Making Bombs for Hitler

By Volodymyr Kish

 
Marsha Skrypuch certainly needs no introduction either to the Ukrainian community in Canada or to this country’s literary scene in general. As one of Canada’s foremost writers of books for children and young adults, she has earned numerous awards and distinctions for her prolific output.

Making Bombs for Hitler is her fifteenth book, and like many of her previous works, it deals with the painful and tragic effects of war and historical turmoil upon innocent victims.  In this case, it portrays the experiences of Lida Ferezuk, a young Ukrainian girl not even in her teens, who is uprooted from everything she has known and held dear by the German invasion of Ukraine during the Second World War.  Like millions of other young Ukrainian people, she is taken into forced labour in Germany where she joins the ranks of the Ostarbeiter, in effect, slave labourers from the East.  The Germans considered Ostarbeiter to be Untermensch or sub-human.  As such, they were used, abused and often literally worked to death, keeping the Nazi war machine going.

The story traces Lida’s agonizing experiences as she is orphaned and taken from her home to eventually wind up working in a small factory making bombs for the German military, hence the book’s title.  Her struggle to survive in the face of overwhelming trials and tribulations is painted in vivid and yet at the same time very human terms. Skrypuch possesses a unique and distinctive ability of being able to place the reader into a protagonist’s consciousness, so that we experience and feel what the story’s main character sees and feels. It makes for a gripping read. Despite the fact that the book is geared for a young adult audience, once I started reading, I did not put the book down until I had finished it.  It was that captivating.

Although the story is ostensibly fictional, it is based on real accounts, and the experiences described are historically accurate.  It is estimated that some 2.5 million young Ukrainians were taken as Ostarbeiter to work in Germany.  A significant number died from hunger, disease, overwork and as innocent victims of bombings or being caught in the crossfire of battling armies.  After the war, most were forcibly repatriated to the Soviet Union where they were unjustly subjected to retribution and persecution by the Communists as being “collaborators” and “traitors”.  A small number were able to immigrate to new homes in Western Europe, North America, Australia, as well as other countries.

The story has a personal resonance in that my mother and one of my uncles who did manage to reach Canada after the war were Ostarbeiter.  While they were still alive, I tried a number of times to get them to recount the details of their experiences in Germany during the war.  Regrettably, they were more than a little reluctant to speak of that cruel period in their young lives.  I was usually rebuffed with a statement to the effect that it was better that I did not know of the inhumanity and cruelty that people were capable of inflicting  They wanted to put that sad time behind them.

As much as I can understand their unwillingness to resurrect painful memories, I think that it is vitally important for posterity that their story be told. Sadly, too little has been written of this shameful history and the world is too little aware of the human toll that it took on Ukraine and Ukrainians. 

There have been a number of attempts in recent decades by scholarly researchers in Canada to document the experiences of Ukrainians who lived through these events and wound up immigrating to Canada from the DP (Displaced Persons) camps after the war.  Sadly, these efforts gained little traction, as most people, similar to my mother, were unwilling to confront the psychological scars that those times had inflicted on their psyches.

I am glad that Skrypuch decided to shine a moving and interesting spotlight on these events within her historical narrative.  Regardless of one’s age, it is a book well worth reading.  Published by Scholastic Canada Ltd, it will be available in bookstores across Canada as of February 1, as well through Amazon.ca on the Internet.