Doc sheds light on ‘shocking’ history of internment camps
On the shores of beautiful Mara Lake south of Sicamous, B.C., Andrea Malysh sheds tears at an injustice she grew up knowing nothing about.
“Why didn’t I know about it? Why wasn’t it talked about? And then actually to find out later on that it actually happened in my family? I was angry. I was really angry after all that time that this could happen in this beautiful country,” she says in Ryan Boyko’s documentary, That Never Happened.
Malysh’s grandparents had 14 children, but not one of them had ever heard about Canada’s first national internment operations, which saw thousands of settlers — mostly Ukrainians — rounded up and put into camps between 1914 and 1920.
“This idea of not talking about things in families, you know, it’s that shame,” she said. “No they didn’t do anything wrong, but they felt like they did and they were treated like they had done something wrong.”
Considered “enemy aliens” under the federal War Measures Act, their possessions were confiscated and they were forced to do manual labour.
At the Mara Lake camps, from 1915 to 1917, these prisoners built B.C.’S Highway 97.
In Jasper, internees built a road to Maligne Lake, while in Banff they built a road to Lake Louise.
There were camps across the Prairies, in Lethbridge and Munson, Brandon and Winnipeg, and one in Saskatchewan at Eaton, where 65 prisoners worked on the railway in 1919 before being transported to a Nova Scotia camp and then deported.
During and after the First World War, 8,579 “enemy aliens” were interned in more than two dozen camps across Canada; about 5,000 of them were Ukrainian. But until quite recently, this wasn’t common knowledge.
The first time Boyko heard this aspect of history, he was a Grade 10 student in Saskatoon.
His dad, Adrian, took him to a screening of Yurij Luhovy’s 1994 documentary, Freedom Had A Price, at the Saskatoon Public Library.
“It was shocking to me. It was my first experience with racism toward my culture,” said Boyko,
who now lives in Hamilton.
“All my dad’s friends were doctors, lawyers, businessmen. The premier of Saskatchewan at the time (Roy Romanow) was a Ukrainian, so my understanding of what a Ukrainian man was, was very different than what I was seeing in this documentary.”
Boyko’s new-canadian ancestors would have been among those who were required to register as enemy aliens. When Boyko brought this information to one of his high school teachers, he got a reaction that inspired the title of his own documentary.
“He said that it had never happened,” said Boyko.
In the two decades since, Boyko has worked to raise awareness of the camps. He created a 33-episode web series, The Camps.
In 2017, he completed That Never Happened: Canada’s First National Internment Operations, co-written and co-produced by Diana Cofini. The film has won numerous awards and was screened at the United Nations in Geneva in September.
It currently is touring across Canada, screening this weekend in Regina, Saskatoon and Edmonton.
The documentary builds on Boyko’s earlier work, exploring what happened to the women and children who were left behind after the men were detained. He also explores the key questions of, “Why is it relevant today, why does it matter and why should we care?”
“There is a famous quote that says ‘those who can’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it,’ and that’s by George Santayana from 1908,” Boyko added. “And every time we were interviewing people, there was some version of that mentioned.”
Talking to prisoners’ descendants, an archeologist, historians, members of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and others, Boyko spells out the history: How Ukrainian settlers came to Canada, the state of the economy and culture during the First World War that contributed to their detainment, the records that the government destroyed in 1954, the impact on families and Ukrainian culture, and the growing acknowledgment of the internment camps.
“Many people deliberately tried to assimilate, change their names, stop speaking the language,” Ukrainian Canadian Congress president Paul Grod told Boyko, “because they were afraid of the xenophobia, of being the bohunks, of being the peasants in sheepskin coats, of being the enemy aliens. And that had a tremendous psychological impact to that wave of Ukrainians.”
Even today, not everyone is keen to talk about it.
“Even while we were shooting, there was a bit of a backlash, like, ‘ … Why are you bringing this up? This history should remain forgotten. There’s a reason people didn’t discuss it,’ ” said Boyko.
“I think it’s very important that we say ‘hey this happened,’ because what happens if we don’t tell this story, who will?”
After the cross-canada theatrical screening, That Never Happened will be available for purchase on itunes. Boyko’s next project is a feature film, Enemy Aliens, a fictional story about the internment camps.