The Emotional Passion : Loyal Nationalist Fighting for Ukraine

"We trampled this land with our bare feet and breathed into our souls and hears its its magical aromas, and our eyes, like memory tapes, forever recorded the beauty of the cities, villages and landscapes of our native land."

"[As the Polish army and civilian population fled, Hunka's village looked toward the west and] the hope that those mystical German knights who give 'bullets' to the hated Poles will appear."

"[Instead of Germans], a column of horsemen with red stars on their caps arrived."

"This was the first demonstration of 'father' Stalin's guardianship over us -- the first echelons of 'enemies of the people' sent to Siberia. More and more new ones followed."

"Friend to friend and brother to brother could not speak sincerely for fear of betrayal. At school, we had to sing praises to our executioners, and the monthly printed murals that each class had to create praised Father Stalin and the communist party to the heavens."

Yaroslav Hunka, 98, former member WW2 Nazi Waffen-SS Galicia

"Ukrainian nationalists faced an impossible choice during the war, but we definitely shouldn't celebrate their Sophie's Choice in the chamber of the Canadian House of Commons."

Joe Roberts, Jewish activist with Ukraine's Jewish community

 

"...The SS Galician Division helped the Germans murder Galician Jews and participated in anti-Polish massacres."

"...It is hard to imagine that Hunka would have been unaware of the region's brutalities and the SS Galician Division's crimes against Poles and Jews; Heinrich Himmler gave a speech to the Galician Division, praising them for removing the 'dirty blemish' of the Jews and 'liquidating' the Poles."

"...In his memoir, not a word of recognition given to these victims."

Adam Zivo, journalist, Odesa, Ukraine

Yaroslav Hunka, right, waits for the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the House of Commons on Sept. 22. It later emerged Hunka was once part of a notorious Nazi unit during the Second World War. (Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press)

Last week in Ottawa, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was present in the House of Commons to be received in respect by Canadian Parliamentarians and invited diplomats. He was to address the House. The Speaker of the House introduced the presence of an invited Ukrainian-Canadian patriot, a war hero, an introduction that saw all present rise in two ovations for the presence of this 98-year-old hero of World War Two. Several days later, the venerable Jewish journal the Forward revealed that the invited man, Yaroslav Hunka, had fought with the Germans as a volunteer, against the Soviet Union.

 

The Battalion he fought in was notorious as a foreign arm of volunteers fighting alongside Nazi German battalions. Enlistment in the SS Galicia Division came with an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. And service to the battalion involved voluntarily assisting Germany in its dedication to slaughtering Jews. This man was no patriotic hero as far as any Allied-nation country was concerned; his presence in the House was an insult to the Canadians who died defending the world against Nazi Germany and its Axis allies.

 

The trigger-words for the adulatory reception given the elderly man who wrote of his years fighting with the SS Galicia Division as the happiest years of his life, came in the introduction of a Ukrainian fighting Russia. Not as a Ukrainian fascist allied with Nazi Germany fighting against the Soviet Union which by then had turned against its former Axis membership when Germany marched on its former Axis ally leading Stalin to throw in his lot with the Western Allies. The Division of Ukrainians, under direct German orders, was declared a criminal organization by the Nuremberg war trial investigators.

 

The quotes above citing words that Yaroslav Hunka had written were extracted from a 2,000-word memoir published in News of the Combatant in 2011, a blog managed by an association of Ukrainian veterans. The brutalities of Soviet rule were memorialized as it were, in the memoir alongside efforts by Ukrainian partisans to establish an independent state. The mind-confusing Ukraine-Russia conflict of today where Moscow has invaded Ukraine, claiming its territories to be part of Russia, and the war crimes committed by Russia at the present time may echo those of the Second World War, but they are different worlds.

Before the war in 1939 Stalin imposed a famine on Ukraine, which caused countless Ukrainians, including Ukrainian Jews, to perish from hunger, when Ukraine, an agricultural super-power then and now, saw its grain yields confiscated and sent to Russia during a time of grain shortage, leaving Ukraine to fend for itself, its harvest maintaining life for Russians, while its absence to feed Ukrainians dealt a near-genocidal blow to the nation; that was the historical Holodomor. 

Mr. Hunka was born and raised in the village of Urman, Eastern Galicia, ruled at that time by Poland. In 1939 when war began Hunka was 14.  Initially under Soviet occupation Hunka, from an impoverished family, was sent to a Polish 'bursa' in Berezhany where many of his classmates were Jewish refugee children. Which puzzled Hunka and his Ukrainian coevals, why Jews "were running away from such a civilized western nation as the Germans". Preparations underway to murder millions of Jews were not long in coming.

Soon people began disappearing, deported to Siberia, including Hunka's family members. Students suddenly disappeared from school and were never seen again. Anyone deemed to be anti-Soviet became part of the deportations. Finally, two years on, in 1941, the Soviets were turned out and Nazis occupied the region. Villagers "welcomed the German soldiers with joy"; ethnic Ukrainians could sleep in peace without fearing "there would ... be that dreaded knocking on the door in the middle of the night".

Soon, their 'liberators'  changed and a new wave of arrests occurred. "The Fuehrer immediately revealed his plans for Ukraine: liquidating the provisional Ukrainian government in Lviv and imprisoning Ukrainian leaders in concentration camps", Mr. Hunka wrote in his memoirs. The Germans spoke a foreign language, he wrote, and "did not permeate our society with informers as the Muscovite did". Soon enough Hunka described the next two years of "charming girls, carelessly cheerful friends and fragrant evenings in the luxurious castle park", the happiest two years of his life.

Ukrainian nationalists imagined Poland's return to control the region, concluding a solution existed; an autocratic ethnically homogeneous Ukrainian state they would create. Whose intention led to atrocities as Jews and Poles, comprising a large minority in East Galicia were being massacred. From 1943 to 1945, Ukrainian Insurgent Army actions and their collaborators aided the Germans in hunting down and exterminating Jews so that an estimated 1.5 million Jews perished ultimately, during the Holocaust in Ukraine.

Zelenskyy and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau appalud Hunka. Trudeau has since apologized for the diplomatic disaster. (Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press)

 

Ethnically cleansing Galicia, collaborating with the Nazis' campaigns of extermination saw favour in the aspirations of the Ukrainian nationalists of this time in history. The impression was given with this man's introduction to Parliament last week that the current battle for Ukraine's sovereignty bears similarity to the WWII situation. Except that now, at the present time, it is a Jew that leads Ukraine in its existential conflict with Russia. And the Parliament of Canada, feted both that Jew, and a Nazi-affiliated Ukrainian guilty of at the very least voluntary association with the mass murder of Ukrainian Jews.

Errors of judgement can be monumental in their revelations, and the judgement of their peers consequential to those who pay insufficient heed to history.

Heinrich Himmler, one of the top Nazi officials, inspects a line of troops with the 1st Galician Division, also known as the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS, in an undated photo. (Polish State Archives)