HARVARD UKRAINIAN STUDIES - See also - Harvard University

Reviews 233legal remedies. Their efforts met with little success, although pressure for governmentaction was mounting.Public awareness of the outrages of the Holocaust increased. The televisionmini-series "Holocaust" contributed to this. So did the 1982 publication of None IsToo Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948, Harold Troper's own contributionto the history he and Weinfeld describe. The book, detailing Canadianindifference to the fate of European Jewry, helped create a climate in which actionagainst war criminals could no longer be deferred. In the same year, a Germanextradition order prompted the arrest of Albert Helmut Rauca, a Toronto residentaccused of direct involvement in the murder of thousands of Lithuanian Jews.Late 1984 saw the election of a Conservative government led by Brian Mulroney.Years of Liberal party indifference gave way to swift action. On 7 February1985, the government announced that Justice Jules Deschênes had agreed to conductan inquiry into the presence of war criminals in Canada.The Jewish community saw the commission as a long overdue, official indicationthat the presence of war criminals in Canada was a wrong yet to be righted. Communityleaders were privately concerned that the Conservative government was actingwithout consulting them. Journalist Sol Littman, who made sensational chargesabout the extent of the war criminals problem, seemed to have the prime minister'sear. The CJC was not consulted; nor was the Ukrainian community.Reactions from Ukrainians were defensive and vehement. Fears were raised thatthe entire community would be besmirched, even though 90 percent wereCanadian-born. Some decried a KGB plot, and named the Jews as co-conspirators.Decisive action was demanded. In this atmosphere, the Toronto chapter of theUkrainian Canadian Committee (UCC; headquartered in Winnipeg) seized me initiative,establishing the single-issue Civil Liberties Commission (CLC).Justice Deschênes convened his commission in April 198S. His task was twofold:to set straight the post-war historical record on the war criminals issue; and torecommend legal action against war criminals, should any be uncovered. Deschênesdecided to grant official "standing" to only two interested ethnic groups: Jews andUkrainians. This gave these groups access to the commission, and both groups didtheir best to affect the commission's recommendations. While achieving standingwas a triumph for those organizations seeking it, was it actually helpful? Standingmay have served to "ethnicize" the issue further. Indeed, Jewish-Ukrainian tensionswere dramatically inflamed throughout Canada. Moreover, legal questions may havefallen prey to the inter-ethnic feud. Still, neither community was willing to risk acommission result in which it had no input.Ukrainians concerned with the commission were fearful of an ethnic smear campaign.They issued apologetic accounts of recent European history. This surprisedJewish officials, whose briefs to the commission made no mention of Ukrainiancriminality in Europe. Ukrainian groups opposed various legal remedies: the creationof a Canadian OSI; extradition for trial abroad; the use of any evidence providedby the Soviet Union (though forensic experts attest to the authenticity of suchdocuments). Ukrainian recommendations seemed to discourage war crimes prosecutionsand narrow the commission's set of options.