Deported Boikos return to Ukraine

When the Polish and Soviet Ukrainian governments signed a treaty on territorial changes in 1951 everything was arranged: the date of changing the frontier, what would become of the property left by both sides, and how much it would cost.

Everything was arranged but people: 32,000 Ukrainians in 45 villages of Nyzhnioustrivsky, Khyriv, and Strilka districts in Drohobych oblast, and tens of thousands of Poles in the province of Lublin. The text of the treaty made no mention of all those people, where all comments relating to the act were packed with Communist eulogies. None at the time seemed to have considered the idea that changing the frontier line by a dozen kilometers meant not only transfer of enterprises and natural resources to new owners, but a drastic change in the destinies of people now forced to leave their homes.

Madame Lesia, aged seventy, was born in the Boiko village of Litovyshchy, in the Beskyd Mountains. The family was a prosperous one; her grandfather had a smithy, and her father traded in tobacco. She had a boyfriend by the name of Mykhailo who worked at the local dairy. They started dating while still in school and planned to get married, but the young man was arrested in the late 1940s, charged with theft. The auditor found several kilos of butter missing and instantly surmised that the butter had been supplied to the Ukrainian underground guerrillas. Everybody in the village knew that Mykhailo had no contact with “the forest,” but public opinion and personal reputation meant nothing at the time. Mykhailo was sent to Siberia and Lesia promised to wait. She waited for three years in Litovyshchy.

Bad news comes in pairs, her father suddenly died and mother was taken seriously ill. She was hospitalized in Sambir, leaving Lesia to take care of her two younger sisters. She prayed for her mother to return from the hospital and Mykhailo from Siberia. The old woman recovered two months later and Mykhailo was released ahead of term several years later, but they would never see their Litovyshchy again, except Lesia who would visit it fifty years later.

“In the spring of 1951, we were told that we would be transferred for permanent residence to eastern Ukraine, because Poland needed oil and the Soviet Union needed coal (a deposit was found near Chervonohrad),” Lesia told me on the bus to her village. “No one wanted to move, people sat by their sacks, bags, and suitcases and lamented like at a funeral. But we had no choice. We three girls were made to pack, escorted to a truck, and brought to the district railway station. Then we found ourselves in a boxcar with two guards, submachine guns trained on us, and on our way to the east.”

Lesia and her sisters fled from Kherson oblast. Others would have gladly followed them, but their identity papers had been confiscated. The three sisters were allowed to leave allegedly to take their mother from the hospital in Sambir. Of course, they did not plan to return. The girls loathed the prospect of picking cotton or plowing under the scorching sun in return for a mark in the team leader’s notebook and a few hundred grams of grain. Also, they were hard put to adapt to the local folkways, postwar fashion, and Russified vernacular.

By the time Mykhailo was released he knew that his family was living far from Litovyshchy and he found them in an entirely new environment. His bride with her sister and mother had settled in a small town in Lviv oblast. They had to start from scratch. Lesia was the only breadwinner. Five years after deportation she received a letter from her friends, saying Mykhailo had been released, so she waited for him to arrive. A month passed, another, then another. She could not visit him, as it was contrary to the village etiquette. “I might have waited longer, but I had two sisters and until I married I would be considered an obstacle in their way. Besides, I thought that Mykhailo had met a girl he liked better... So I decided I’d had enough of self-imposed widowhood and got married.”

She was a mother when she visited Kherson oblast to meet friends and neighbors. There she also met with the man she had wanted as the father of her children.

“Mykhailo asked why I hadn’t waited for him and I asked why he hadn’t come once out of prison camp. He said he had nothing to wear, just his padded jacket, and was ashamed to visit me like that. After all, I came from a well-to-do family and he did not want me to see him dressed like a beggar. I would’ve never for a moment thought that was the reason for his not coming. I needed him, not his clothes!”

But it was exactly as Mykhailo said. The collective farmers were paid no money and they lived in poverty, especially the deportees. Each such family had to pay 5,000 rubles by installments for a cramped haphazardly built two-room home. Each would build attachments, make whatever improvements they could afford. And there was livestock, of course, as no Boiko man could respect himself without livestock. Mykhailo had been stubbornly putting away money for clothes and the trip when he learned that Lesia was getting married soon. There was nothing he could do about it, for that was the countryside etiquette, so Mykhailo put up with his lot. Eventually he, too, got married and taught at the village school. Colleagues wanted him as school principal, but this required Communist Party membership. He refused and in due time retired as an ordinary schoolteacher. He hoped he would visit his native land one of these days, pay homage to his family home and visit the local Boiko church where he had been baptized. He passed away less than a year ago.

Lesia received a letter with the bad news from Kherson oblast and for several days afterwards could not contain herself.

“I have a good husband and excellent children. I knew Mykhailo and I would never be together again, yet his death came as a terrible blow. I still can’t believe he’s not among the living. Maybe if he were alive we’d be visiting our home village together.”

They could, indeed. The Ustryki Society arranges from the town of Mykolayiv, Lviv oblast, for 1951 deportees’ trips to the Boikivska Vatra in Ustryki [Poland]. Residents of border regions are not even required a travel passport, as an agreement was made between the Ukrainian and Polish border guard authorities, allowing passage on an invitation from Poland with a domestic passport. Naturally, the privilege extends only to deportees and/or their posterity. Lesia took advantage and visited the home village with her sister. They tidied up their father’s grave and lit candles. They couldn’t find the graves of any of Mykhailo’s relatives, save for a lone stone cross erected in memory of the brother of Mykhailo’s grandfather, a so-called kurkul. Lesia lit a candle there, made the sign of the cross, wiped the dust from the carved legend, and stiffened at the thought that the last name would be hers if only...

If only life had not undergone such dramatic change in her native mountains; if the world upheaval had not started in 1939; if there hadn’t been Communist purges in 1946-47; and most importantly, if the USSR’s last deportation hadn’t taken place in 1951. “If they didn’t make us resettle, Mykhailo would return and we would be together. Everybody would be in their native village now. As it is, we are strangers in the east, because we came and settled in a strange land; here, too, because we no longer belong here,” says Lesia. She knows from books that Ukrainian deported to the east from western Ukrainian territories are now called Muscovites in Halychyna, and Banderites in eastern Ukraine.

A journalist of the Polish newspaper, Nowiny (The News) had a long talk with the old woman during the Boikivska Vatra in Ustryka. He wanted to know if she had returned for good, was now claiming her old property. She told him she would have returned a decade ago if offered an opportunity. Now she was too old and returning to her native village in a foreign country was too much of a problem.

Her father’s home was now a post office. “I came and told the lady that I had once lived here and that my sister had been born here. And I also assured her that I had no claims. It was good to see the house in one piece and tidy.”

Of more than 300 Boiko homes in Litovyshchy before the deportation, several dozen have survived mainly because of the scarce populace (the same is true of the entire region). After the place was cleared of Ukrainians the Poles were in no hurry to settle as the soils were not fertile, the winter was long and transport poor. And there are ten times less residents than before World War II. Of 27 villages in the Polish administrative district. 11 are just names; of 26 churches three are still there, the rest are marked by the remnants of walls or foundations. One of the Boikivska Vatra guests shared his impressions: “Poland is developing, but this locality, where I was born, is falling into decay; barren fields, empty homes, churches, and our graveyards without crosses...” In fact, the church where young Lesia went with her parents is no longer there, dismantled in the 1970s, the construction materials transferred to a neighboring village and used in the erection of a Polish cathedral. One has to push one’s way through the shrubs to find the site of that beautiful sample of Boiko sacral architecture.

A divine service was celebrated for the Boikivska Vatra guests in the town of Ustryki Dolne. Until 1985, the church had been used as a store, then the authorities allowed opening Greek Catholic church. Although there are quite a few ethnic Ukrainians in the neighborhood, not all admit their parentage; only several dozen persons attend services regularly. But this time the church was packed, for it was visited by over 500 deportees. In his sermon the Greek Catholic priest from Ukraine said that one should not complain about the past; if people were deported it meant that the Lord willed it. At this more than one aging person in the audience whispered, “Not the Lord but Satan!”

Perhaps if the priest had known the story of Lesia and Mykhailo, he would not have said it.