PERSPECTIVES: The greatest generation (10/01/06)

PERSPECTIVES

by Andrew Fedynsky

The greatest generation

It was 25 years in September since my father died. He was 66 - not that old by today's standards. There are memorial notices in The Ukrainian Weekly and Svoboda for his contemporaries who lived well into their 80s and 90s. Indeed, I know several who continue to contribute to the community. As for my mother, she died in 1985, four years after Tato passed away. She was 67.

I hate to admit it, but I've gotten to know my parents a lot better now that they're gone than I ever did when they were alive, when they could have shared details about their lives, if only I'd bothered to ask. To be sure, I heard snippets of their story as I was growing up, but I didn't listen as closely as I should have: how they met and fell in love; my father's stint as a political prisoner in Poland in the 1930s; his arrest 10 years later by the Gestapo; my mother's trauma during Nazi and Soviet occupation; their efforts to stay alive and stay together.

The house where my two brothers and I grew up in Cleveland was empty for a year and a half after our parents died. Finally, someone had to sift through their clothes, furniture and, above all, the papers they'd accumulated. That task fell to me. And that's when I found the wartime correspondence, the photographs and the forged Letter of Passage from May 1946, ostensibly from the Red Army Military Command in Vienna, averring that Alexander Fedynsky was their translator and would be traveling to Soviet Ukraine to repatriate his wife and son.

Typed on a simple piece of lined notebook paper with a rubber stamp featuring a red star, the letter identifies our father as an Austrian citizen and lists his passport number: S 654/46. I have that ID booklet -it's in German, English, French and Russian with an Austrian eagle on the cover. On the last page - in German only - it states: "Does not serve as proof of Austrian citizenship."

With these dubious credentials, Tato bluffed his way to the village where our mother had spent the war. The late Volodymyr Bodnar, my father's roommate in Vienna who outlived him by two decades, filled me in on missing elements of the story. My older brother, George, whose story this is much more than it is mine, also told me details. As for the documents, they speak volumes.

According to a certification on the Letter of Passage, Alexander entered Soviet Ukraine on May 15, 1946. Dr. Bodnar told me how Tato hopped onto a series of trains and eventually leaped from a coal car as it passed near the village. One of the first things he did was report to the regional office of the NKVD - the secret police. A Director Zolotko and his assistant, Kozlov, rubber-stamped and signed the Letter of Passage. Somehow, Tato managed to convince the wife who hadn't seen him for three years to join him on a harrowing trip back to Vienna with 5-year-old George in tow. And so, a week after he had entered the country, authorities at Mukachevo (Mukachiv) signed the same document certifying that he was leaving Ukraine.

Over the next two years, the family worked its way from Vienna, where the Soviets were ubiquitous, to the French Zone in Innsbruck, where I was born in 1947, and from there to the American Zone in Munich, where we won precious passage to America, arriving in Philadelphia in May 1948. I was just learning to walk; my parents and brother were learning English. Three years later, our brother, Peter, was born in a little town in Pennsylvania's Anthracite Region.

Alexander Fedynsky and his wife, Alexandra, belonged to an extraordinary group of Ukrainians who endured economic hardship, civil unrest, genocide, war, exile and, finally the challenge of raising a family in an unfamiliar land.

The relative handful that succeeded in emigrating to the U.S., Canada, South America and Australia after the war took mundane jobs for the most part - our father became an accountant. Looking at it from a generational distance, it's a miracle that our parents, in their mid-30s when they came to America, were able to provide us with three meals a day, every day, and then gave each of us in turn four years of college.

This was not uncommon in the Ukrainian American refugee community. But they were not content to merely provide for their children; they set a far higher goal: nothing less than the liberation of their homeland. And so, they recreated in microcosm the world they had left behind: Saturday schools, youth organizations, summer camps, choruses, arts groups, publishing houses, newspapers and magazines. Already established Ukrainian communities, which had built strong institutions and churches a generation or two before, generously helped the refugees get settled and invited them to join.

Now, as I commemorate my father's passing 25 years ago, I know that I owe him everything, starting with life itself - something he risked his own life to provide my brothers and me. Growing up, I never thought of my father as a hero. In fact, there were times I was chagrined he couldn't catch a baseball and felt shame that he spoke English with an accent. Well, shame on me. Now I know that his was an extraordinary story, one he wrote by virtue of his extraordinary courage, idealism and faith.

And he was not alone. He had many compatriots - people whose exemplary lives are summed up by a couple dozen words enclosed in a black frame in a Ukrainian Weekly or Svoboda death notice. Many of them I knew personally. Invariably, the brilliance of their lives is reflected in the success of the children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews whose names are listed among the mourners.

I'm sorry that the father who seemed so ordinary to me never lived to see the dream of Ukraine's independence he and his contemporaries pursued so selflessly, but I'm glad the culture he defended with his every fiber is alive and flourishing, that his grandchildren are among those contributing to its perpetuation.

Writing about Americans from the same era, Tom Brokaw calls them "the Greatest Generation." That certainly applies to our parents and their contemporaries. No one's written about them the way Mr. Brokaw did. Someone should.

Andrew Fedynsky's e-mail address is: fedynsky@stratos.net.

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