There is no monument to Mykola Lemyk in Myrhorod or, for that matter, in Lviv. Who was he? Lemyk was one of the millions who were killed by a Nazi bullet. You won’t even find his grave: he was shot and buried somewhere in a prison courtyard or suburban woodland. Even historians who research the liberation movement do not mention Lemyk very often — the same applies to Galicia, even though a far larger number of people know about him there.
Meanwhile, this boy deserves serious attention from historians, politicians, philosophers, and ordinary young people who reflect on the sense of life. Every person has an inherent sense of life that depends on the depth of his/her nature. As Flaubert said, the heart is always divided between two overwhelming thoughts that fill an individual’s lifetime: how to make a fortune and how to live for oneself or, in other words, to confine one’s life to one’s own bench and one’s own digestion of food.
This Flaubertian thought is somewhat reassuring: there have always been petty individuals, and our country is no exception in this respect. Yet the number of eminent persons varies from era to era. The present day appears to be very impoverished in this sense. I wonder how many young people would be able to live their short life the way Lemyk did, carrying out a single exploit that may outlive you or sink into oblivion, as it usually happens when eternity is in question. What do we recall years later? — Only a few episodes that outweigh all of our bland and drab existence. We remember moments of triumph. Naturally, everyone has such moments. But there is often nothing to remember. So the conclusion is that we live only to soar — only this is worth any effort. And if we fail or do not dare to soar (which is the same thing), how will we encounter our God, and what will we say to Him?
Let us look back to the fall of 1933. In Lviv, the fall is the most beautiful season. The cobblestones are covered with golden leaves. The cafes, whose doors are still ajar because it is not cold yet, smell of coffee. Ladies wearing splendid little hats nod coquettishly whenever they see a handsome and stately young man. You yourself are “a tall, well-built blond with blue, somewhat slanting eyes and a very appealing face; intelligent, sincere, frank, and straightforward” (from Volodymyr Makar’s reminiscences Comrades-in-Arms). Just imagine this for a second, and you will feel your muscles flexing and eyes blinking a little from the joy of life and the knowledge that fate can present you with quite a few happy, if not divine, moments.
Mykola Lemyk was only 18 years old when the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in Western Ukraine resolved to draw the attention of the international public to the Holodomor in Soviet Ukraine. At an OUN meeting it was decided to assassinate a Moscow official, the Soviet consul in Lviv. A dozen young OUN militants offered to carry out the mission. But the operation required not just a brave fighter but an intelligent person with nerves of steel, because the assignment was not only to carry out the assassination but also to fend off the NKVD troops and consulate security guards and surrender to the Polish police. In addition, the candidate had to behave in a dignified manner during the trial, which would be the focus of international media attention.
The volunteers drew lots. Fate chose the 18-year-old Lviv University student Mykola Lemyk, the son of a peasant from the village of Solova, 30 km from Lviv. What did this boy from a small Galician village (population: 300 households) founded in the 17th century by his Lemyk forefathers have in common with the peasants who were swelling up from starvation somewhere in eastern Ukraine? The truth is that he was raised in this spirit not only by his mother and father but the entire Galician community.
The Galicians were generally not indifferent to the events in Greater Ukraine. In the summer of 1933 Lviv saw the founding of the National Committee for Ukrainian Famine Relief, which issued an appeal, “Toll the great alarm bell!” with the following words: “Ukrainian people! Wherever you may live outside Great Ukraine — in Galicia, overseas in America, in Volyn, Kholm, or faraway Austria, in Bukovyna or China, in Transcarpathia, in European emigration or in sweltering Africa — nowhere can you look calmly at the huge calamity and torments of your enslaved and starving brothers...You have reached the end of your patience. You must not keep silent anymore. Wherever a Ukrainian heart beats, you should not only protest against all kinds of communist violence, but also arouse the conscience of all humans and draw the whole world’s attention to your plight and come to your rescue” (Dilo, Aug. 14, 1933).
The Galicians were greatly dismayed when the train filled with grain that they had collected as charity was sent back. For some time the cars stood near the border and then headed back. The movement of solidarity and protest assumed a truly international scale. According to plans, the wave of protest actions by the Galicians and Ukrainians residing in other countries reached its peak on Oct. 29, when the leadership of the Ukrainian relief committee, supported by the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, declared a National Day of Mourning and Protest. On that day, “people were to observe a fast and make voluntary donations at churches, meetings, and rallies for the relief effort” (Dilo, Oct. 15).
The assassination was scheduled for Oct. 21. Roman Shukhevych, the head of the OUN Regional Leadership, masterminded the operation that was to be carried out at the Soviet consulate. On his instructions, the artist Roman Senkiv visited the consulate located at 22 Nabyliak Street (now 1 Kotliarevsky Street), drew a precise plan of the building and a portrait of the consul Golubov, and checked the office hours. In early October Mykola met Stepan Bandera at Lychakiv Park, then known as Bartosz-Glowacki Park. They spoke for many hours about the political situation and the famine in Ukraine. Bandera instructed the youth on how to behave in court and give a detailed explanation of the motives behind the assassination. It was important for him to allow the police to arrest him but not let the consulate’s NKVD security guards use weapons against him, thus preventing them from classifying this as a run-of-the-mill terrorist act.
Mykola was aware that the assassin might face the death sentence. On the eve of the assassination, when he was asked if he had any last requests, he asked for a new pair of boots: “Because when they shoot me and see me lying dead, my old footwear will catch their eye. I don’t want the enemies to laugh.” New boots and socks were purchased for him.
Mykola practiced firing his revolver in a forest near Lviv. A few days before the assassination, he sewed a secret pocket where he placed the Orgis revolver. He learned to take it out quickly. On the day of his departure to Lviv, a feeling of apprehension came over the members of his family, who knew nothing about the operation. His mother had had a terrible dream. When Mykola heard about it, he just laughed. When the door closed behind him, his mother’s nerves were completely on edge. Mykola narrowly escaped trouble at the Kurovychi railway station (this track no longer exists), when he was stopped by a policeman. Satisfied with the youth’s explanation that he was going to a high school in Lviv, he let him go.
In Lviv Mykola met Shukhevych, who put the boy up at the Narodny Hotel (today: the customs office building) under the codename Dubenko.
On the morning of Oct. 21 Mykola left the hotel, went to pray at a church, and reached the Soviet consulate at 11.30 sharp. Then he acted according to the detailed plan. He pressed the doorbell and had a brief exchange with the man on duty. Asked [in Russian] why he needed to see the consul, Mykola said, “About traveling to Soviet Ukraine.” He signed himself Dubenko in the visitors’ book. The secretary, a man named Dzhugai, came into the reception room and said, “Who wants to see the Comrade Consul? Please come in.” Lemyk resolutely strode to the office door. Once inside, Mykola noticed that the consul did not look like the man in the portrait that had been drawn by the artist Senkiv, but there was no time for reflection. “I would like to speak to the consul.”
“Please, speak, I am the consul.”
“I wish to travel to Kyiv, Ukraine, for studies.”
“You have relatives there?”
“Yes, a sister.”
“Do you have any letters from her? Please show them.”
Those were the last words of the man who was in fact the consul’s stand-in. Instead of producing letters, Lemyk whipped out the loaded Orgis and fired off a single shot, saying, “This is for you from the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists for the torments and death of our brothers and sisters, for the famine in Ukraine, for all the abuses.”
Panic broke out in the reception room. Lemyk did not wait for the security guards to make short work of him. Yelling “Everybody down!” he pointed his gun at two suspicious young men. Dzhugai tried to sneak out, but the bullet that hit his arm forced him to stay put.
Hearing the shots, the real consul Golubov hid under a bed, from where he was later extricated by the police. The front door was blocked. The Polish police entered the premises from the roof of a villa next door. They ordered Lemyk to put the revolver on the floor. He was taken out of the building and bundled into a police van.
The trial began soon after, on Oct. 30, 1933. Lemyk was defended by the well-known Lviv lawyers Dr. Stepan Shukhevych and Volodymyr Starosolsky. During a break Shukhevych came up to Lemyk and said quietly, “You killed a different man, Mailov, who is a hundred times worse than Golubov. He was Stalin’s special representative, who controlled the Soviet diplomatic and consular offices in Poland. You sprang a pleasant surprise in Comrade Stalin.”
A large group of young Ukrainians demonstrated in front of the Lviv court in a token of the solidarity that all Ukrainians felt with the assassination, which was an act of protest against Bolshevik terror against the Ukrainian nation. Then the protesters moved to the regional government building only to encounter the Polish police. All these events aroused lively interest outside Poland. The political message of the assassination, the trial, and the demonstration showed every foreign observer — better than any high-flown speeches — that Western Ukrainians were expressing solidarity with their brothers in eastern Ukraine. The exploit of the young Mykola Lemyk not only served to alert the international public to the 1932-1933 Holodomor, but also helped sparked national awareness, primarily among young Western Ukrainians.
Unwilling to aggravate its relations with the Soviet Union, the Polish government banned mass rallies, and the court handed down a death sentence. However, owing to the defendant’s youth, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and Mykola was taken to Warsaw’s Holy Cross political prison. There, Petro Duzhy, a longtime OUN member and inmate of Polish, German, and Soviet prisons, who had twice been sentenced to death, communicated with Lemyk for a long period of time and later recalled that he was a very genial and optimistic young man. Asked when he would be released, Mykola would always say, “On Sunday. I don’t know which one exactly, but it’s going to be a Sunday all right!”
Lemyk was the only prisoner who was kept in shackles for six months. But as the Ukrainian saying goes, in the absence of fortune, misfortune comes to one’s aid: he learned how to remove them, and this skill later saved his life. He was released in 1939, on a Sunday. At the beginning of World War II, when the prisoners, including Mykola, were being transported to another jail, he succeeded in removing the chains and escaped, and was wounded in the process. With difficulty he made it to a village, but none of the residents gave him shelter. He sat on a bench near the closest building and heard Ukrainian being spoken. It turned out to be a Ukrainian village. He was taken in by a Ukrainian family that helped nurse him back to health, and he later taught at the local school. He got in touch with the OUN leadership in Cracow, where he met his future wife Liuba Vozniak, the sister of Maria Vozniak, the wife of Bandera’s brother Vasyl, who later died a martyr’s death in a German concentration camp.
Mykola and Liuba were married on Aug. 4, 1940. In keeping with the bride’s wish, the following date was engraved on their wedding rings: May 23, 1940, the date of their first meeting and the memorable date of Yevhen Konovalet’s death. They changed their surname to Synyshyn because the name Lemyk was too well known.
After Bandera’s followers in Lviv issued the Act proclaiming a Ukrainian state on June 30, 1941, three OUN expeditionary groups (North, Central, and South) set off eastward to advance the idea of Ukraine’s independence. Lemyk headed the central group. “He could have stayed behind in Galicia and avoided the fatal danger of this expedition,” Liuba Synyshyn recalled, “but he still went to Great Ukraine with an irresistible desire and elan. I followed him on an OUN mission. They were reluctant to send him because he had been in prison — it was quite a high-profile case. So he asked me, ‘Look, can you really not let me go?’ Naturally, I could not have stopped him from going. We were the exact same age; we had been raised at the same time. He was in prison when I was working in the organization. Then he said, ‘I was behind bars for this Ukraine! Really, you could not have stopped me.’ ‘No,’ I said.”
“Mykola was assigned to Kharkiv; he sent a courier to Liuba, but by the time she arrived in Poltava, he was no longer alive. The Gestapo had arrested Lemyk in October 1941. He was executed in Myrhorod. This is the only known fact, but no one knows where he was buried,” says Yaroslav Lemyk, a close relative of Mykola’s (“My grandfather Mykhailo and Mykola’s father Senko were brothers”).
It is mostly thanks to him that people today know about the heroic Galician teenager. Yaroslav Lemyk devoted part of his life to collecting reminiscences about Mykola. We are grateful to him for this. Also, largely owing to his efforts, a memorial plaque was hung a few years ago on the building of the former Soviet consulate, which reminds our contemporaries about the heroic and daring exploit of this young Ukrainian nationalist. A street in Lviv has been named after him. I wonder if this is the end of a short campaign to honor a person who considered his life unimportant in comparison with the tragedy of his eastern Ukrainian brothers.
After her husband’s death, Liuba stayed for a time in the Dnipro basin area and then returned home. In 1943-45 she worked at the underground radio station Free Ukraine in Transcarpathia, which broadcast information about the OUN and the UPA in Ukrainian, Russian, French, and English. In 1947, Themis (the embodiment of divine order) in the person of a “special troika” initially sentenced Liuba to death but then “mercifully” reduced the punishment to 25 years in prison. She spent 8 years, 11 months, and 22 days behind barbed wire in the Mordovian camps until Khrushchev’s long- awaited Thaw. After her release, she rented corners in other people’s houses in Tahanrih, Anzhero- Sudzhensk, and the Donbas region. She moved to Ivano-Frankivsk in 1967 together with her niece Daria, who reminisced about her aunt: “I am simply fascinated by my Aunt Liuba. She has lived through and endured so much but has not lost a certain special goodness that people everywhere noticed, and they would cleave to her. Everywhere she helped everybody who was in the lurch — friends, strangers, Ukrainians, Russians, Belarusians, and Balts. Very few people manage to live such an honest and unselfish life.”
In all probability, Mykola Lemyk’s wife could not have been any different. In this he was lucky. He had his own idea of happiness, which is shared by those people on whom the earth stands.
