NEWS AND VIEWS: Redress: acknowledgement is the key (03/20/05)

NEWS AND VIEWS

Redress: acknowledgement is the key

by Lubomyr Luciuk

Mary came to me because she needed someone to remember what they did to her. She is elderly now, ill, in a home. She doesn't recall what she told me. She does not recognize she is the last.

We met after The Globe and Mail published "And who says time heals all?" Our words gave Mary hope. Until October 1988 no one believed her, even when she explained where the evidence was. Go north, she said, into Quebec's Abitibi region. Find Spirit Lake.

Some tried. Spirit Lake proved elusive. Lac des Esprits was renamed Lac Beauchamp. The place Mary was sent to had vanished, like a ghost.

Others could confirm her testimony. They dared not. They were still "in fear of the barbed wire fence." Save Mary, they are all gone now. So are the archives. Time took people as Ottawa's men plucked papers. Now nearly nothing is left, save Mary.

It began in August 1914 with the first world war. Overnight, thousands of Ukrainians and other Europeans, previously lured with promises of freedom and free land, were branded "enemy aliens." Immigrants from territories under Austro-Hungarian rule, they were misidentified as "Austrians," despite their protests. Thousands had to carry identity papers. Others were interned, compelled to labor in the Dominion's hinterlands. What little wealth they had was confiscated. They endured other state-sanctioned censures, including disenfranchisement - not because of anything they had done, only because of where they came from, who they were.

Mary was 6 when they took the Manko family and others like them from St. Michael's Ukrainian Catholic Parish, around Montreal's Point St. Charles area. Her parents were greengrocers. They weren't disloyal.

It didn't matter. They were transported in April 1915.

They lost everything.

They weren't released until June 14, 1916. Too late. Militia Book No. 60, found in a second-hand bin at a flea market in the Eastern Townships, records only two pairs of ladies' stockings for the family in February 1916. Three-year-old Nellie Manko hadn't made it through the winter. We have another detail - she wore size 10 kid's shoes. But we don't know where she is buried. Her remains are lost.

A statue, "Interned Madonna," now hallows the memory of the women and children imprisoned at Spirit Lake. Plaques have been placed to recall of the wrongs done to Ukrainians during Canada's first national internment operations. Last week Ottawa finally took note, with $25 million included in the budget, a Redress Fund. We were baffled when some editorialists railed against that modest measure, woefully or perhaps willfully ignorant of what we have called for.

We don't want an apology. It is wrong to ask Canadians today to apologize for yesteryear's sins. We want acknowledgement. In 1987, a multiculturalism minister from Montreal said Ukrainians had never been interned. Obviously, the minister never met Mary. His successor, another Montrealer, knew better, which perhaps explains why she wouldn't greet Mary. You don't recognize what you won't face.

We have never asked for compensation. The contemporary value of that portion of the internees' confiscated wealth not returned should instead be used for educational and commemorative projects of value to all Canadians. That constitutes a recovery, nothing more.

Some insist compensation is the only acceptable prescription for righting historical injustices, but paid only to those who suffered. Sounds fair. But tell me what "value" you would place on what they did to Mary, a Montreal-born girl who committed no crime but was carted off to a Canadian concentration camp, watched her sister die, and then lived the rest of her life being told it never happened?

I don't know how to do that kind of math. All Mary wanted was for us to remember. If you'd rather pay redress I guess $25 million is about right.

Lubomyr Luciuk is director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

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