Immigrants from Ukraine

Apr 3, 2013

Wasyl Dubas – his haunting face, the mustache and the number 19 clipped onto his jacket in that old Ellis Island photo – resurrected in my mind when I watched the new citizen naturalization ceremony at the White House on the TV evening news on March 25, then again – this time with even more emotion – the following morning as I read a Washington Post report about the event, which noted that among those singled out by President Barack Obama in his remarks was a recent immigrant from Ukraine – now serving in the U.S. Air Force – Nikita Kirichenko. So I got on the Internet to get the full transcript of the president’s remarks and the full list of the 28 new citizens who were honored. Surprise: Hanna Myroshnychenko, another recent immigrant from Ukraine, was there as well.
Wasyl Dubas, of course, was not.
In his remarks welcoming them to the East Room of “the people’s house,” which was designed by an Irish immigrant, President Obama noted how these new citizens came to America from all around the world.
“Some of you came here as children, carried by parents who wished for them a life that they had never had. Others came as adults, leaving behind everything you knew to seek a new life,” he said, pointing to four in the group as examples, the first among them: Airman 1st Class Nikita Kirichenko.
“For Nikita Kirichenko – there’s Nikita right here – that love runs so deep it led him to enlist in our military. Nikita came here at the age of 11 from Ukraine. His mother saw America as the one place on Earth where her son could do anything he wanted. And a few years ago Nikita decided that he wanted to join the Air Force so that, in his words, ‘I could give back to a country that took me in and gave me a better life.’ Thank you, Nikita.”
Reading the president’s remarks, my mind wandered back in time again: If President Woodrow Wilson had a similar ceremony at the White House after World War I, maybe Wasyl Dubas could have been among those honorees. But no. He never made it past New York’s Ellis Island.
I “got acquainted” with Wasyl early last summer at the National Archives exhibit “Attachments: Faces and Stories from America’s Gates” – a haunting exhibit describing the many difficulties and prejudices America’s immigrants from Europe and Asia faced in trying to achieve their life’s ambition of building a new and successful life in this country. He was one of the “faces” featured in the exhibit.
This poor 33-year-old “native of Austria,” “Ruthenian” “farm laborer,” with “normal ears” and two missing teeth, arrived at Ellis Island from Antwerp aboard the S.S. Kroonland on November 13, 1906. During the screening process, the interrogators somehow discovered that he had spent one month in jail “for stealing peas” and eight more “for being an accomplice to thieves.” And for that, the document notes, he was “excluded as a person convicted of a crime involving moral turpitude.” A week later he was placed aboard the same S.S. Kroonland, going back to Antwerp.
I wondered if our family’s first immigrants to America – Aunt Maria and her husband, Nick Fedorka – ever grabbed a handful of peas from some neighboring landowner’s field and brought it home to help feed their family in Nyzhny Strutyn before coming to America at about the same time as Wasyl tried to. If they had, their Ellis Island interrogators never learned about it, and they made it to Pennsylvania, where Nick worked in the coal mines, while Maria raised their children and took care of the small home they turned into a boarding house for a handful of other immigrant coal miners. Later, two of their sons would served in the U.S. military during World War II.
Half a century later, my immediate family and other relatives also made it here without a hitch after spending up to five years in post-World War II DP camps. We, too, were lucky that nobody blew the whistle on my father Mykola’s “moral turpitude” and jail-time in Polish prisons between the wars: five years in Wisnicz, a number of shorter detentions in Lviv’s infamous jails, and a year and a half at Bereza Kartuzka – Poland’s precursor to our Guantanamo, in which without any court order Poland detained suspects considered to be “a threat to national security, peace and order.” Father was an active, combative Ukrainian nationalist. Nowadays he would be called an “extremist” or “terrorist.” The Nazis didn’t care for him that much either, and sent him to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Luckily, World War II soon ended and he survived.
My parents never formally became U.S. citizens, but the children did. And my brother Andrew and I served our country in the commercial and press sections of the new U.S. Embassy in Kyiv in the early years of Ukraine’s independence; earlier, before going to college, I served three years in the U.S. Army.
Wasyl Dubas never got that chance. Although, in a way, he finally succeeded in making it here: a year ago, when he entered my memory and now lives with me in Washington and wherever I go.