BOOK NOTES

Memoirs by Alex Woskob: an account of triumph over adversity

"Memoirs of My Life: Alex Woskob," Ukrainian text by Alex Woskob, with Oleh Chornohuz; English translation by Michael M. Naydan and Oksana Tatsyak. Kyiv: WUS Publishers, 2004.

by Michael Bernosky

Alex Woskob's account of his long life and noteworthy success is a poignant tale of triumph over adversity and obstacles that would defeat most ordinary people. The Ukrainian émigré communities of the United States and Canada have many such stories of hardships endured and tragedies overcome, of which this striking example serves as a reminder that the Ukrainians are tenacious survivors and above all a people of strong faith and hard working perseverance.

Memoirs are an elusive literary form, just as memories are themselves elusive. To sit back and recall the events of one's life is during the best of times a difficult endeavor, but certain episodes will emerge with startling clarity. This is certainly the case for these reminiscences. Readers should not expect the narrative clarity of a novelist, or the stylistic consistency of an essayist, and accept the rewards of reading this episodic account with all its variations for its absorbing content and insightful observations on both life and human nature.

Alex Woskob begins by offering a humble explanation of the change that led to the rendering of Oleksiy Voskobyjnik into a more "western" version of his name, a circumstance familiar to many in the various ethnic communities of North America. He then recounts the year of his birth, 1922, during the first years of Bolshevik rule in Ukraine, and the first of the famines caused by the Bolsheviks' violent seizure of the agricultural bounty of that fertile land, which he emphasizes was the "breadbasket of Europe." The following chapters recount his childhood and love for his grandparents, parents and his native city of Myrhorod with touching eloquence.

As his memories unfold, this picture of a devoted hard-working family and its equally industrious neighbors takes a reader back to the last days of a more bucolic Ukraine, before the onslaught of the Communist and Nazi horrors engulfed that world.

The segments that follow one after another attest to the sheer degradation that inundated Ukraine. Consider these subtitles: "Opium for the People," "The Murder of a Priest," "Deportation to Siberia," "Escape from Home," "The Year of the Great Terror," "Seeking Shelter - Homeless Again," "Under Escort in the Cattle Car," "1937: The Year of Executions," "The Horrible Word: War," "The Occupation," and "Untermensch," as well as others, all of which convey the precarious existence of those terror-drenched times.

Life was tenuous, disaster constantly loomed, nothing was certain except death, the truth of which is rendered in chilling memories such as the following account of being expelled from their home by the "Red Bolsheviks":

The beginning of this survivor's success in life began when as a young man with intelligence, native cunning, linguistic facility, and obvious entrepreneurial skills, he became, in effect, the chief electrical engineer at Myrhorod's power station during the German occupation. As he and his family fled into western Ukraine to escape the war raging near their home, he put those same valued skills to work as the director of the power station network in Halychyna, cooperating clandestinely with Ukrainian partisans fighting the Nazis.

Alex Woskob, his mother and brother, along with several other Ukrainian families, fled to the west when they heard "the remote sounds of cannons as the front moved closer to the Carpathians." Their determination never again to be under Communist rule propelled them on a harrowing journey through Slovakia, into Germany heading toward a hoped for haven in Switzerland.

A segment contributed by Mr. Woskob's wife, Helen, adds to this picture of unmitigated horror and devastation. "Finally we saw a silver strip of the Dniester River on the horizon. The river represented our salvation. We couldn't wait to get to the other side. As we approached the bridge crossing the Dniester, the number of carriages multiplied. It seemed that the whole of Ukraine was running away from Stalin."

"Soviet artillery began to boom in the forest. The Nazis panicked and without fighting began to flee with the crowd toward the river. Soviet tanks suddenly appeared from the edge of the forest and began to fire without discretion at the road. Then, without warning, the Soviet tanks moved straight toward the line of carts, smashing and rolling over everything in their way - carriages, carts, horses, cows, men, women and children - I thought the Last Judgment had begun. Unearthly screams and cries of despair filled the air. Sometimes even now I wake up in the middle of the night with nightmares about that day."

Surviving those tumultuous months at the end of World War II, both, though they had not yet met, relate anecdotes of their lives in the Displaced Persons' (DP) camps in Germany, and how again with courage and hard work they got on with their brutally disrupted lives. In the final three chapters, titled "Germany-Canada 1944-1953," "The USA 1953-2000" and a summation in "More Thoughts," Mr. Woskob tells of his successes as a mining engineer in remote Canada, of returning to Germany to woo his wife, and ultimately of his success as a contractor and builder in Canada and then the United States. The chapters are filled with observations, realistic analyses and various axioms that do much to explain to the reader how he became such a highly successful man of business. Many readers, in fact, will be left with a curiosity to learn even more about Mr. Woskob's entrepreneurial gifts.

Many a business school graduate could benefit from a seminar dedicated to his realistic appraisal of how to found, manage and build a large-scale business enterprise. Take this example: "After starting my business in Philadelphia, I realized that business is always a risk. A businessman has to take risks but he has to risk with his head on his shoulders not just risk his head. Another thing I learned was that business requires character. If a person doesn't have character, he should not even try to get into business." What is most evident about Mr Woskob's observations is their sound practicality combined with entrepreneurial vision that has served him well through his many endeavors.

The most heart-rending segment of these memoirs occurs near the end, when Mr. Woskob returned to newly independent Ukraine to try and discover what had been his father's ultimate fate under the Soviets. He tells of entering the former KGB headquarters in Kyiv with dread, then to be sent on to Poltava where a Ukrainian State Security Service officer informed him that Voskobinik, Grigory Vasilevich, had been executed as a state criminal by order of a Soviet NKVD court in 1937. His crime, for which he had been denounced by a former friend and a neighbor, was to comment after Stalin's brutal purges that "The Red Army is very weak now. There are no commanders who can lead the army." A fact that proved only all too true when the Nazis invaded the USSR in 1941. And then with an irony that only the vicissitudes of history could supply, was informed that his father had been "rehabilitated" in 1989 by a decree of the Supreme Council of the USSR, not long before it too went to history's graveyard.

As he prepared to leave, the commanding general asked to speak with him, and in a final ironic moment told him - in impeccable Ukrainian - he had been a neighbor of theirs in Myrhorod, and revealed that his father's place of execution was only ten miles away, then added, "Please accept my condolences, 50 years after your father's death."

This deeply touching passage follows: "As we drove along the highway in the car, I thought that my father and thousands of my countrymen had been driven on that highway half a century ago to their executions. I call that highway the Road of Death. The blue Ukrainian sky was above us. Century-old oaks and evergreen fir trees were silent witnesses to the execution of innocents. I wondered what kind of country Ukraine would be if millions of Ukrainians who had perished in Siberia could return somehow. People are the most valued capital in capitalist countries, but in the Soviet Union the most intelligent and the most industrious people were eliminated."

"When we stepped out of the car a few minutes later, a forest of firs greeted us. Nothing suggested that the forest of Tryby was the second Ukrainian Bykivnia. In a clear glade we found five large black crosses. One cross faced each direction while the fifth cross stood in the center, rising above the mass grave."

"The Bolsheviks destroyed 40,000 innocent people in the forest of Tryby in 1937. The victim's common offense was their heritage: they belonged to the freedom-loving Ukrainian nation that wanted to govern its own land."

These memoirs, which carry the reader from the fertile steppe home of the young Oleksiy Woskobyjnik to the American construction business and real estate fortune built by Alex Woskob, offer a very real and very readable account of his fascinating life. Many Ukrainian émigrés could tell equally interesting stories, of that there is little doubt, but Alex Woskob has taken the time and effort to offer his story to history, and it is a story well worth reading, particularly for readers of Ukrainian heritage. For despite his many successes, a profound contemplative sadness pervades these memoirs. As Mr. Woskob notes, "Halya often says, "There is nothing worse than being cut off from your homeland."

The book is available for purchase at http://www.webstersbookstorecafe.com or from: Bahriany Foundation, 811 S. Roosevelt Ave., Arlington Heights, IL 60005. Price: $12.

Michael Procanin Bernosky is a writer, director and actor currently completing a play based on the life of Taras Shevchenko. Mr. Bernosky's Ukrainian grandparents were from Halychyna and Lemkivshchyna, having emigrated to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century. Mr. Bernosky was Fulbright Scholar to Ukraine, 2002-2003.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, January 30, 2005, No. 5, Vol. LXXIII

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