Colby Cosh: A little sympathy for Yaroslav Hunka

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If he does deserve to suffer, well, suffering is what he’ll get.

Published Sep 27, 2023  •  Last updated 2 hours ago  •  3 minute read

Yaroslav Hunka waits for the arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Friday. Photo by Patrick Doyle/The Canadian Press

On Monday, after I filed a column on Friday’s strange events in the House of Commons, I found myself having a strange sympathy for the 98-year-old ex-Nazi at the centre of the whole mess. No doubt reporters will get to the bottom of exactly how this happened, but it seems like Yaroslav Hunka’s younger family members saw an opportunity for their patriarch to hear and maybe meet the Ukrainian president.

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For any Ukrainian-Canadian, this would naturally seem like an amazing, uncanny opportunity; Ukrainians everywhere are still delighted and amazed that there is such a thing as a president of sovereign Ukraine. The family may not have anticipated that the Speaker of the House would declare their SS-veteran ancestor a “hero” before the eyes of a watching world, or that Speaker Anthony Rota would thank him specifically and explicitly for serving in a Nazi uniform against the Red Army, an ally of Canada.

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They certainly didn’t bargain on attracting the raised eyebrows that their surname will now invite everywhere they go for a little while, and I bet they didn’t imagine that the government of Poland would try to have “Dedo,” as they call their grandfather, extradited. Above all, they surely didn’t imagine that, with the help of Anthony Rota, they would end up handing a concrete propaganda victory to Ukraine’s greatest enemy since Stalin. The little old man in the wheelchair will have to live his last days knowing that, after a youth spent fighting for Ukraine and a long life praying for it, he has betrayed the land of his birth badly, in wartime, or been enticed into betraying it. As a Canadian, I could add that he hasn’t done his adopted country any big favours, either.

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It’s natural to be dismissive and contemptuous of somebody who voluntarily donned an SS uniform. My own grandfather fought in the big war on what I understand to be the side of right: who could second-guess his volunteer service in our Air Force, servicing aircraft that incinerated German civilians by the thousands? No one, or almost no one, expects me to feel shame about this; no odour of roasted flesh accompanies my family’s name. But, then, my “dedo” wasn’t born in the zone of statelessness and agony that lies amidst the Germans and the Russians.

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The SS unit to which the elderly Hunka belonged was recruited in the spirit of great-power exploitation, a situation in which the Ukrainian and other peoples in Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands had existed for three or four hundred years. (“Bloodlands” isn’t a nice name for a part of Europe, but that’s part of the point of that book: we don’t have another suitable name for the vacuum left behind by the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.) He had seen how Stalinist rule, even after the great engineered famine in Ukraine, persistently extirpated the best teachers and scholars and leaders in Ukraine. He had welcomed the German invaders as civilized liberators from Stalinism; he saw that they were about to retreat to the west, leaving the Ukrainians to their own fate; he was offered a uniform and a gun and asked to slow down the Reds, possibly by throwing himself under the treads of their tanks.

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When survivors of that experience wanted to emigrate to Canada after the war, and the Allied mania for Russia had turned into enmity and hostility, a conscious decision was made not to treat them as if they were German members of the SS or other ideological collaborators. That decision still seems justifiable: it still seems possible to me to have sympathy for the young Hunka’s decision, or, at minimum, for the crippling difficulty of it.

The unit he joined committed atrocities against Jews and other targets of the Holocaust, but Galician Division veterans in Canada have been exposed to investigation, arrest and trial for individual participation in crimes against humanity for decades. In the absence of any bill of particulars, what I see is an old man who was cruelly let down at the end of his days by naive descendants and a halfwit glory-seeking politician. If he does deserve to suffer, well, suffering is what he’ll get.

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