"An unidentified guest," and our family collections

by Yaro Bihun

CONCLUSION

Those who have read my January 2000 two-part feature in The Weekly about searching for family roots may think I fancy myself as my family's Jonathan from "Everything is Illuminated." Fair enough, although I'm quite a bit older than Elijah Wood, who plays that part in the film. But I definitely do see my mother in the role of Lista (played by Laryssa Lauret), the lone remaining resident of what used to be Trachimbrod, who, in an isolated house in a sea of sunflowers, preserved as much as she could of the history of that Ukrainian shtetl.

Mychajlyna Kubrak Bihun was our Lista. She was the keeper of the family "tabernacle" and two old photo albums, all dating back into the 1930s, as well as a growing number of other boxes and large envelopes chronicling our past. She not only collected and identified these items (most of the photos are marked with at least the year and place), she somehow managed to bring all of it out of Ukraine, through war-torn Eastern Europe to the American-occupied Germany with three small children in tow (I was barely 1 then), while her husband, Mykola, was incarcerated along with other nationalist leaders in 1944 in German concentration camps.

She continued preserving and adding to this archive until she died in 1994: all our photographs, all kinds of documents and certificates, diplomas, Ukrainian community event programs - even a German-language newsletter from the USS Gen. Harry Taylor that brought us to America - old address books, postcards, Christmas and Easter cards, letters, including all of my correspondence home from the Army in the 1960s. She even saved the stashes of letters my brother and I received during our youthful, inter-city long-distance romances and carelessly left at home when we moved to Washington - much to the delight of his teenage daughters many years later who found them during a family Christmas gathering at mother's place near Soyuzivka.

Every generation of every family should have at least one Lista and one Jonathan. In this respect, we may have been luckier than most. Still, all-too-many unidentified persons remain in our photographs, "blank spots" in our family history and many questions that yearn to be answered.

Traveling to the origin of one's roots, as Jonathan did, is one way to help fill in the blanks, but not the only way. Among the other, closer-to-home ways, are:

• Finding and helping - or becoming - the Listas and Jonathans in the family.
  
  
• Interviewing the oldest members of the extended family and organizing get-togethers and reunions so family members can share this information. We had shared and learned much as some 60 members of our extended family from across the country came together in Cleveland in 2000 to mark our 50th anniversary in the United States.
  
  
• Locating the major collections of family photographs and making sure they are inscribed with all available identifying information. And doing it sooner rather than later.
  
  
• Reading memoirs and history books, and taking advantage of the capabilities of the Internet, where, for example, one can digitally:
  
  
• search the passenger lists of ships that arrived at Ellis Island between 1892 and 1924 (www.ellisisland.org) - where I found my Aunt Maria Fedorka's arrival with her 18-month old daughter Kateryna in 1913. Her immediate family knew about the daughter, who died soon after their arrival, but none could recall her name.
  
  
• locate the microfilm roll that contains the 1920 and 1930 census information about your relatives (www.archives.gov). To actually view the microfilm and photocopy the report, however, one must visit the National Archive in Washington or one of its regional centers. I did, and confirmed from their 1930 census interview that Maria Fedorka ("Teta Marunia" to us children) then was already the sole breadwinner of the family, taking in five boarders (four miners from "Poland" who spoke Ukrainian and one Hungarian). Her husband, Nick, a coal miner, was listed as "unemployed." He must already have been suffering from tuberculosis or black lung from which, we know, he died a few years later.
  
  
• Check Social Security death and birth dates through the Mormon website (www.familysearch.org). The Mormons also maintain a huge microfilm library of old church records from around the world, including Ukraine.
  
  
• Find just about anything, important or trivial, through Google (www.google.com), where I learned, among other things, that the USS Gen. Harry Taylor troop ship that brought us to America later transported the 1956 Hungarian Revolution refugees from Europe to Australia, was refitted for sophisticated satellite missile tracking operations and renamed the Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg, served as a backdrop in the science fiction movie "Virus," and now is slated to spend the rest of its days submerged as an artificial reef off the Florida Keys.
  
  
• Scan, enlarge and study the photographs, paying attention to background details that normally go unnoticed. A seemingly innocuous 2-by-3-inch photograph of my mother standing with a young boy at the doorway of a Peremyshl bookstore where she worked in the 1930s takes on special meaning when enlarged, making readable some of the headlines on newspaper front pages posted on the bookstore's doorway columns: "Turbulent Days," "The Battle for Asia," "Peace Plan?" "Capitulation of Romania," "France Undermined." In a companion photo taken that same day but from a different angle, a small poster behind her reads "Germans in Ukraine."

My family roots piece in 2000 featured a photograph of my father within a group of Ukrainian political prisoners celebrating Christmas in a Polish prison in Wisnicz. That photograph is the centerpiece of our "tabernacle," which may well have been especially made to hold it, judging by the way the box is inlaid with a Ukrainian trident within a wreath of thorns dominating its cover and the inscription "Wisnicz 1929" next to where the photo was framed on the inside of the cover.

In my younger years, I had looked into that box many times. I recognized my father's face in the picture, but never wondered who were the other 10 men sitting and standing beside him. The inscription on the front of the photograph seemed enough for me then: "Our Christmas in the Polish prison in Wisnicz. January 7, 1929."

Only when I removed the photograph to scan it for inclusion with The Weekly roots feature did I learn from the inscription on the reverse that standing behind him was my future uncle, Volodymyr Kubrak (Uncle Vlodko). The wonderful researchers at the Lviv Historical Archives who helped find many old family root documents for me also found a copy of the prosecutor's charges against him and his five co-defendants from Peremyshl, but since my mother had already passed on, as had all of our family members of her generation, so had my hope of finding out any more about him.

Until two years ago, that is, when The Ukrainian Weekly carried a piece about the Ukrainian Canadian film maker Yurij Luhovy working on a documentary about the Polish concentration camp Bereza Kartuzka. My father had spent 18 months there in 1934-1935, so I wondered if Uncle Vlodko did his "graduate work" there as well, as I suspected he would be inclined to do.

(I sometimes refer - jokingly, of course - to my father's incarcerations in educational terms: he received his "undergraduate" degree at Wisnicz, went to "graduate school" at Bereza Kartuzka, and did almost a year's worth of "post-graduate work" in a German concentration camp in 1944. But there is nothing funny about my being lucky that he was in Krakow in 1939 when the Soviets entered Lviv, otherwise, I would not have come into this world. The NKVD left mostly corpses behind in Lviv's prisons when they fled before the German invasion.)

I recalled seeing the book "Peremyshl: The Western Stronghold of Ukraine" while transporting my parents' book collection from Kerhonkson, N.Y., to Washington and hoped that it would have some mention about my uncle's activities there between the wars. And it did, although not about any connection to Bereza Kartuzka. It reported about his 1928 trial that sent him to Wisnicz and, five pages later, about the period when the Soviet and German armies occupied opposing banks of the Sian River running through Peremyshl. It noted that a number of local Ukrainian nationalists would sneak back and forth across the border, coordinating their activities with their colleagues on the other side. The Gestapo eventually apprehended some of them, including my uncle, the author writes, adding: "Volodymyr Kubrak was sent to Auschwitz in 1940 where he later died."

I learned this from a book that for more than 10 years had been sitting unread in a bookcase less than 10 feet from the dinner table.

The inscription on the back of the Wisnicz prison photo, which probably had not been looked at since it was inserted into the frame of our "tabernacle" in the 1930s, identified not only my father and my uncle. Someone had meticulously inscribed the names of all 11 prisoners, including the cities they came from and the length of their prison terms. I must have felt their identities were not germane to the roots story back in 2000 and left them "unidentified."

I was wrong. They, as my father, uncle and many others, sacrificed much during this critical period in Ukraine's history. Some of them, like Uncle Vlodko, may well have paid the ultimate price. They deserve to be identified.

Mea maxima culpa.

(Please see the photo with a complete caption).

PART I

CONCLUSION

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, April 16, 2006, No. 16, Vol. LXXIV

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