Decades After Fleeing Ukraine, Falmouth Resident Relives Her Pain: 'It's Just Repetition'
Turning on the news, Ukrainian-born Falmouth resident Sonia Smith cannot help but be reminded of her childhood. Being just 6 months old at the time, many of the memories she has of fleeing Ukraine with her parents to escape the invading Russians are secondhand, but the pain she feels watching it happen all over again almost eight decades later is entirely her own.
“I’m watching what the Russians are doing in Ukraine right now and it’s exactly what happened after the world wars,” Ms. Smith said. “It’s such a shame because they’re just coming back into their own after being beaten up by the Germans, and then the Russians, and they’re just doing it again. It’s painful.”
Ms. Smith was born in the eastern city of Drohobych near the end of World War II. The Russians were advancing west after the war and Ms. Smith’s parents, having lived under Russian rule since the end of World War I, decided that it was best for their family to leave while they could. So they packed up their belongings and began their journey with Ms. Smith, an infant at the time, and some of their extended family in tow.
“We left my grandparents behind, my father’s parents, because my father had a brother and he was taken into the Russian military,” Ms. Smith said. “They didn’t want to leave him, in case he came home and wouldn’t have a family.
The emotion in Ms. Smith’s voice was palpable as she recounted her family’s journey through Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Vienna before finally reaching an American zone in Bavaria.
“The most important thing was to make sure that you were on a train, because there were no buses,” she said. “There were only trains or wagons or however you could get away. And you wanted to make sure that you were traveling west, not east, so you had to look for where the sun was coming up. Believe it or not, this was the way it was.”
Once in the American zone, Ms. Smith and her family spent five years in what was called a “displaced persons camp.” Adults were given jobs and food coupons to support their families. Some of the lucky ones—like Ms. Smith’s father, an attorney who spoke a slew of different languages—were able to secure second jobs for additional income. Ms. Smith was in preschool.
The process of leaving the camp, she said, was to find a sponsor elsewhere in the world who could help them get out by guaranteeing a place to live.
“Some Ukrainians ended up going to Australia, some went to Brazil, some went to Argentina, but my aunt actually had a connection in the States. He had been our family doctor back in Ukraine and he came in 1949, and then he sponsored my first aunt. She came [to America] at the end of 1949, and we ended up in Yonkers, New York.”
Being physically out of the conflict zone had been the goal and once that that had been achieved, Ms. Smith’s family was able to build a new life in the States. They remained deeply rooted in their Ukrainian culture, but the damage of displacement from their home country was almost unavoidable.
There were family members they had left behind in Ukraine, she said. Her mother’s sister, a widow, was still there. Her husband had been a chemist who was likely executed by the Soviet secret police, or the NKVD, known for rounding up patriotic Ukrainians or anyone showing dissent toward Russian forces.
“The NKVD came to his job and said, ‘Go get your passport, you’re going on a trip,’ and they just took him,” Ms. Smith said. “We assume he was executed somewhere. We never found out.”
Other Ukrainian patriots were sent to Siberia, as were some of her uncles and a family friend of her mother.
“She would write to my mother, and my mother was afraid to write back because she was worried about herself and my father,” Ms. Smith said. “After they were released, she would not speak to my mother because she was so hurt that nobody would keep in touch.”
Ms. Smith still has family in Ukraine today, she said—cousins and second cousins, extended family that she has not yet had the pleasure of meeting because of how difficult travel and communication have been over the years.
Ms. Smith last visited Ukraine with her daughter and her parents in 1989, just before the Berlin Wall fell. Even then, travel was difficult, she said, but her family managed to make it to their hometown of Drohobych to visit the home her father was born in. His cousin was still living there, she said, and gave her two photographs, one of each of her grandparents. She still has the photos today.
The pain Ms. Smith feels is generational, passed down from family members who endured Russian attacks on their homeland before she was born. It is something she has passed down to younger family members, too, through the carrying on of Ukrainian tradition and culture. She also makes sure her grandchildren understand the history of where they come from, something she feels is too often overlooked.
“I just think that we are always looking to the future and that’s great, but you have to look back sometimes and see if history isn’t trying to teach us something,” she said. “It repeats itself… We don’t teach what happened, not just Ukraine—but in China or in South America. I mean, every country has a history and we don’t teach our kids, so they don’t have a reference point.”