Angry in the Great White North

Borys Wrzesnewskyj might well be the most foolish Ukrainian Canadian in the country.

As we know, he stepped in it when he called Jason Kenney's upcoming visit to the Nazi death camps in Poland a jaunt:

Liberal MP Borys Wrzesnewskyj is livid about Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's trip to Poland this week. Referring to the minister's visit to Auschwitz as a "jaunt," the Toronto MP says Mr. Kenney should be here, or in Haiti, dealing with the aftermath of the devastating earthquake.

Mr. Kenney left on Sunday for Poland where he is to attend the 65th anniversary ceremonies of the liberation of the Nazi death camp. Mr. Wrzesnewskyj contends that Mr. Kenney is also taking some time to visit the Wieliczka Salt Mine where miners built an underground cathedral and carved statues from the salt; there is a salt statue of the late Pope John Paul. "Now that is wonderful but that could wait two or three weeks, especially at a time when he has this humanitarian catastrophe in Haiti, which his department has not been handling well."

Now put aside the fact that when there is an official visit like this, the host country expects the visitor to make himself available for local photo ops.  The Polish government is like any other in this respect, but in particular, the government might not want visitors to come, see Nazi death camps, and leave -- with the impression that there is nothing more to Poland than a history of occupation and murder.  That would be pretty understandable if it was true.

But the trip to the salt mine wasn't even on the agenda, according to the ministry:

Mr. Kenney's spokesman, Alykhan Velshi, called Mr. Wrzesnewskyj's comments "disgusting."

"It's pretty low for the Liberals to criticize a minister for representing the Canadian government at Auschwitz concentration camp on the 65th anniversary of its liberation," he said. "And it's disgusting, but not surprising, that Borys Wrzesnewsky would call an Auschwitz visit a 'jaunt.'"

Mr. Velshi also disputed the Liberal MP's version of Mr. Kenney's agenda. "A visit to a salt mine is not, nor has it ever been, on the Minister's itinerary," he told The Globe.

Not surprisingly, Wrzesnewskyj has backed down:

In a statement released after Mr. Wrzesnewskyj called The Globe to clarify his remarks, he said: "I sincerely regret these comments. I would never trivialize a Minister's visit to Auschwitz and especially on the 65th anniversary of its liberation. Had I been fully informed, I would not have made these comments."

Fine, you say, he apologized.  But you're not Polish.  I am.  Ukrainians ought to know better than to start to trivialize the Polish experience under Nazi occupation.

So what was that Polish experience?  Universal resistance to the Nazis:

Unlike in most European countries occupied by Nazi Germany - where the Germans sought and found true collaborators among the locals - in occupied Poland there was no official collaboration neither at the political nor at the economic level. Poland also never officially surrendered to the Germans. Under German occupation, the Polish army continued to fight underground, as Armia Krajowa and forest partisans - Lesni. The Polish resistance movement in World War II in German-occupied Poland was the largest resistance movement in all of occupied Europe. As a result, Polish citizens were unlikely to be given positions of any significant authority.  The vast majority of the pre-war citizenry collaborating with the Nazis was the German minority in Poland which was offered one of several possible grades of the German citizenship.  In 1939, before the German invasion of Poland, 800,000 people declared themselves as members of the German minority in Poland mostly in Pomerania and Western Silesia. During the war there were about 3 million former Polish citizens of German origin who signed the official list of Volksdeutsche. People who became Volksdeutsche were treated by Poles with special contempt, and the fact of them having signed the Volksliste constituted high treason according to the Polish underground law.

And can Ukrainians say the same?

Before the Second World War Ukraine was divided primarily between the Ukrainian SSR of the Soviet Union and the Second Polish Republic. Smaller regions were administered by Romania and Czechoslovakia. Only the Soviet Union recognised Ukrainian autonomy, and large numbers of Ukrainians, particularly from the East, fought in the Red Army.

The negative impact of Soviet denationalisation policies implemented in the 1930s were still fresh in the memory of Ukrainians. These included the Holodomor of 1933, the Great Terror, the persecution of intellectuals during the Great Purge of 1937-38, the massacre of Ukrainian intellectuals after the annexation of Western Ukraine from Poland in 1939, the introduction and implementation of Collectivisation.

As a result the population of whole towns, cities and villages, greeted the Germans as liberators which helps explain the unprecedented rapid progress of the German forces in the occupation of Ukraine.

Even before the German invasion, the Nachtigall and Roland battalions were set up and trained as Ukrainian battalions in the Wehrmacht, and were part of the initial invading force.

With the change in regime ethnic Ukrainians were allowed and encouraged to work in administrative positions. These included and the auxiliary police, post office, and other government structures; taking the place of Poles, Russians and Jews.

There is evidence of Ukrainian participation in the Holocaust.  The auxiliary police in Kiev participated in rounding up of Jews who were directed to the Babi Yar massacre.

Ukrainians participated in crushing the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943 and the Warsaw Uprising of 1944 where a mixed force of German SS troops, Russians, Cossacks, Azeris and Ukrainians, backed by German regular army units - killed up to 40,000 civilians.

Yeah, so this is a sore point with Poles everywhere, especially knowing that special Ukrainian units helped Nazis kill Poles on Polish soil.  And now to listen to some damn Ukrainian calling a visit to Poland to mark the end of the Nazi murder of European Jewry on their native soil a jaunt?!

Like it's some sort of trip to Disneyland?

Now I said "damn Ukrainian" deliberately, and I'm sure it'll be quoted without this explanatory note added in, but so what?  The fact is, a lot of Poles will be thinking exactly that.  They feel (not without reason) that they don't need to be taking lessons from a Ukrainian on what constitutes an appropriate way to mark a key anniversary of the end of Nazism in Europe.

The great thing about Canada is that Poles and Ukrainians can live together and leave these bad feelings behind.  But then they are never really left behind.  They just fade, a bit, as everyone tries to make a new life in a new country.  But when one side hits a sore point like this, the feelings come back, and come back strongly.

Their sons and daughters, born here and raised in Canada, don't feel it any less.

Why would Wrzesnewskyj make a stupid mistake like this?  I suppose it could be one of two reasons.

The first could be that Wrzesnewskyj really is an insensitive clod who thinks Polish sensitivity to the Holocaust on Polish territory is just overwrought nonsense for something that he doesn't think was such a terrible thing.  I am absolutely certain that this is not true.  Though war crime investigations in Canada seem to come back to Ukrainians exclusively, I don't count Wrzesnewskyj in that company.

The second is that Wrzesnewskyj himself is so removed from his European roots (he is third generation) that he just doesn't get it.  He just had no idea how particularly grating insensitive comments like his sound to a Pole when spoken by someone with Ukrainian name.  An honest mistake born of ignorance then.  Fair enough.  But if that's true, I would hope he doesn't peddle his ethnic name as a vote-getter in elections.  He doesn't deserve to.