One time when she was about seven years old, he had lost her in the woods for about a minute. That was one of the longest minutes of his life. He could see her now, squatting amidst a good-sized clustering of mushrooms, methodically picking only the freshest ones. When she was finished in an area, she would stand up quickly. No aches or pains in his granddaughter's joints, that was for sure.
Danylo crouched back down so that he could reach the new clustering of mushrooms. There were quite a few dead leaves in the way, so he picked up a handful and placed it aside. As he reached for another handful, his fingers brushed upon something hard. He looked down and was startled to see a man's black leather shoe. Danylo's heart beat fast at the sight and he clutched his chest. His brain told him that it was just a discarded shoe, but it brought back a rush of horrible memories.
"Kataryna, come here," he called out urgently.
Kat stood up straight and strode quickly over to where her grandfather was. She could see that he was holding his hand to his chest and his face was contorted with pain. "What's the matter?" she asked.
"Help me to my feet," he asked meekly. "I just need to stretch out for a moment."
Kat pulled him to his feet, and then she looked down. A man's shoe. She nudged it with the tip of her running shoe, then bent down and picked it up. "Looks like it's been here awhile," she said, wondering why her grandfather would be so shaken by the sight of a shoe in the forest.
"Put it down," said Danylo.
Kat looked at her grandfather in confusion, but did what he asked. "Maybe we should go home?"
"I'll be fine," he said. "Just let me catch my breath." Kat looped her arm around her grandfather's back and led him over to a fallen log. They both sat down together.
"What's the matter?" she asked.
"That shoe reminded me of something," he said.
"Of what?"
"I can't talk about it," he replied in a husky voice.
It was a cold June morning in 1941. When word came that the Nazis were attacking, the Soviet administration left the area en masse and had taken with them all the food and supplies that they could carry. The locals were left with nothing to eat. And soon, they would be at the complete mercy of the Nazis. His father had gone out to find food days before and still hadn't returned. Danylo knew that if they didn't eat soon, he and his mother would starve. His family's one salvation was that they lived close to the forest. There was a chance that he could sneak into the woods and scavenge wild roots and mushrooms and bring them back before the Nazis arrived. Now that the Soviets were gone, it had to be safer.
In the pre-dawn darkness, Danylo knelt down and blindly felt a beautiful clustering of spring mushrooms behind a rotted log. He carefully placed them one by one in his hand-woven sack and then brushed aside a handful of dead leaves to grope for more mushrooms, but instead, he felt something smooth and firm. He brushed away some more leaves and felt what seemed to be a length of wood covered with cloth. Very odd. A few feet from the rotted log, Danylo felt some more mushrooms and so he picked those and placed them in his sack too, working quickly because the sun was beginning to peek through the tops of the trees. He stood up and brushed the dirt from the knees of his pants, and then bent down to pick up his mushroom sack. What he saw made him cry out in horror. The firm smoothness that he had felt was a handmade shoe, and there was a leg sticking out from it. The corpse of a man lay there, a bullet hole through the neck. Danylo felt the bile rise up his throat when he realized that the man was his father. The first rays of sunlight now mercilessly illuminated the area. His father's body wasn't the only one. There were more than a dozen, all with bullet holes in their necks. Danylo recognized them all. Each one of them had been involved in Ukrainian resistance activities against the Soviets.
Danylo gripped his mushroom sack close to his chest and ran home.
Kat wanted to go home right then, but Danylo wouldn't hear of it. " Zolota zhabka," he said, "my sad thoughts will be with me whether we get the pidpenky or not, so rather we pick them and I be sad then we don't pick them and I be sad."
Kat couldn't fault his reasoning, but she insisted that her grandfather rest while she finished. It was close to ten by the time she had filled both bags. Instead of waiting for the bus, Kat called home to see if someone could pick them up. Genya answered.
"I'll be right there."
Kat noted her sister's suppressed look of cool disapproval as she pulled up in front of Cawthra House in their mother's car. Kat held her grandfather's elbow and guided him into the passenger seat and then she sat down in the back seat. Once they pulled into the driveway, Kat had barely enough time to get out of the car and help her grandfather out before Genya had put the car in reverse and was backing out of the driveway, spewing gravel as she went.
By the time they got into the house, Danylo was grey with fatigue. He quickly washed and then lay down in his room.
CHAPTER 14
PREPARING PIDPENKY FOR the winter was a time and space-consuming affair. Kat's father had already lit a fire in the wood stove and it had burnt down to a steady dry heat. A few years ago, he had perfected a contraption for drying the pidpenky.
Orysia opened her daughter's bag and grinned with delight. "These look excellent, Kataryna!"
"They're exceptional this year," agreed Kat. She opened her grandfather's bag and let some of his mushrooms tumble gently out onto the utility table in the summer kitchen.
It was essential that the mushrooms be processed immediately because if they sat at all, they would go slimy. And they couldn't be washed with water for the same reason. Each one had to be carefully dried and brushed. Kat was tired, but that didn't stop her from grabbing dishtowels and mushroom brushes from the kitchen and pitching in. She and her parents set up a mini factory line to process the mushrooms. Kat blotted one mushroom dry at a time and then handed it to her mother, who would gently whisk away every last remnant of dirt with a small brush. Orysia would then hand the mushroom to Walt, who would break off the stem and set it aside, then thinly slice the cap. The dehydrating contraption he'd come up with consisted of five individual pieces of screen door mesh that had each been framed with wood. He had already covered the first mesh screen with a layer of cheesecloth, and so as each mushroom cap was sliced, he placed the slices side by side on the cheesecloth. When a whole layer was done, cheesecloth would be laid on top and then another mesh frame placed on top.
The warmth from the stove made the summer kitchen a cozy place to work, and Kat delighted in working together with her parents this way. With Danylo asleep, it also gave her the opportunity to talk with her parents about some things that had been on her mind.
"Have either of you read that file Mr. Vincent left?" Kat asked.
Walt nodded, and Orysia answered, "We read it this morning."
Kat reached for another mushroom and carefully blotted every part of it. "What did it say?"
"It was basically a summary of why the issue of Nazi war crimes became hot after 50 years of silence," said Orysia.
"So why did it?" asked Kat.
Walt stopped his slicing for a moment and looked up at his daughter. "You were just a baby when all this happened," he said. "An MP got up in the House of Commons in 1985 and claimed that Joseph Mengele had applied to immigrate to Canada in 1962 and that the government knew his identity at the time but hadn't done anything about it. More than that, some people claimed that Mengele might still be living in Canada."
Kat knew who Joseph Mengele was. He had been one of the most cruel and brutal Nazis of all. As a doctor, he should have been healing the sick, but instead he used his medical skills to do dreadful experiments on humans. The pain and suffering he had caused was infamous. "You're kidding," she said. "How could that have happened?"
"Well, it didn't," replied her mother. "It was an unfounded rumour. Mengele died in South America in 1979 and there is no evidence that he ever tried to enter Canada."
"What's that got to do with this file then?" asked Kat,
more confused than when the conversation started.
"The government didn't know it was just a rumour at the time. They decided to set up a commission to investigate and report to the government," explained Orysia. "Also, there were allegations that thousands of other Nazi war criminals were living in Canada."
"That's awful," said Kat. "Didn't the government screen Nazis out?"
"Again," said Walt. "This was just a rumour. When World War II ended, the Cold War began. The government was more concerned with screening out possible Soviet spies and terrorists than former Nazis."
Kat frowned. "I don't understand. They should still have been screening out Nazis."
"I agree," said Orysia. "But thousands of refugees and displaced persons were immigrating all at the same time. It was hard for the immigration officials to do proper screening. There were so many languages to deal with. And the sheer volume of immigrants was something else."
"What does this have to do with Dido?" asked Kat.
"He was one of the many thousand Ukrainian immigrants who came to Canada because their part of Ukraine had been taken over by the Soviet Union."
"He and Baba were Displaced Persons escaping Communism. Dido told me all about that."
"They were escaping both Communism and Nazism," added her father. "The Nazis considered Ukrainians and other Slavs to be sub-human."
"I thought only Jews and Gypsies were considered subhuman by the Nazis," replied Kat.
"Jews and Gypsies were considered even worse than subhuman," said her father. "Where some Slavs were to be kept alive for slave-labour, every last Jew and Gypsy was to be murdered."
A shudder went through Kat that even the warmth of the wood stove couldn't shake. How could one group hate so much? It was utter evil.
"I still don't understand what this has to do with Dido, and what all this has to do with war crimes," said Kat.
By this time Walt had filled up one whole frame with sliced mushroom caps and was working on the second. As he placed the empty frame carefully on top of the one covered with cheesecloth and mushrooms, he continued to explain the situation to his daughter. "The allegation that was made in the 1980s was that amongst those postwar immigrants, there were Nazi war criminals who had snuck in and were being protected by their ethnic communities."
Kat was silent for a moment, considering the scenario as she blotted dry the pidpenky one by one. She looked up first to her father and then to her mother, frowning. "Do you think that's possible?" she asked.
"Anything's possible," replied Walt. "But it's not likely. The Nazis were brutal beasts. In the case of the Ukrainian community, I just can't see it."
Her mother nodded in agreement. "If there was a Nazi in our community, he would be drummed out."
"But what you're telling me is that this commission showed that there were Nazis hiding out in Canada," argued Kat. "So obviously, someone was protecting them."
Orysia put down her mushroom brush and looked her daughter in the eye. "Actually, hon, that's not what the file says at all."
"Then what does it say?"
"For one, that there are not thousands of Nazi war criminals hiding in Canada. The official list given to the Commission contained 774 names."
"That's still a lot," said Kat.
"But the people on that list were just suspects," continued her mother.
Kat heard a car trunk close in the driveway, and looked out the front door to see that her sister had returned in their mother's car with two huge paper bags filled with groceries.
"Help!" she called from the door step. Walt jumped up and opened the door, taking one of the bags from her and depositing it in the kitchen.
"Did you remember freezer bags?" asked Orysia, standing up from her own work with the mushrooms to give her oldest daughter a hug and to take the other bag from her.
"I've got them," replied Genya.
"We're talking about Dido's case and Mr. Vincent's file," Walt explained to Genya, who could see that another serious conversation was taking place.
Genya pulled off her jacket and draped it over the back of one of the kitchen chairs and then began unpacking the groceries. "I read some of that this morning," she began. "I bet every one of the people on that list did something bad to get there."
Her mother rolled her eyes with impatience. "If you'd read the whole file, Genya, then you know that half the people never lived in Canada, and many on the list weren't even born before World War II. What's the "bad" stuff they were supposed to have done? Have a foreign accent?"
"Maybe a neighbour complained about the music they were playing," suggested Walt, thinking of the music Gen liked to play.
"You are being ridiculous," said Genya. "The government is just trying to root out Nazi war criminals hiding in Canada."
"Then why is it that more than half the people on the list had never even set foot in Canada?" asked her mother.
Kat looked from her sister to her mother and then shook her head in confusion. "That doesn't make sense."
"That's what the Commission thought too."
"Who made up this list, anyway?" asked Kat.
"It was made up by the self-styled Nazi hunter, Sol Littman," explained her father. "And in fact, the whole Commission was set up in response to his false accusations."
"But it doesn't sound like this list was put together with very much thought," said Kat.
"You're right," said Walt. "And in fact, Justice Deschenes himself chastised Littman for his gross exaggerations and for wasting the court's time and money."
"I don't believe it," said Genya. "There are thousands of Nazi war criminals hiding out. I hear it on the news all the time."
"A juicy news story is not necessarily true," continued Orysia hotly. She pointed at the report the lawyer had left for them to read. "Of the 774 cases brought forward to the Commission, only 20 could be substantiated with even surface evidence."
"And those twenty people should be tried," answered Genya. "Just because one is your father, doesn't make it all right."
"That's a low blow," said Orysia. "But I agree with you about criminal court."
"Then what's the problem?" asked Genya. "That's what the Commission recommended. Those twenty were to be charged with war crimes and then tried in a criminal court. They're innocent until proven guilty. That's justice, pure and simple."
"You didn't read the whole report," retorted her mother. "If you did, you'd know that the government couldn't find enough evidence, and the first three charges were dropped because of lack of evidence."
"Then that's the end of it," replied Genya. "If they don't have the evidence, then the case is closed. End of story. I don't know why you're getting so hot under the collar about this."
Kat looked at her big sister in amazement. Could Genya, who was known for her brains, really not understand what was happening? She looked at her mother and saw that she was deeply angry with her older daughter.
"I think you've totally misunderstood what's happening with your grandfather," Orysia said with carefully enunciated words. "The government considered it a ‘failure' when they couldn't convict these people. Therefore they changed the law."
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"The remaining people on the list are not being given a criminal trial at all. They are not presumed innocent. On the basis of surface allegations that can't hold up in criminal court, they're being deported instead."
Genya regarded her mother in confusion.
Walt piped in, "They're assuming he's guilty without evidence. They're calling him a war criminal, but this trial that's approaching is not a criminal trial; it's a deportation trial. They're sidestepping the criminality altogether and they're going to deport him because they say that he may have lied during immigration proceedings, and he's got to prove that he didn't lie."
"That's simple," said Genya, pulling more items out of the grocery bags. "All he's got to do is get his original immigration documents from the government archives and what he said
during the immigration proceedings will be down there. If he lied, he lied; if he didn't — that will be obvious too."
"But Genya," replied her mother sadly. "The immigration documents were all destroyed by the government. How is he going to prove that he didn't lie?"
CHAPTER 15
DANYLO WAS NOT asleep in his room. He could hear his family arguing about him and it gave him great pain. It cut him to the quick to think that misunderstandings about his past were bringing sorrow to his loved ones now. If only they could see what had happened. If only the government could understand too.
The image of his father's corpse had flashed into his mind unbidden and unwanted that morning. And now a flood of other memories filled his mind.
When World War II started on September 1, 1939, Hitler and Stalin were allies. The Soviets came to his village of Orelets days later, on September 17th, 1939, and the villagers greeted the change with fear and hope. They had lived under oppressive Polish rule for far too long. Ukrainian wasn't to be spoken, and the Ukrainian Orthodox church was suppressed. Ukrainians were not allowed to go to university, and they were blocked from many jobs. Would the Soviets be better?
At first, Ukrainian language schools were opened and Ukrainian culture was allowed to flourish. Many people, including Danylo and his sister Kataryna, had joined the Communist Party.
The first inkling of trouble for Danylo came a month later with the first elections. The slate of candidates consisted of a single name for each position.
"Is this a joke?" Danylo had asked the election commissar after he had stood for hours in the line-up with the rest of the villagers. The line-up extended down the whole main street and ended inside the chytalnya, or reading room, in the village square. "Why bother holding an election if you're only allowing one candidate to run for each position?"
The commissar looked up wearily from a sheaf of papers on his makeshift desk. Danylo peered at the list and saw that it appeared to contain the names of each and every villager over the age of eighteen. As each villager "voted", the commissar would take a ruler and a pen and carefully draw a line through their name.
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