OPINION
Monday , September 28, 2015 7
The Syrian Refugee Crisis
A story of Ukrainian refugees seventy years later
andri shchudlo › contributor
A
t the end of the summer, just before returning to classes at Osgoode Hall, I made my
annual summer trip to my hometown of
Winnipeg. While there, I visited my Ukrainian
Baba, and came across the following two photos.
On the left is a photo of my Dido in a refugee camp
in 1944, alongside other Ukrainian refugees. On the
right is my Baba in 1945 in Hanover—this was the
identification photo she had to submit in her refugee
application to come to Canada.
My grandparents were among the millions of
Eastern and Central European refugees that fled ahead
of the advancing Red Army, desperately trying to
reach the America, British and Canadian armies before
Stalin cut Europe in half and threw a 45 year Iron
Curtain over the East. As anti-Communist, Ukrainian
nationalists, my grandparents would almost certainly
have been killed if they had been unable to escape the
Soviet Union’s reoccupation of the Ukraine. They fled
from city to city in a cattle car, so crammed with suffering humanity that it was impossible to sit down
during the journey. Eventually they reached the
Western Allies, from where they applied and were
accepted as refugees to Canada. They eventually settled in one of Canada’s great Ukrainian communities
in Winnipeg’s North End. They were not the wealthy,
hyper-skilled immigrants privileged by our current
policies--my grandfather became a bricklayer and my
grandmother was a night cleaner in corporate offices.
If you are reading this you have likely noticed my
incessant and insufferable hectoring on the Syrian
refugee crisis, posting articles and raging inelegantly
against those defending Canada’s current immigration and refugee policies. My annoying insistence on
highlighting the plight of the Syrian refugees stems
from the personal resonance I feel on this issue. Quite
simply, if Canada in 1945 had had the restrictive
quotas and burdensome bureaucratic requirements
of today, my grandparents would never have made
it here. They would have been killed, or tortured by
the NKVD, or exiled to Siberia. My Dad would likely
never have been born, and I of course would never
have come into existence.
The story of Ukrainian refugees in WWII parallels
that of the Syrian refugees today in so many ways. Like
the Syrian refugees, my grandparents were destitute,
and they would never have been attractive to a country like Canada on a purely economic metric. Like the
Syrian refugees, they practiced a different religion
(Eastern Orthodox) and came from a country with no
history of liberal democracy and civil liberties, which
in the opinion of the nativists and xenophobes, would
have made them impossible to integrate into the fabric
of Canadian society. Of course, they are now among
the over 3 million Ukrainians and their descendants
in Canada, who have been integral to the building of
the affluent, peaceful country we now live in. In retrospect it seems beyond absurd to have thought they
couldn’t integrate. It is equally absurd to think that
Muslim immigrants from the Middle East would be
any less likely to do so today.
The most remarkable thing about my family’s
story is, in fact, how it is the eminently ordinary
Canadian story. Unless you are First Nations, many
of you could trace a similar story. Most recently
Croats and Bosnians and Somalis and Tamils, and
before that Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, Mennonites,
Hungarians, Germans. Baltic peoples, Italians,
Greeks, Koreans, Vietnamese, Chinese, Cambodians,
Laotians, Africans, South Americans, Mexicans, AfroCaribbean. Even before them, it was starving Irish and
persecuted Scots, runaway slaves escaping the South
to freedom via the underground railway, and British
loyalists fleeing retribution at the hands of revolutionary Americans—so many different peoples fleeing from war, persecution, famine or at the very least
material circumstances so dire they propelled them to
uproot their families and their entire lives and risk an
often hazardous journey to the frozen, sparsely populated and totally alien country of Canada. In every one
of these refugee waves, the xenophobes and nativists
said Canada should shut the door, that we could not
afford to take them in, that these culturally dissimilar
people would not integrate, etc. In every single case,
the xenophobes and nativists were completely wrong.
This is why I find the immigration and refugee policies of our current government so unfathomable. As
you may have seen, Canada has refused to accept more
than a token number of Syrian refugees. In the 4 years
since the Syrian civil war broke out, Canada has taken
in 2,400 Syrian refugees—2,400 out of more than 4
milli