By Newell Durnbrooke
In March 2017 a Globe and Mail journalist shook up the humdrum of the Ottawa political scene by asking Chrystia Freeland about her grandfather Mykhailo Chomiak.
Chomiak had come to Canada with his family after the Second World War and had been portrayed as a typical hard-working immigrant. But his past hide something a little more sinister. He had been an editor and propagandist for the Nazis. Chomiak was in charge of
Krakivski Visti , an anti-Semitic newspaper that promoted the Waffen SS and denounced Jews.
Freeland responded to the Globe reporter that claims about her grandfather were part of a disinformation plot by the Russians. An official in Freeland’s office went even farther, telling the Globe the claim Chomiak was a Nazi collaborator was a fabrication.
Freeland’s supporters in the Canadian news media rushed to defend Chomiak.
Paul Wells claimed that during the Second World War all people in Europe led a double-life, co-operating with the Nazis during the day and resisting them a night. (Someone should have informed Wells about the tens of thousands of brave partisans living in forests throughout Europe who fought the Nazis day and night).
Terry Glavin took a different angle, suggesting Freeland knew her grandfather was a collaborator but added that Chomiak’s involvement with the Nazis wasn’t any big deal. Glavin claimed that even discussing the Chomiak issue was to support the Russians.
This type of distortion continued even into 2019 when Greg Reaume, managing editor of CBC News coverage, claimed that “while historical records show Freeland's grandfather did indeed work for a wartime newspaper sympathetic to the Nazis, we do not know what his exact role was.”
It’s too bad Reaume, Wells and Glavin didn’t bother checking in with the Holocaust museums in Los Angeles and Washington. If they had then they would have discovered the true role of Chomiak’s newspaper. It was virulently anti-Semitic and a major force behind drumming up support for the Ukrainian Waffen SS division as well as Adolf Hitler.
Glavin went so far as to claim that Chomiak “had no control over the Nazi mumbo jumbo he was obliged to print as the newspaper’s titular editor.” (Historical records from Chomiak himself show this to be false. The editor was a hands-on and exuberant participant).
Now award-winning author Peter McFarlane in a new book blows the lid off the attempts to whitewash Chomiak’s Nazi past. The book is called “Family Ties: How a Ukrainian Nazi and a living witness link Canada to Ukraine today.”
It is a devastating portrayal of Mykhailo Chomiak. McFarlane points out that Chomiak was not only the editor of an influential Ukrainian newspaper celebrating Hitler and promoting a virulent form of antisemitism but he also spent the war working for German military intelligence.
For his research McFarlane travelled throughout Ukraine and Poland. He visited the apartment Chomiak and his family lived in during the war, an abode that had been seized by the Nazis from a Jewish family who was later gassed. Chomiak even went as far as wanting to bill the Nazis for having to clean the apartment because it had once been occupied by dirty Jews.
McFarlane juxtaposes the lives of Chomiak and author Ann Charney, both from the same region in eastern Europe and both who had come to Canada after the war.
While Chomiak chummed around with Emil Gassner, in charge of the Nazi’s press department under Joseph Goebbels, Charney and her mother were being hunted by the Nazis and their Ukrainian supporters.
Charney was two years old when she and her Jewish mother evaded their certain death by hiding out in a hayloft in the Ukrainian countryside.
Visiting Charney’s home town of Brody, McFarlane finds that the local history museum celebrates Ukrainian Nazi soldiers and collaborators while saying nothing about their Holocaust role. That involved executing the town’s 10,000 Jewish residents including all of Ann’s family and relatives.
When McFarlane visits Chomiak’s relatives in Ukraine, he finds the themes of ethnic hatred and antisemitism strongly in play today in public support for the war with Russia.
McFarlane also obtained Chomiak’s Nazi identification card as well as photos showing the editor with Third Reich figures as well as others with Waffen SS banners. In fact, Chomiak was so valuable as a propagandist for the Third Reich that, as the Soviets fought their way towards Germany, the Nazis moved the editor and his family to Austria so he could continue writing his material.
Chomiak eventually settled in Alberta, where he continued to work for extreme right wing causes, McFarlane writes. In postwar correspondence, Chomiak noted his anti-Semitic views, praising a friend for his “bravery” in publishing about the “true nature” of Jews as a group who controls the press, exploits nations and dreams of global domination.
There is no question McFarlane’s book will be controversial. This isn’t a book that will be welcomed in the world of Ukrainian nationalists or that Canadian apologists.
McFarlane can expect to be attacked personally with the usual drivel that he is a Russian sympathizer or that his book is promoting Russian disinformation.
Some in the Ukrainian community in Canada will likely put pressure on his publisher Lorimer. Hopefully that company stands behind its author and does not cave in to baseless attacks.
In the end, McFarlane has created a highly readable and important book that exposes the Nazi collaborators that came to this country and the network of support that allowed them to thrive.
