With a cup of strong French roast coffee before him on the table and a Marlboro between his fingers, he shoots a penetrating, if somewhat quizzical, glance at his interlocutor. He speaks excellent Ukrainian, wildly gesticulating, and his reasoning displays moderation and impartiality coupled with the ability to analyze events and make logical conclusions from what he has seen and experienced. This person, named Volodymyr Osnovych-Melnyk, has recently turned ninety and has spent most of his years outside Ukraine. He is a typical representative of the generation of our fellow countrymen who actively and painfully lived through all the vicissitudes of the twentieth century. Born still under the Russian Empire, these people (if they were lucky enough to live to see our day) are now living eyewitnesses of and participants (even if rank and file ones) in events, which most of us view as part of a distant and to some extent legendary past. Yet, looking back at history through the prism of their own destinies and reflections, they do not think they are the creators of this history. Volodymyr Osnovych-Melnyk decided to discuss with out newspaper what he had lived through. This resulted in the book, My Way to Light and Freedom , which was published in Rivne on the eve of the author’s jubilee.
IDEE FIXE
“I had never though I would become a writer, the more so, in old age,” the sprightly gentleman smiles and again draws on his cigarette. “I just see that people take an interest in what I tell them of my life and adventures but it is tiring to say the same story to each and all. So I decided to let them read it. As for me, I’ve had a thirst for knowledge all my life. It took me all my young years to fulfill these aspirations during the time when our homeland was under Polish rule. I was born long ago under Russian Tsar Nicholas II in Zdolbuniv district, Volyn province. My native village is now part of Rivne oblast. As there was no school there, I learned to read and write on my own until I was ten, then I received an incomplete secondary education in a neighboring town and passed entrance exams to the Ostroh Pedagogical Seminary. But I studied only one Semester there because it cost one cow, and my parents could not afford to sell a indispensable bovine every six months. Soon after I enrolled in a free school for foresters, where I was the only Ukrainian among the Poles. Here, too, I ran into a financial problem: although there was no tuition, I had to pay for room and board. As my parents were steadily going down on their luck, I dropped out of this educational institution as well and decided to get my secondary diploma by doing an extension course. I corresponded with Krakow teachers for a year and then I saw I was unable to master the course on my own: there was almost no literature in the village and nobody to consult with in order to solve a problem. So I came to the conclusion that academic pursuits would be more successful in a big city and went by foot to Lviv almost three hundred kilometers away. Thus walking from village to village, I finally reached the main city of Western Ukraine. First I stayed in a homeless shelter and ate at a soup kitchen, a place for underdogs like me (in the early 1930s, the unemployed accounted for about a fourth of the able-bodied population of Poland, so there were plenty of us down-and-out). At first, a fiddler friend of mine and I, a good mandolin player, performed in the streets of Lviv. Then I worked as a carpenter’s apprentice and signed up for an evening course, for my dream of education had become an idee fixe. But fate presented me the opportunity to meet Mykola Burdan, the son of a high-ranking Lublin postal functionary. We were like brothers, and he promised to help me in my life’s journey. Meanwhile, I turned 21, and it was time to be drafted into the Polish Army.
LUCKY IN PRISON
Volodymyr Osnovych-Melnyk was sent to serve in the Krakow- stationed 20th Infantry Regiment. Eighteen month later he, a warrant officer who was ready to choose a military career for the sake of the secondary education he dreamed of, was unexpectedly arrested. “It turned out that my Lviv friend Mykola Burdan had defected to Soviet Russia,” he continues his story. “He was sincerely convinced that it was the true example of an ideal society, where there is no unemployment or persecution for using the Ukrainian language. It is my brother who helped him cross the border and even presented him with my photo as a keepsake. But the Soviets said to Mykola, ‘Even our own people have nothing to eat. If you want to help the world revolution, go back to Lviv and work there for us.’ Back in Lviv, Mykola fell into the hands of the Polish secret police. When frisking him, they found my photo also and arrested me as an accomplice, though I hadn’t the le ast idea of what he had done. I spent a year in pretrial detention, then a court sentenced me to two years in prison (including the pretrial year) and ten years denial of civil rights. Burdan got nine years. Incidentally, I was defended at the trial by the father of Roman Shukhevych, the last commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Proceeding from the maxim ‘Everything is done for the best,’ I can fully assert I struck it lucky... with prison. I got into a political cell with 25 inmates who could be almost equally divided by their political persuasions: half of them raved about the socialist setup and the other half about an independent Ukraine. Absolutely indifferent to politics at the time, I was struck with those heated debates. Besides, I considerably broadened my intellectual horizons: the cell was full of true intellectuals who were in fact my teachers in many fields.”
A TAVERN KEEPER TURNED TEACHER
When Volodymyr was released from prison, he was jobless and destitute, but his active nature kept him afloat. At that time, the Poles carried out the so-called komasacja , the merger of peasants’ land plots, thus setting up the out-village-type farming system (in Poland, an owner of, say, three hectares of land had held it dispersed haphazardly into several strips). This compelled Volyn Ukrainians to resettle en masse to the new places, taking apart and moving their houses except the stoves and fireplaces. As the settlers had to have the latter put up again, Volodymyr Osnovych- Melnyk suddenly discovered in himself a talent for this business. Earning 25 zlotys per stove (along with a 0.75 liter bottle of vodka costing 4.10 zlotys), he accumulated some capital during the komacacja season and launched a business of his own: first he opened a tavern, then, when he, as a former political prisoner, was told to settle far away from the Soviet border, he organized a large-scale supply of fresh fruit to Lviv.
“I dreamed of building a mill of my own, for the name obliges me ( melnyk is Ukrainian for miller — Ed. ),” the old man laughs, “but in 1939 (I had just got married), after the partition of Poland by Hitler and Stalin, we wound up part of the USSR. I had a vague idea of what I would be doing under the new conditions, but something had to be done. The money was devalued: the Soviets would exchange one zloty for one ruble, but while, for example, you could buy three elegant high-quality suits for 300 zloty, 300 rubles could only get you a pair of work shoes. At first, I, as the most educated person in the village, was employed as village council secretary and then sent to attend a six-month teacher training course. So my coveted dream to become a diploma-holding specialist came true under the Soviet regime. Once in the school, I saw that I was in my own element. I loved the work. Still, I failed: I once taught the pupils an ‘ideologically inadequate song’ and the lady principal, who heard this, reported me to the local NKVD. I was summoned there in the dead of night and told that if I didn’t want to graze white bears, I had to cooperate with the new authorities; they assigned me the first task: to draw up within two weeks a list of all the villagers who had served in the tsarist, Petliura and hetman armies. That meant I would have to inform first of all on my father, a former tsarist soldier, then on my wife’s brothers who had been in Petliura’s army, and so on. After some time I said I’d done nothing for lack of time. They gave me another two weeks. I was well aware that the leather jacket guys were no laughing matter and decided to lie low for awhile. Meanwhile, exam time came: I was an extension student at the Kremenets Pedagogical Institute. Only in Kremenets did I learn about the outbreak of the war...”
THE GERMANS, UPA, AND RED ARMY
Osnovych-Melnyk’s destiny again took a dramatic turn as the war broke out. As he was drafted neither into the Polish Army as one stripped of civil rights nor the Red Army (they were at first wary of western Ukrainians), he remained in the occupied territory. He joined the OUN wing led by Andriy Melnyk who favored peaceful cooperation with the Germans, hoping they would help restore Ukrainian statehood.
“In fact, I was not actively engaged in politics: I was appointed a school principal, so this was the world I was confined to. However, life does not usually depend on your hopes and but the other way around. It was the same in my case: the Germans arrested the top figures of the Bandera national liberation movement, thus dashing our hopes to constructively cooperate with the occupation authorities. This triggered armed struggle and the formation of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) where I also wound up. As a former warrant officer, I was appointed a squad commander under the pseudonym of Antypko (we, as a rule, did not know each other’s real names). My next sobriquet was Osnova, which later became my second surname, while Melnyk remained my family name. We had to fight on three fronts: against the Germans, Soviet partisans, and the nationalist Polish Armia Krajowa. However, the moderate ideology of Melnyk’s followers appealed to me more than the radicalism of Bandera’s fighters. I say quite responsibly that I did not kill a single person in the year of my service with the UPA. This was noticed by my immediate superior with a pronounced sadistic tendency (and the appropriate sobriquette Lykho, meaning woe). To confirm his suspicions, he once ordered me to shoot dead two captured young people whose guilt did not deserve this kind of punishment. The boys fled while being taken to the place of execution, and I myself quit the woods soon after. I began to work again in the local administration until the Soviet troops came. In February 1944 I was mobilized into the Red Army and was taken prisoner by the Germans in the Baltic area six months later. In May 1945 I was in the British occupation zone.”
HALF A CENTURY IN FRANCE
Osnovych-Melnyk never reflected on whether or not to return to his fatherland, for he had been stigmatized by German captivity and UPA membership in Soviet eyes, and this led him to seek his fate in the West.
“At first I introduced myself everywhere as a teacher. But my profession turned out to be of no consequence. So when our displaced persons camp was visited by the French, I said I was a mason and thus made my way to France, now my second fatherland. Still in the camp, I married a Belarusian woman (my relatives thought me dead for half a century). We have four children who have acquired prestigious professions and become full members of that society. As for me, I worked for fifteen years in the Moselle coal mines, retired on health grounds, became joint owner of a grocery store in Nancy, and dealt in real estate. Yet, I have always felt myself an alien among the French because I don’t approve of their egocentricity, although I highly respect their democratic style of thinking. As soon as I heard that Ukraine had proclaimed its independence, I immediately bought a ticket and flew here. I found my family, my daughter by the first wife. I had left her at the age of two, and now she, a product engineer by education, lives in Kazan. This is how I live now: two months in France and two in Rivne. I try to do my best to help my fellow countrymen. I actively deal with humanitarian aid, and I’ve helped many of my relatives to get on their feet. I closely follow public developments and am still waiting for a new social force to implement in Ukraine the national democratic ideals of previous generations. Only then can I die in peace. Yet, now, as never before, I feel a desire to live on. For it is interesting...”
