Ukrainian Canadians in camps during WWI, new film reveals
When actor-filmmaker Ryan Boyko was in Grade 10 in Saskatoon, he saw a documentary about the internment of Ukrainian Canadians during the First World War that left him stunned.
Growing up in a Ukrainian-Canadian household, he’d never heard that about the war and he went to his history teacher to learn more.
“He said, ‘You mean the Japanese internment during World War II?’ and I said, ‘No, I mean the Ukrainian internment during World War I,’” Boyko, 38, recalled in a recent phone interview.
“And he looked at me and said, ‘That never happened.’ ”
The experience sparked a decadeslong research journey into the littleknown chapter of Canada’s history for Boyko, resulting in his feature directorial debut, That Never Happened, which screened in Ottawa on Thursday and several other Canadian cities through Monday. It hits various digital platforms on Tuesday, and will be available on demand through Shaw and Bell.
The documentary features interviews with experts and internee descendants as it details Canada’s first national internment operations between 1914 to 1920, when roughly 8,500 people from Ukraine and other European countries — some of them women and children — were labelled “enemy aliens” and unjustly put into camps under the War Measures Act.
Described in the film as essentially “prison camps,” some were in national parks and had inadequate food, clothing and shelter for internees, who were forced to do hard labour in rough conditions. At least 106 people died in the camps, Boyko said. Most internees were Ukrainians, but there were also Croatians, Serbians, Bulgarians, Czechs, Slovaks and Armenians.
As Boyko’s film explains, in 1954 the government destroyed all of the records pertaining to the internment. It wasn’t until the late ’70s and early ’80s people started talking about it, mostly a result of aging internees finally revealing harrowing experiences to their loved ones.
“Most people don’t know that they had family members who were interned, because most didn’t talk about it,” said the Hamilton-based Boyko, founder and CEO of Armistice Films Inc. “And because there isn’t a complete record of all 8,579 people who were interned — there are only about 3,000 names that people know at the moment — there are a lot of people missing.”
In 2005, a private member’s bill, C-331, was passed into law to recognize the internees.