"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.
"Don't ask, just vote," said the commissar.
Danylo took the ballot from the commissar's outstretched hand, ripped it in two, and strode out of the building.
That night, Danylo was awakened by a loud banging. His father got up to answer the door, but before he could even get to it, it was smashed open and two Soviet secret police — the NKVD — stepped in. One grabbed Danylo by the hair and dragged him outside. His mother ran after him and tried to beat one of the police with her fists, but he swatted her away as if she were no more than a fly. Danylo's father ran out and grabbed his wife and dragged her back in.
One of the police punched Danylo repeatedly in the face, while the other kicked him in the abdomen. "When we say vote, you vote," they said.
After they left, his parents carried him back inside and his mother washed the blood from his face.
In the newspaper the next morning, the headlines announced, "Communists win overwhelming majority!"
In some ways that first beating was what saved Danylo's life. The next day, Danylo and his sister dug a hiding place deep beneath the barn. The entry was hidden under a pile of manure behind the garden. From then on, Danylo and his family slept in this safe but aromatic refuge each night.
Danylo wasn't the only one to be beaten or dragged off in the middle of the night, and so the initial hope of the villagers for the Soviets was quickly replaced with fear. There were some villagers who profited from the Soviet occupation, however. These were the kind who would denounce their neighbours to get ahead. It was the thugs and the bullies who ruled the day. Starting in September 1939, the NKVD, with local collaborators, rounded up all of the people who had been leaders within the Ukrainian community. They were loaded into cattle cars and shipped off to Siberia. Sometimes, in a fit of efficiency, the newly arrested were simply shot. By April 1940, a new wave of terror had arrived. Vast numbers of people were arrested and shipped off. No one was safe. The NKVD would walk into people's homes at night and arbitrarily arrest whoever they found. The best and the brightest were taken, and had it not been for the Feschuks' hiding place, they too would have been taken away. Then one night, Kataryna mysteriously disappeared.