Yesterday, I paid a visit to film maker Yuriy Luhovy's with a friend of mine who wanted to return a copy of the Ukrainian version of his multi-award winning documentary Genocide Revealed. During the course of his questioning Yuriy about other films I was surprised to learn that it was at that moment that that friend had first heard of the internment of Ukrainians during WWI.
He was equally surprised to learn of the Internment camp at Spirit Lake, Quebec, that at Field, Alberta and the many others. We gave him a short history lesson and mentioned how the father of the former mayor of the community Greenfield Park on Montreal's south shore, Steve Olinyk, though while not interned, had to report to police weekly to have his identity papers stamped, and to add insult to injury his father had to pay the police two dollars for them to do so.
For other episodes on that black page in Canadian history, and the precedent for the internment of Italian and Japanese Canadians during WWII, check out the Internment pages on InfoUkes.com. A more recent recount of a darker part of Banff, that somehow took nearly 100 years to be brought into the light in the Calgary Herald: "Luciuk: Banff finally tells story of Ukrainian internees - So-called enemy aliens were forced to do labour in national park"
Vasyl Pawlowsky Independent Consultant
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