What burdens did those who were taken forcibly from their homes in Ukraine during World War II carry with them? How were these transported to the distant lands they migrated to as refugees? To what extent were these heavy weights transmitted to their descendants?
These are questions I have pondered long and hard, because I have found the scars in my own soul. I was born in Australia as the daughter of a Ukrainian-born father. He was one of the many who in the early 1940s was given the "choice", of going to the Russian front to pick up dead bodies or being transported to Germany as a forced laborer. So, as a young fellow, off he went - to Germany.
Already he had seen his ancestral farm taken over by the communists and watched his mother crying miserably over the kitchen table about it. Members of his family were tortured in the new KGB residence nestled among the farmhouses of his small village near Brody in Western Ukraine. An older brother was murdered and dumped in the forest and a sister sent off to Siberia, leaving her son standing alone at the railway station with no parent remaining. In the Ukraine of that time, fierce nationalists were fiercely punished.
 I always had the impression that my father remembered his time in Germany during the war as rather a jolly adventure. He was a very young man and probably enjoyed seeing the world a bit. However, he couldn't have been very enthusiastic about his work in the coalmines of the Ruhr district since he escaped and ran away. Like many simple village folk, he missed his family and wanted to go home.
Going home was not an option, as the Nazi SS were searching for the runaway there. He managed to hole up with some other lads from his village in, of all places, Berlin. They took him in and fed him and eventually, when their food rations could no longer stretch to feed him, he got himself another "job" in a factory. Looking back it was remarkable that the German authorities never linked the Volodymyr Sitka in Berlin with the same person who was wanted for legging it from the Ruhr District.
I always knew my father as a fearful, cautious, unadventurous man. I was embarrassed by the way he was subservient to even the most minor authority figures, such as teachers or doctors, in our small Australian town. Once I had extracted the story of his war years from him I was amazed that such a timid character could have effected an escape from the SS and, later, the KGB.
I guess he knew it was out of character because he always spoke of his time in Germany with gusto; but only the stories he enjoyed. Other parts of the tale could not be cajoled, forced or tricked out of him. He never talked about his life in Ukraine and I was left to wonder, why?
My father was not someone you could get to talk about things. He was the antithesis of an intellectual; he had a stubborn peasant mentality. I can only speculate about his motivations.
The consequences for me were multiform. Throughout my childhood and early adult years I had no contact with the Ukrainian side of my family (my mother is German). Even worse, I got to know very little about them. So, to some extent I was a psychological orphan. I often tried to get my father to reveal things about the missing part of my family, mostly to no avail. He never wrote to them or made inquiries about them.
 Volodymyr had effectively cut himself off from his family. Why? You might surmise, as he implied, that he was afraid of either being forcibly deported back to Soviet punishment or making things harder for his family by initiating contact from the West. I always pooh-poohed such a notion while I was a young leftist. However later, after visiting post-Soviet Ukraine, and learning more about my family's nationalist leanings and activities, I gave a bit more credence to this theory.
All the same it didn't explain why he wouldn't, or couldn't, talk more about his life back in Ukraine. After all, some other Ukrainians we knew from a similar background corresponded with and even ventured behind the Iron Curtain to visit their relatives.
Eventually I concluded it was what we might call a form of posttraumatic stress syndrome. He had cut himself off emotionally to block out his feelings. He had been exposed to a multitude of horrors, in addition to being forced to leave the family he would never see again. These horrors included being on a train that was bombed, an incident from which only a handful survived; and just making it over to the American side of a German river, with the Soviet troops hot on his heels.
After he journeyed to Australia, following his successful escape into Western Germany, he wanted to lay low. We could barely ever persuade him to get in the car for a Sunday drive. He didn't want to go anywhere else ever again. No holiday excursions for us. All he wanted to do was go to work and grow vegetables (especially potatoes).
In a sense he went back to his peasant roots. But the family was missing. In a way he was also missing. I never felt I could reach him or connect with him. He functioned adequately, but he had closed a part of himself down.
I had to find my family without his help. I did it on a visit to Canada in 1977 when I was 25. Sitka was a unique name in Australia. Looking in the Toronto phone book I found it was not so rare, and managed to make contact with a family named Sitka, not related, but from the same village. They had photos of my surviving aunts sitting outside the family home in Zabolotzi. The Toronto Sitka's wrote to them and revealed to them the location of their long lost brother.
Enthusiastic letters from them subsequently arrived in Ocean Grove, the Australian town where my father had settled. Was he pleased? Excited? No. He was disturbed. I might have done myself a favor, but I had made life more difficult for him by dredging up feelings he would rather have left buried.
After his death I found numerous letters, half drafted, in response, that were never sent. He didn't really want to have contact with them. Under my urging he managed one or two brief replies, then went on ignoring pleas from them. I had to take over family communications, asking Ukrainian friends and acquaintances to translate my writings, as I had no literacy in the language of my lost forbears.
My desire to visit Ukraine was taken as a threat by my father. He issued dire warnings of horrific consequences if I should dare to venture there. Despite this, once the Soviet Union was dissolved, and numerous Ukrainians went and came back seemingly unscathed, I made a pilgrimage to discover my roots. It was a deeply emotional journey, one that he really did not want to share.
When I produced pictures of his old home and the joyful gathering of his nieces and nephews, who he, as a youngest child, had grown up around, he would barely glance at them. There was some reaction, but it was muted and guarded by, I guess, a desire to dull the edge I had unwittingly sharpened. The heartfelt entreaties by his kin to re-embrace the family were deflected.
My mother, though long separated from my father, showed far more interest and emotion. She sent them gifts and was keen to know about my journey and all about them. Yet she knew them as little as I did, having met my father after he had severed contact. Their letters to my father continued to elicit little response. Now those who were old enough to have known him as a boy have all passed away, as he has. Even when I was there with them there was little I could learn about my father and his past, as my Ukrainian was limited and translation opportunities few.
It has always been hard, even painful, for me to have access to my historical search blocked. Though born in Australia, and also part German, I still always felt very Ukrainian. But the attempts to communicate with my father in a more meaningful and deeper way were always frustrated. So I was left to speculate on why he was like that.
In the ensuing years, having learned much about the effects of trauma on people, I can see he must have been damaged by his experiences. Each one of the many painful and difficult events in his life would nowadays be seen as potentially causing major problems. Australia is a relatively peaceful country. A train crash in which one person dies results in extensive counseling being provided for all who were on the train.
Yet in Germany my father was one of the few survivors of hundreds, not even rescued by emergency services. They had to walk back to Berlin under the bombers, unwashed, unfed and fearful of being accused of escaping. What else did he witness in those war years that he wouldn't even talk about? There were tantalizing hints of something else from him.
Before that there was the harshness of Ukrainian village life in a strictly structured patriarchal, almost pre-industrial, society. In a lucid moment he mentioned a brutal older brother-in-law persecuting him. I felt echoes of such treatment when I saw how horribly dogs were treated in my father's home village. I came to believe that the psychology was, "kick the being below you on the rung of the hierarchical ladder."
Whatever the ultimate cause of my father's truculence - perhaps the combination of a whole trunk full of accumulated encumbrances -- my father carried it within him and I inherited it. For we grow up in our parents' shadows. They are inevitably cast over us.
My father kept with him an old musty greatcoat within which he survived the winters of the war. I remember it as huge and heavy. He refused to get rid of it long after it was redundant in Australia's mild climate. He was very sentimental about that coat. We used to tease him about it. Eventually my mother managed to throw it out. But when the chill winds blow in my life I might as well be wearing his old coat, like a thick heavy skin, blocking out the lightness and warmth of my own potential.
That is some of my experience. In talking with others of my generation about our shared heritage I see my scars mirrored in them. We reminisce together about our strangely behaving parents and how they have affected us and created disease in our subsequent lives. We work on freeing up our emotional responses, or freeing ourselves from over emotional responses. As modern western intellectuals do, we work hard at unpacking that heavy old bag of transmitted trauma, and shedding the old skins.
Is that what is happening back in the old country? Is that perhaps what is happening to the old country herself, a painful, long, slow unburdening?
Editor's Note: Volodymyr Sitka, once he left German chose to keep the German transliteration of his name for the rest of his life. Therefore, for all of his remaining years he was known as Wolodymyr Sitka, rather than his original birth name. His daughter still resides in Australia and may be reached at sitka@jeack.com.au.
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