When This Thing Happened: The Story of a Father, a Son, and the Wars That Changed Them - Softcover

McKernan, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1925106896 ISBN 13: 9781925106893

Verlag: Scribe Pubns Pty Ltd, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

A tour de force about the impact of war on one family over the twentieth century.

Working at the Australian War Memorial for many years, Michael McKernan had heard and written about many stories of war. For him, war was never about the big picture; it always came down to the individual. Yet little did he know when he met his future wife in 1989 that her father would soon be telling him, over many leisurely afternoons, his own story, of being made a slave to the Nazis in the Second World War, and its unforeseeable consequences.

One of these consequences was that Mychajlo Stawyskyj’s son Joe would grow up in Australia in time to be sent to fight in Vietnam, where he would become one of that war’s worst casualties.

Drawing on his authoritative grasp of twentieth-century history, and in particular military and social history, Michael McKernan pieces together the disrupted lives of his father-in-law and brother-in-law, creating a compelling narrative of general interest, as well as an unforgettable story about the cost of war to one Australian family.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Michael McKernan is a professional writer, reviewer, and commentator in the area of Australian history. He has written about war and society, the region, sport, and Australian politics.

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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: 978-1-925106-89-3

Contents

Prologue, 
Part One: Michael's Story, 
Part Two: Joe's Story, 
Epilogue, 
Acknowledgements, 

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,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Scribe Pubns Pty Ltd
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1925106896
• ISBN 13: 9781925106893
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar