in Vancouver but mostly in Toronto. Although several good-byes were organized for him by various groups in Toronto in the weeks before he left, he left without fanfare, which he disliked, in the company of his daughter Vera Kalach with whom he will live near Donetsk.

At 88 years of age and still suffering the effects of a serious car accident in 1997, he needs constant care and, as his daughter was denied an extension of her visa to stay in Canada, he decided to leave with her.

Mr. Shumuk was a man of principle who always said what he thought and constantly found himself in opposition to the authorities of the time. A Communist in pre-war Volyn under Polish rule, a Soviet soldier at the time of the German invasion of Ukraine, a member of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) at the time of the Soviet re-occupation of western Ukraine and a Ukrainian patriot under the new Soviet regime - Mr. Shumuk was always out of sync with the powers in charge. For this he paid dearly - with 42 years of incarceration - in a Polish prison, as a POW of the Germans and with many years in the Soviet gulag.

He chronicled his life in several books: "Za Skhidnym Obriyem" (Beyond the Eastern Horizon) published in the United States by Smoloskyp in 1974; his memoirs "Perezhyte i Peredumane," published in Detroit in 1983, with the English version, "Life Sentence," edited by Ivan Jaworsky, published by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies in 1984; and "Z Gulagu u Vilnyi Svit" (From the Gulag into the Free World) published by New Pathway Publishers in Toronto in 1991, which contained, in addition to various articles on his travels around North America, two chapters that were omitted from his memoirs because they were lost on the way.

Mr. Shumuk was born on December 30, 1914, in the village of Boremschyna in the Volyn Oblast. He joined the Communist Party of Western Ukraine at age 17 and was arrested in 1934 and sentenced to eight years by the Polish regime. Thanks to an amnesty, he was released in 1939 and returned home to Ukraine, which had become part of the USSR.

With the German invasion of the USSR, he was conscripted into the Soviet army but taken prisoner by the Germans. He escaped a German POW camp and in 1943 joined the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and was appointed a political instructor in an officer training school.

In 1945 he was captured by the NKVD and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to 20 years of hard labor in Norilsk, where he was one of the leaders of the Norilsk prisoners' strike in 1953. He was released in 1956 during the so-called "thaw," but rearrested the following year and sentenced to 10 years, which he served in Vorkuta.

After his release in 1967, Mr. Shumuk lived in the Kyiv Oblast and became acquainted with some of the "Shestydesiatnyky," particularly Ivan Svitlychny, Nadia Svitlychna and Yevhen Sverstiuk. This time he was swept up in the wave of arrests of dissidents in 1972. His memoirs were confiscated, and he was sentenced to 10 years of strict-regime camp and five years' exile. He served his sentence in a Mordovian concentration camp and his exile in the Perm Oblast. During his incarceration he joined the Ukrainian Helsinki Group, and participated in numerous protest actions and hunger strikes even though he was in ill health.

On November 3, 1978, the Parliament of Canada passed a resolution to ask the government of the USSR to release Mr. Shumuk and permit him to emigrate and join his nephew in Canada. While he was secretary of state for external affairs, Joe Clark made numerous requests to the Soviet government for permission for Mr. Shumuk to join his family in Canada. But Mr. Shumuk was allowed to leave only upon the completion of his sentence of 15 years.

During his years in the West, Mr. Shumuk did not abandon his outspokenness; he voiced strong opinions about the behavior of both other dissidents and about the diaspora. At the same time, he was generous with his affections, made a lot of friends and never forgot a kindness.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, February 16, 2003, No. 7, Vol. LXXI

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