Nestled among the gravestones of cemeteries in Edmonton and Oakville, Ont., are two monuments that commemorate those who fought for the freedom of Ukraine.
To the untutored eye, they seem innocuous – almost as innocuous as, say, honouring a 98-year-old Ukrainian war veteran in the House of Commons. But what seemed to be an anodyne gesture turned out to be a colossal error that snowballed into an international embarrassment after it was discovered that the nonagenarian in question, Yaroslav Hunka, was a veteran of the Waffen SS Galicia Division.
Former speaker Anthony Rota has resigned. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has apologized. But those two monuments, honouring the same Waffen SS division in which Mr. Hunka served, remain.
Indeed, the furor over Mr. Hunka has given them new prominence: neo-Nazis have made pilgrimages to take selfies with the Oakville monument. Those extremists have done Canadians a favour – making it clear that these displays celebrate men who fought as part of Nazi Germany’s war effort.
There are any number of logical backflips required to turn service in the Waffen SS into part of the fight for Ukrainian sovereignty. One part of that manoeuvre is to take the narrow finding of the 1980s-era Deschênes commission that membership in the Waffen SS did not itself constitute a war crime, and inflate it into an assertion that no members of the division took part in atrocities. But the irrefutable fact is that the Waffen SS fought for Adolf Hitler’s army, in service of a genocidal regime. Today’s neo-Nazis recognize the lineage all too clearly.
The question, then, is what to do about those monuments that glorify what should be a shameful moment for the men who served in the Waffen SS and cause for sombre reflection by Canadians, particularly the Ukrainian community?
One possibility would be to add (sorely lacking) historical context to the displays in Oakville and Edmonton, including details of the atrocities that the unit – though not all of its members – took part in. That context could also include the horrors of the Holodomor, the Soviet-perpetrated famine that killed millions of Ukrainians in the early 1930s. Such context could further make the point that by 1943, when Mr. Hunka and other young Ukrainians volunteered to join the Waffen SS, the Holocaust was well under way. Jews had already disappeared from villages across Ukraine.
In other circumstances, adding to history rather than subtracting is the right approach. Statues of Sir John A. Macdonald, rather than being summarily dismantled, could benefit from additional historical details about his role in founding not just Canada but the residential school system.
But the case of the Waffen SS memorials is different, for a critical reason: They are becoming rallying points for racist extremists. Whatever context that might be added to the monuments will not diminish the racists’ loathsome enthusiasm.
Perhaps, then, the answer is to dismantle the monuments and simply erase them from view and, eventually, from memory. That, too, would be a mistake, akin to the misguided response by the federal Liberals, who attempted to expunge the Hunka episode from the official record of Parliamentary proceedings.
The Galicia division and the men who served in it should not be honoured, but they should not be airbrushed out of history either. That same sentiment extends to the parts of the Ukrainian-Canadian community who felt it appropriate to commemorate veterans of a Nazi division, and who have ignored for years the request from Jewish Canadians to dismantle monuments commemorating their misdeeds. None of that history can be ignored.
That points to an approach that would neither extinguish the history of the Galicia division, nor allow fanatics to exploit it: moving the monuments to a museum, with the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg being the most obvious home. An exhibit in a professionally curated setting could put both the Galicia division, and its postwar veneration, into proper context.
The monuments are on private land; it will be up to their administrators to decide on any change. But this is an opportunity for the Ukrainian community – and all Canadians – to develop a greater understanding of the past, and to build a greater solidarity with the Jewish community.