sent 301623 KWK ar
rcd 301630 IHar.
Then things sped up for Maurice. Corporal Knight helped him make applications, and pressured the commandant to sign papers.
Maurice celebrated New Year’s Day 1947 with the GIs. He drank, he sang, and he danced with German, Czech and Polish girls at a party held in one of the barracks.
Two weeks later, Corporal Knight gave him a red bi-folded card, with a four-language title. It was an Allied Travel Permit that allowed him to go to Vienna. Ironically, the front was signed by the same French officer who had tried to send all the Ukrainians back to the U.S.S.R. in the fall—Charles Meistersheim..
Maurice paid for his train ticket out of the money he had saved from his meagre salary as a translator for the U.S. Army. Corporal Knight accompanied him to the train platform.
“So long, Morrie,” he said, shaking Maurice’s hand. “I’m glad you’re going home. I hear we’re going back stateside soon, too.”
“Good. Thanks for all your help.”
Knight waved his hand. “It was nothin’. But Morrie,” he leaned closer, “if you want to convince people you’re really from Canada, you better learn better English.”
Vienna
February 1947
Maurice tucked the newspapers higher under his arm to draw his handkerchief from his pocket, and blew his nose for the thousandth time that day. Five years of war, marching across whole countries, five years of sitting on cold and wet ground, of fighting and sheltering from bombs and bullets, of sneaking through the dark, and this is the worst I’ve ever felt.
Except when the Germans were starving me in the prison camp.
Or when the Reds killed Kateryna.
He tucked away the handkerchief and turned up the collar on his coat, now badly worn and threadbare. Gusts came chilly and hard between the blasted buildings. Snow drifted against walls and slush clogged the streets. Postwar Vienna had more pressing concerns than snow clearing.
He turned a corner, and saw the three-man NKVD team in front of a bomb-damaged storefront. There was no mistaking the Soviet army’s intelligence soldiers, with the red collars on the baby-shit brown coats, nor the lieutenant’s blue peaked cap with the red band. The officer was arguing in broken German with a man in a torn coat, who held a hammer in one hand and a broken board in the other.
“There is no one like that here,” the shopkeeper insisted. Like most Viennese in 1946, he was very thin. Maurice judged him to be about sixty years old. He had a grey fringe of hair around the back of his head, and despite the chilly air, no hat on his bald head. “No Russians, no Ukrainians.”
Maurice kept walking at the same pace, hoping that the soldiers would not notice him. The three Ukrainian-language newspapers seemed to burn under his arm, even through the heavy winter coat he had taken from the German supply train all those months ago.
“Is very serious to hide Soviet deserter,” he heard the lieutenant say behind him as he crossed the street.
The shopkeeper turned away and nailed the board up over the hole.
“We look inside,” said the lieutenant, and stepped toward the door.
The shopkeeper jumped to block him. “No. You have no right to enter my shop,” he said.
The NKVD soldiers lifted their rifles. “You think soldiers scare me now?” the shopkeeper said. “I’ve seen nothing but soldiers for the past ten years. Go away, Russian.” He spat into the gutter.
Maurice pretended not to watch as he continued along the other side of the street. One of the soldiers pressed the barrel of his rifle into the shopkeeper’s chest. “Go ahead, you son of a bitch,” the shopkeeper growled. “You’ve already killed my son in Poland. You’ve destroyed my business. You may as well spill my blood, too. Pull the trigger, you Russian bastard.”
A whistle echoed down the street, and against his will, Maurice turned. Two Vienna policemen ran toward the little tableau in front of the shop. The Soviet lieutenant looked disappointed. The soldiers drew their rifles across their chests and scowled as two young men in Vienna police uniforms approached.
Maurice turned away and walked as quickly as he thought he could without drawing attention to himself. He stepped into an alley and shoved the Ukrainian publications under a fallen chunk of masonry. He could easily replace them at the meeting he was heading to. He knew of close to forty Ukrainian-language publications produced in Vienna for the thousands of Ukrainians living in the city in 1946. They were refugees and emigrants, some living in U.N. displaced persons camps near the city. But there were also thousands who had emigrated before the war, and thousands more who had been born in Austria to immigrant parents.
And now, the NKVD were rounding up as many as they could to take back to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. They didn’t care whether they took deserters, people who took the opportunity to flee communism when they could, people who ran from the destruction of war, or Austrian citizens.
Or Canadian-born ethnic Ukrainians who had moved to Poland before Hitler and Stalin had divided the country between them.
As he stepped over a snow bank, he looked back at the shop. The shopkeeper stood, hammer in hand, watching the Vienna cops encouraging the NKVD men to move on.
A truck from the British army rumbled past the storefront where the defiant owner was still hammering. The NKVD and the Vienna police were gone.
Maurice blew his nose into a tattered handkerchief and walked faster to the meeting of the Ukrainian Central Relief Bureau, which he had read about in one Ukrainian-language weekly the day before. Set up by occupying Canadian and American soldiers of Ukrainian descent, the Bureau used its military access to almost anything they wanted, including D.P. camps, to provide food, clothing and counselling to Ukrainians. It operated at the edges of the laws and regulations of the U.N., which still did not recognize Ukraine as a distinct country—even though Stalin had demanded, and got, separate seats in the U.N. General Assembly for Ukraine and Belorussia.
Maurice arrived at the bomb-damaged church where the Central Ukrainian Relief Bureau, based in Innsbruck, had organized a meeting for Ukrainians living in Vienna who wanted to emigrate to western countries. Wiping his nose one more time, he pushed open the cracked, heavy door and stepped inside, realizing it was the first time he had been inside a church in over a year.
There must have been a hundred people sitting in the pews, while in front of the sacristy across the front of the church, a man in a Canadian Army uniform, another in a U.S. Army Air Force officer’s uniform and a man in an Austrian tailored suit sat in wooden chairs.
“The USSR has set up the Soviet Administration of the Plenipotentiary for Repatriation Affairs in cities all across their zones of control in Germany and Austria,” the American was saying in accented Ukrainian. “They are sending back to the USSR anyone they decide is Russian, Ukrainian or White Russian. Whether they want to go ‘home’ or not.”
“They are also taking Latvian, Estonians and Lithuanians,” said the Canadian, in better Ukrainian. “I doubt that Stalin is going to give up the Baltics or any other territory the Soviets conquered.”
“They’re also taking Ukrainian and Russian people who lived in Vienna before the war,” said a middle-aged woman in the second pew. “There was a family next door to me. Their house was destroyed by the shelling. They were staying in a United Nations shelter, and the Red Army took them with refugees back to Ukraine. The soldiers didn’t listen when they explained that they had lived in Vienna for years, that they were citizens of Austria even before the annexation. They didn’t even care that the children were born in Austria.”