Scratches on a Prison Wall

 This week, I read Luba Komar’s Scratches on a Prison Wall. Her account from her days as part of the OUN, including her time as a prisoner of the Soviets, was eye-opening.


“Ukraine,” or the land that is today considered to be Ukraine, developed as such during the 1600 and 1700s, when Ukraine fell under Tsar Peter the Great’s Russian Empire. Ukraine means borderland. In the 1660s, Russia and Poland divided Ukraine between them. Then, between 1772 and 1795, Prussia, Russia, and Austria partitioned Poland. Much of the land that now comprises Ukraine was then considered Poland. Lviv and its surrounding region, Galicia, became part of Poland. In 1785, Chernivtsi and surrounding Bucovina became part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

You guys know what happened here in Chernivtsi from 1785 to 1941. At the end of WWI, when the A-H Empire was split up, Chernivtsi became part of Romania, while Lviv and Galicia became part of Poland. I should mention that Kyiv, central Ukraine, and eastern Ukraine became part of the USSR in 1917 at the outbreak of the Russian Civil War during WWI, but Western Ukraine, as I just mentioned, remained part of other countries and empires. Western Ukrainians feared the Soviets and did not want to become part of the USSR. When the Russians came into western Ukrainian between 1939 and 1945 and eventually gained control of the land in this region from Romania and Poland, the Soviets lauded themselves for having reunified Ukraine. This wasn’t how western Ukrainians saw it, especially when the Soviets began to aggressively subdue any Ukrainian nationalist sentiment, a political movement with headquarters in Lviv.

World War II came to Lviv in June 1941. The Soviets had already arrived in Lviv; bc of agreements relating to the partition of Poland that were part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between allies Germany and the USSR, they had been in Lviv since 1939. When the Germans decided to go on the attack against their ally the USSR, however, WWII came to Lviv. From then on, the Soviets, Germans, and Poles fought not only each other in western Ukraine, but also fought against western Ukrainians. Poor Ukraine…they had a seriously bad geographic location in 1941, sandwiched between Germany and Russia.

So Luba Komar, a student at Ivan Franko University in Lviv who was very active in the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), was arrested by Soviets before war broke out between Germany and the USSR in 1941. She and her brother and sister were imprisoned, tortured, put on trial, and sentenced to death by execution, Their death sentences were reduced to hard labor and exile in Siberia for 15 years. Just before she was to be taken to Siberia, the Soviets set fire to the prison she and her brother were in, abandoning it during a fight with the Germans. She and many others were able to escape. She returned to Lviv and resumed her activities with the underground network, becoming a radio communicator for the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. The goal of the UIA was to free western Ukraine from the USSR, the Germans, and the Romanians.

In 1944, she was sent to the west on orders from the UIA. She ended up in Bratislava, Slovakia, and then in nearby Vienna. She often travelled by foot and at night, taking advantage of a secret network of sympathizers. It reminded me a bit of the Underground Railroad that slaves used to escape to Canada. She was eventually placed in a displaced person camp in Germany. In 1949, she and her husband and daughter immigrated to America through Ellis Island. Her brother also survived the war and immigrated to Canada. Her sister fulfilled her 15 year sentence of hard labor and exile in Siberia and returned to western Ukraine.

Komar’s parents died in the 1960s and her sister died in the 1980s. She had not seen them since 1944. Returning to a Ukraine that remained part of the USSR was not an option, however. She felt it would have been a death sentence for her. The movement she supported continued through the mid-1950s, especially in the Carpathian mountsins, with UIA members and Soviet officials fightng each other. The KGB assassinated the UIA leader in Munich in 1959. So even long after she left, the nationalist movement continued.

Not even one year after the USSR crumbled, Luba Komar returned to Lviv to go through the records from her trial. She loved being able to return to her home country, but all her family here had died. She lived in NYC until her death in 2007.

I really enjoyed this book, and it certainly gave me an appreciate of just how badly the Germans and the Russians treated the Ukrainian people, especially western Ukrainian nationalists. They weren’t safe anywhere. I also realized the extent to which Ukrainians feel that they have never truly been in charge of their own country. The dream of an independent Ukraine that these people fought for was eventually realized in 1991, but even now, it isn't what many people had hoped for, and continue to hope for.