Freeland’s grandfather had Nazi ties
Chrystia Freeland’s long-dead grandfather is the talk of the town today. And since it is 2017, most of the talk is about whether we are allowed to talk about him. On Monday, Freeland, the foreign affairs minister, warned Canadians of “efforts on the Russian side to destabilize Western democracies” while Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale talked of “Russian disinformation tactics.” It turned out that Putinist news gremlins had been circulating a crazy story about Freeland’s grandpa, Michael Chomiak, being a Nazi collaborator in Poland during the Second World War.
It also turned out that the crazy story is true — it is not “disinformation,” just information that has not been in the newspapers until now. When Chomiak died in 1984, his personal papers turned out to include copies of a Ukrainian language newspaper he had edited, Krakivs’ki Visti, as well as its records and correspondence. The name means “Krakow News.” The paper was based in occupied Poland, and circulated with German approval and sponsorship among ethnic Ukrainians living under the cruel “General-gouvernement” of Hans Frank.
Chomiak had been the paper’s titular boss throughout the war, and was there to wrap things up as the Red Army approached in late 1944. We know this because Chomiak’s family, upon making the surprising discovery, chose not to build a bonfire in the backyard and consign the offending evidence to the flames. Chrystia Freeland’s uncle by marriage, the son-in-law of Michael Chomiak, is J.P. Himka, a now-retired University of Alberta historian. He is a distinguished specialist on the modern history of the Slavic world, and a Holocaust scholar to boot. There is hardly anyone else who could have been better placed to interpret and make use of the remains of Krakivs’ki Visti.
Chomiak, as Himka has been struggling to explain to reporters the last few days, should not be thought of as a newspaper editor in the contemporary sense. Krakivs’ki Visti was a mouthpiece for the Nazi regime, created at the behest of Frank and the inner circle of the occupation forces. The Ukrainian nationalist society that ran it was given the press and the offices of a Jewish newspaper in Krakow that had been abandoned precipitately by its staff at the outbreak of the war.
Chomiak’s paper published official news and war reports from the Nazi point of view, putting out, for example, a special edition when the SS began to recruit its ethnically Ukrainian “Galizien” division. It gave space to anti-Semitic diatribes, ones that Chomiak had to locate suitable Ukrainian columnists to write. It pursued a culturally Germanophile line, representing the Western-facing side of the political split that still runs across modern Ukraine. Amid the official matter and the propaganda, it was also able to produce Ukrainian cultural and political material that Himka insists is still lively and interesting.
It is probably fair, although a little sloppy, to describe Krakivs’ki Visti as a “Nazi newspaper.” (“Pro-Nazi newspaper” would be better.) It is obviously proper to call Chomiak a “Nazi collaborator.” This is not some Russian contrivance, unless the Russians have learned how to forge documents and travel back in time 30 years to plant them on an old Ukrainian farmer. And I am afraid “the foreign minister’s grandfather was a Nazi collaborator” is unquestionably news, whether or not Putin laughs at how late you are hearing of it.
I doubt whether it is appropriate for almost any of us to sit in judgment on Chomiak, if you consider how Ukraine had been treated by Soviet Russia through decades of “civil” war and engineered Stalinist famine. It was natural for Ukrainians to hope that something resembling national survival would result from the struggle between Hitler and Stalin. And individuals in the cauldron of war pursued individual survival, not always with perfect, punctilious, death-defying honour. Himka documents occasional threats by Nazi officialdom against the staff of Krakivs’ki Visti; at least once, when Chomiak ran afoul of the General gouvernement party line, he was warned of the possibility of being sent for “re-education.” This word signified “death in a labour camp.”
Somehow Michael Chomiak reached far northern Alberta and lived out his days as a farmer. I am comfortable with that. Very few Western Canadians have anything like complete knowledge of their own family background: I suspect we would be astonished to learn how many have had surprises like Freeland’s.
Given what we know, entirely because Freeland’s family has told us, this is not a question of “sins of the grandfather,” much less those of an innocent granddaughter. As someone who grew up knowing nothing of genocide and terror, I do not have any business attributing such sins. It is for you to decide whether you do.