"ORANGE AND AUSCHWITZ"

OP-ED By Bohdan Koczor, Chicago Tribune
Chicago, Illinois, Tue, 21 December 2004

I have a name. I also have a number. My parents gave me my name. It's a good Ukrainian name, and I have always been proud of it, and of my people. It wasn't always good to be a Ukrainian, however.

I was just a teenager in western Ukraine when World War II broke out. The Soviets came claiming they would liberate us. Instead they began liquidating us. The Germans drove them out. They also said they had come to free us from the Bolsheviks.

Then they began to execute us, to exploit us, even to export us as slave laborers to the Third Reich. Too many people still bury Ukraine's losses among those of the Soviet Union or Poland. They pretend Ukrainians did not exist. We proved otherwise. We resisted. Ukraine's anti-Nazi and anti-Soviet movement would carry on an armed struggle for our people's freedom well into the 1950s.

People forget all that. When they speak of Ukrainians and the war, they refer to us only as collaborators or camp guards. I was in a camp, in fact several. But I wasn't there as a guard. In fact, that's where I got my number. It's 154754. The Nazis gave it to me.

They made it easy for me to remember, by tattooing it on my forearm. I was 19 years old when they did that to me at Auschwitz. They brought me there because I was a member of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. I know it has become politically correct to label Ukrainian nationalists as anti-Semitic Nazi collaborators. That is not true.

We fought for a free Ukraine against all those who tried to extinguish our kind. Another Ukrainian there was Andriy Yushchenko, the father of Viktor Yushchenko, Ukraine's next president, I hope.

Yes, there were some Ukrainians who collaborated, out of fear, out of greed, out of prejudice. But I saw such scum among every nation represented among those at Auschwitz. I also saw them in the other concentration camps the Nazis carted me off to, including Mathausen, Melk and Ebensee. Many Ukrainian patriots, men and women, perished at the hands of the Nazis. Only a few were lucky enough to survive and to find a new life in the West, even as our homeland fell under Soviet occupation, again.

In 1991 I celebrated the collapse of the Soviet empire and Ukraine's independence. I believed that, finally, Ukraine would rejoin Europe, become a normal country. That did not happen. Ukraine remained under the grip of former communists whose corrupt rule wreaked havoc on the land.

Like many others in our diaspora, I began to despair. Would Ukraine ever be free? And then came our "Orange Revolution." In the last few weeks hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians have marched and mobilized to demonstrate that they will have their freedom. I am proud to see my people stand up for liberty, unmistakably showing the whole world that they will not tolerate more of what they have endured in the 13 years since independence supposedly came.

Last month Ukrainians watched in horror as the old guard tried to steal the election from the people. The nation made sure that didn't happen. On Sunday another election will confirm that Ukra ine's people want to be in Europe, not sequestered in some post-Soviet reserve on the margins of civilization. There are some who fear this resurgence of Ukrainian nationalism, who already have begun to slur this movement by pulling out the oldest and dirtiest canard in the book, claiming Ukrainian nationalists are intrinsically anti-Semitic.

We weren't, and the Orange Revolution isn't. I affirm that as a Holocaust survivor imprisoned at Auschwitz because I was a Ukrainian nationalist. Tomorrow's democratic Ukraine will be a home to all who contribute to Ukrainian freedom today.