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14 WWW.UNWLA.ORG “НАШЕ ЖИТТЯ”, ЧЕРВЕНЬ 2016 When the Forest Was Our Father A review of Maria (Iryna) Labunka’s Koly lis buv nash bat’ko: Spomyny (Kyiv: Osnovy, 2015) 216 pp. text; pp. 217-257 index and supplementary materials; pp.258-320 photographs. Introduction by Dmytro Pavlychko . by Martha Bohachevsky-Chomiak, UNWLA Branch 78 Let me come clean in the first sentence. I’m writing this review in English to encourage you to read a Ukrainian-language memoir, even if that reading will be a bit of a strain. Notwithstanding this warn- ing, the book is worth your dusting off the linguis- tic cobwebs. For a good part of her life, Maria Roven- chuk Labunka (b. February 2, 1924, d. October 17, 1996) lived a typical Ukrainian American Philadel- phia life. She was not particularly visible, nor ex- ceptionally honored. Her historian husband was the more widely recognized Labunka. Maria raised her three children, taught at the Ukrainian Satur- day school, was very active in Plast and in the UN- WLA. She was a slight, serious, and not very talk- ative woman who could always be counted upon to do whatever one asked her to do. Nothing about her or her demeanor seemed particularly excep- tional. Even her death from cancer made her sadly just one of many victims of this prevalent disease. But Maria Labunka was a genuine hero. Of course, she did not consider herself a hero; true he- roes never do. By wit and grit, she lived the difficult life of the lone guerilla agent in hostile territory searching for local supporters, outwitting police- men and out-arguing officials. The winter of 1946– 1947, which for the rest of the world was a time of peaceful rehabilitation, was a time Maria spent ed- iting underground texts. She did this alone, for four months, in an underground bunker, unable to even stick her head out, just listening to dogs sniff- ing and boots tramping in the snow. She was then sent north into territories newly ceded to and ad- ministered by Poland, lands to which Ukrainians were forcibly resettled. She lived in this area for a year illegally, helping where and how she could. She did not lose heart even after her parents were exiled to hard labor, one of her brothers was killed in guerilla action, and the other was arrested and shipped to Siberia. In the summer of 1948, she was ordered to join a small group of Ukrainian fighters selected to make the grueling, clandestine, two- month forced journey from the Carpathians to the Alps. The goal was to disseminate information about the ongoing Ukrainian guerilla warfare against the Soviets to the West, to somehow gain support for those left back in the homeland who tried to continue the fight against the Soviets after the Nazis were defeated. In the West, Labunka could not compre- hend how her fellow Ukrainian refugees, merci- fully housed in Displaced Persons Camps, could organize and socialize at dances, while she visual- ized the guerillas still starving in the winter woods . . . or sharing an even worse fate in the mines of Siberia. For this and other reasons, she had a hard time adjusting to the West, both in Europe and in the United States. The sum of her experiences ex- plains why. Barely a teenager Labunka became a mem- ber of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), which at the time she joined, was largely a youth organization that helped mount guerilla warfare against both the German Nazis and the So- viet Communist forces. That struggle continued until it was suppressed in 1952. The guerilla war- fare conducted mainly by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA. This was a volunteer, self-sup- porting force directed against the Germans and the Soviets, always on the lookout for enemy double agents in its ranks. The OUN was one of the found- ers of the UPA, but the UPA should not be confused with the original OUN. During the course of the warfare, the ideology of those who fought under the label of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) morphed from the OUN’s integral nationalism with clear authoritarian overtones to an open so- cial democratic platform that saw its final develop- ment as the human rights movement in the Soviet gulags. This transformation of part of the OUN is largely undocumented, except for a few original smuggled texts written in the 1940s and early 1950s. In contrast, the founding OUN documents, most drafted by persons who themselves did not participate in the armed struggle, are widely avail- able, even online. Today, most of the Ukrainian diaspora ac- cepts the various branches of the OUN as a patri- otic émigré political group or party; few bother with the group’s ideology. That was not the case with the original members of OUN, for whom the slogans of the ideology articulated the love of the land, the desire to participate in the Ukrainian struggle for freedom, the yearning to be part of the
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