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When this Thing Happened
The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Wars that Changed them
By Michael McKernan Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Copyright © 2015 Michael McKernan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-925307-16-0
CHAPTER 1
The Village
michael stawyskyj was born on 3 June 1922, in the village of Banyca. This seems a relatively simple statement, and I am very confident that the date is correct. But the new baby was not given the name Michael. That name would come some time later, tentatively in Germany and then permanently in Australia. The baby was baptised Mychajlo, probably unpronounceable in Australia. Almost every European document regarding Michael's life, even his application to settle in Australia, uses Mychajlo as his name, as would every family member in his early life and every villager among whom he grew up. The village, too, had a variety of spellings, including Banyzia and Banycia. Regardless of the variety of spellings, Banyca was a real village and Mychajlo was a real baby. I hope the reader will forgive me if I call the baby, young man, and grown man Michael throughout this story, as this was how I always knew him and how he named himself from his mid-20s onwards.
The village is now on the Polish side of the border and it was in Michael's time, too. To add to its confusions, the village name is now spelt Banica, though Michael's Ukrainian spelling must have been used at some stage in the village's history. Most of the people in the village in 1922 spoke Ukrainian. Michael would say that the nearest big city was Gribu (now Grybow), 40 kilometres away, yet the nearest city was Lvov, in Ukraine, 270 kilometres from Banyca. Lvov, when Michael was born, had a population of 219,000 people, and thus can fairly be called a city; Gribu, even today, has only 12,400 people. We can say that Michael was not used to big cities and crowds of people. He described himself as of peasant background. But that was just a fact; it implied no value judgement at all.
Michael's father was Stefan Stawyskyj and his mother was Maria. He had two brothers, Stefan and Ivan (John in Australia), and two sisters, Ulaska and Anna; an older and a younger brother; an older and a younger sister. He was, he said, in the middle. Stefan was Maria's second husband; her first husband, and the father of Maria's first two children, had died. Michael thought of himself as and, indeed, was Ukrainian, 'because you'd been teached from parents when you were born [that you were Ukrainian] ... and you first learn Ukrainian language'. Statesmen might draw and redraw national boundaries, but ordinary folk knew who they were.
Michael's parents owned a farm, which Maria had inherited from her first husband, 'but a very small one', in Michael's words. What does that mean? About ten hectares or so, he thought (about 25 acres). His father grew vegetables on the farm, onions and potatoes, almost solely for the family's own use. Michael's parents were not wealthy people and there was little money ('there was no way to make money, you know, in those days'), but there was enough food ('we have enough because we produce everything on the farm what we needed'). They had some cows and horses, but, again, I can't tell you the extent of the stock, though I suspect there were very few animals.
The family lived in a wooden house in the village, with very thick walls to keep out the cold. Nice big rooms, Michael remembered, but not many of them. Michael slept with his brothers and sisters. The village was in a valley, surrounded by mountains, and there might have been about 90 houses in the village, probably most made of wood, like his own. It was very cold in the village in winter, but Michael remembered the summers with pleasure and real joy. There were no shops in his village, though there were a few in one nearby. There was a school, 'of course', which Michael attended from the age of seven for five years or so. But only in the morning, from 8.30 until one o'clock. After that, it was farm work.
What did Michael learn at school? Well, Polish for one thing, because that was the language of instruction. He learned Ukrainian at home and a little bit at school, to read and write his own language. There was a little bit of mathematics, too, he remembered, how to add up. Michael was proud of his work at school, and his teacher clearly thought well of him. He was attentive and clever. He could pick up the reading aloud whenever asked, and he already had a fine singing voice. One of his teachers (the only teacher?) thought he might continue his education by going to study for the priesthood, the only way a poor peasant boy might go further in life, but that was out of the question. He was needed on the farm. Even late in his life, Michael remembered his school days with pleasure and some pride. He liked to say that he was good at school. It helped to define him. He was not just a farm boy.
One of the teachers whom he remembered was a rather stern woman, eager to discipline naughty little boys. In the winter, the boys would climb a low hill near the school and slide down the hill on their bottoms. This, of course, would make their pants very wet, and there would be plenty of smacks on those damp bottoms for boys who came into class with wet pants. There were no uniforms at school and children wore what they wore at home. In summer, everyone went to school barefoot, but there were boots for winter. There was little time for games, Michael remembered, but he would have liked to have had a go at soccer. There was only one problem: nobody had a ball.
I asked Michael if he had studied geography at school, and he said he had, a little. I asked him if he had ever come across Australia at school, and he said that he hadn't. And then came a memory that perhaps he had forgotten for many years. There was a book, he said, that they read in grade three, which showed an Australian Aborigine 'throwing boomerang on the dirt'. But where Australia was, or anything else about it, was not something they were giving attention to in Ukrainian/Polish schools in those years.
School, and then, of course, church. Every Sunday from ten in the morning until about noon (the Ukrainian Catholic liturgy is much more complicated and thus lengthier than the ordinary Roman-Rite Catholic Mass). Then there was another church service at four in the afternoon, which the family always attended, perhaps some type of Benediction service. The Ukrainian liturgy is sung, and Michael remembered with considerable affection the singing of all the people in the church, for the services in Ukraine were in Ukrainian, while the rest of the Catholic world still struggled under the intolerable burden of Latin. It was a big church building, wooden again, put up by the village people. The priest, when Michael was a little boy, was very old and had spent all his life in the village. He was almost certainly married, as Ukrainian Catholic priests can be, and probably participated fully in village life. After his death or retirement, new and younger priests came, but rarely lasted more than a couple of years in Banyca.
There was turmoil when Michael was about 15 years of age, because Ukrainian Orthodox people came to the village to poach souls. Up to that point, everyone had been Catholic and everyone, naturally, attended church. But then 'some people come from somewhere and start teaching [the people] about Ukrainians are supposed to be all Orthodox, and part went there, and part stayed with the same church. They build another church then for Orthodox church. There was lots of trouble because they start fighting each other.'
Michael's family was in the thick of it. His parents stayed loyal to the old church, which was either next door to their own house or very close by. The Orthodox push must have been quite successful, and, before long, the Orthodox Christians accounted for a majority of the people in the village. So they said, in triumph, we should have the church bell (a very valuable and important item) now that we have the greater number of adherents — and, as you might expect, the Catholics were having none of that. Michael, his father, and his older brother were now on 'bell watch', looking out each night for a gang of marauders intent on pinching the bell, and fighting them off. And it did come to that; they would ring the bell when the Orthodox men approached, as a way of calling out the Catholic defenders. To the best of my knowledge, the bell stayed Catholic. Michael rejoiced in a job well done.
It was tough to be born into the world anywhere in 1922, but particularly in Europe. As a young boy, Michael observed the effects of the economic crisis the whole world knew as the Great Depression. He saw the rise of racial hatred, of evil ideologies, and the prospect of war, which, in all likelihood, might draw him into the fighting. Michael couldn't see a life for himself on the family farm — there wasn't enough work for three fit men, though there had been plenty of work for an eager little boy. But it 'was very hard to get job' elsewhere. 'It was very hard. Usually, Polish government in these days said, "If you want a job, you should be Polish."' A border might have made you Polish, but your own people and the government knew that you were Ukrainian, and you were worse off for that.
There was no work for people in the village. Some went to America and some came back, 'but they didn't last long and went back again'. While at home, they spoke of a world Michael could only dream about: 'people have cars and things like that ... we usually didn't believe it'. In Banyca, people 'just work on the farms and grow things so they can feed themselves'. Michael's mother tried to sell her surplus eggs, but no one had the money to buy them.
It was possibly unusual that Michael's mother, Maria, owned the family farm; her husband, Stefan, had come from a neighbouring village and had no land. Her parents were, most likely, landless peasants, too, though Michael had never known her father, for he was dead. Maria's mother still lived in the village when Michael was a little boy, and there were no grandparents from his father's side. His father, Stefan, had fought in the First World War, in the Austrian army. He had been wounded, shot in the arm, which Michael said had caused that arm to be two inches shorter than the good arm. There was a small pension to compensate for this wound, very small I would think. Stefan had had no training as a soldier and was simply taken from his village for the war. Michael thought he had fought 'somewhere near Yugoslavia' and that he had been in the army for almost the full four years.
Army life figured on Michael's horizon, too, as a Polish citizen. Each young man, when he turned 21, was required to serve for 18 months in the Polish army, 'if you are fit'. His brother Stefan had started his period of service, but sustained an injury of some kind 'and they let him go home again'. This would tell us that Stefan was quite a deal older than Michael, at least five years or so. By the time Michael turned 21, the Polish army no longer existed, having been destroyed by the might of the German army within weeks of the Second World War starting, leaving many of Stefan's co-conscriptionists likely dead on the battlefield. The chances of war.
Michael left school at the age of 14 and turned to full-time work on the farm. 'Of course, it was hard work', he said, and laughed at the thought of it. Everything had to be done by hand. Scything the grass for hay for the winter, scything the wheat and the oats, 'no tractors, no nothing'. Ploughing the land with a horse — 'that was easy' because the horse did most of the work. But the soil was not good, 'lots of little stones in the ground, being the mountains ... not good for anything but potatoes'. So lots of potatoes were planted, and 'usually everybody go there [everybody in the family, that is] when you take it out potatoes. Children pick it ...' You could try to sell the potatoes, 'but sometime didn't pay to bring into the market because so cheap'.
And after work ended for the day? 'You can go to see the friends ... In the summer, boys just go out walking and singing ... drinking, if you have money to buy something', but Michael was too young to drink. He didn't have a girlfriend, yet, he said forcefully, 'I was very happy ... If you healthy, so you happy.' Michael was healthy; he had never seen a doctor. Indeed, there wasn't a doctor for at least 25 kilometres.
Michael used to come to stay with us in Canberra in the last part of his life, though he didn't like it very much, because he hated to be away from his own home. I would drive him down to the Tuggeranong valley, where there was a club where we could spend some quiet time together. It was almost always the same as we swung out of our suburb and drove further down the valley. Michael would then see our mountains, the Brindabellas, which fringe southern Canberra. Beautiful blue-green mountains, dominating our low settled plains. And his heart would stir as he saw them and he would be happy again. He was a mountain man. Canberra's mountains reminded him so powerfully of home. Of where he had roamed minding the family's cows as a little boy. Of where he had roamed with his friends in the long summer twilight, singing their lungs out, in the joy of the mountains, the valley, the village, and home.
When he was out with the cows, he would sing to them with his strong, powerful, and surprisingly deep voice for the sheer joy of it all. When he came back into the village, the people would tell him that they had heard him up there, making his songs, making them smile to hear him. 'You didn't know any better life, you know ... If you healthy, so you happy.'
CHAPTER 2
War Comes
there were no radios in Banyca and no newspapers. Yet, somehow, the village people kept up with at least some of the news. People travelled from village to village passing on what they had heard. Perhaps the priest was a little better informed than most and told his parishioners what he knew. Perhaps it was hard to suppress the news of the awfulness that was engulfing their homes, villages, and nations at the command of Hitler. Around the world, people watched in newsreel cinemas as his unfolding madness developed; they heard his remarkable speeches on the radio; they read in the newspapers as western leaders ducked and weaved, trying to appease him. The people of Banyca and the other villagers of Poland and Ukraine were spared the details of all these things and had only the vaguest knowledge of the way the world was. But they would feel its consequences in much the same strength as people elsewhere in Europe. Except that they might be spared the bombing.
How much did Michael Stawyskyj know about the coming approach of war? Did he and his friends in the village talk about it and what it would mean for them? You would expect so. To have turned 17 exactly three months before war was declared on 3 September 1939 was the worst possible timing. No such young European boy could think that the war would not affect him. Most of these young Europeans would have thought that they would soon be in an army, and many might have thrilled at this thought. For some, there was the dream of the glory of defending, or expanding, the homeland; of performing brave and remarkable feats; of the advantage of a uniform, to become a recognised and visible part of the military, esteemed by generations of preachers, poets, statesmen, and other mythologisers.
Michael might have recognised quite early on, even before the war broke out, that the world he had known of family farm, of church, of friends, of village life must be coming to an end. But he couldn't have known that, on leaving his parents for the first time, he would never see them again. That, in saying goodbye to his mother, he would never again speak to her face-to-face. That he would never again be able to go to his father for the kind of advice a young man needs: to discuss his plans, to talk about marriage when the time came, to talk together about approaching manhood. He could not have known, either, that he would never again set eyes on the bed he had slept in all his life; that he would never again sit in the kitchen with his family, where he had taken almost all his meals and spent almost all of his winter evenings. He could not have known that he would never again enter the church where he had prayed since earliest childhood. That he would never again walk in the mountains that he had so loved. War would rob Michael Stawyskyj of all this.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from When this Thing Happened by Michael McKernan. Copyright © 2015 Michael McKernan. Excerpted by permission of Scribe Publications Pty Ltd.
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