Joseph Sabino Mistick: Ukrainian tough

When I was a boy, we moved from Braddock to one of the small towns upwind from the mill smoke that we breathed every day. The post-World War II GI Bill put mortgages and small homes within reach of our families, and better union contracts meant a little extra cash.

Among our new neighbors in East McKeesport were Ukrainian refugees Jack and Lydia Polnyj and their children, Roman and Olga. Our houses sat across from each other on the last hundred feet of paved road before the red dog slag started, where we played on summer days until the streetlights came on.

It was a time of lingering tragedy. Everyone had lost someone or something to the war, but no one talked about the past much. They were busy trying to patch their lives back together. But we always had a sense that Jack Polnyj had seen more than most, probably more than anyone should.

When a cousin from Jack’s peasant village near Chernobyl showed up on his porch, both men were surprised that the other was still alive. Roman listened as the cousins remembered their beginnings and talked about their journeys. What he heard explained a lot about his dad and the Ukrainian people.

Jack’s father was killed in World War I when Jack was 10 years old. The boy worked the land on the family’s one-horse farm, and that farm fed them until 1932. Then, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin decided to starve the Ukrainian people, confiscating their food and seizing crops.

During the Terror Famine, millions of Ukrainians died — as many as 10 million, according to one United Nations estimate. Young Jack and most of his immediate family survived, but only because they were lucky to live near a lake and he knew how to fish.

Stalin’s troops returned during WWII and gathered the men and boys from the village, gave them rifles with no bullets and forced them to charge the Nazi lines — human shields for the armed soldiers behind them. If they faltered, they were told, or zigzagged, they would be shot in the back.

Jack made it, fighting with his rifle butt until he was captured and sent to a concentration camp. There he stayed, half-starved and surrounded by death and suffering, until the end of the war.

He was then sent to a refugee camp, where he met and married Lydia. She had been taken from her Ukrainian village to work in a German munitions plant that was often the target of Allied bombers. In time, they made it to America and our little stretch of road where they made a new and happy life together.

Jack was tough. He endured. And his story is the story of the Ukrainian people. Vladimir Putin is the beast this time, and he can channel Stalin all he wants, but the Ukrainian people have been here before. And, like Jack, they know the value of freedom.

That is why grandmas are carrying assault rifles, citizens are making Molotov cocktails, Ukrainian saboteurs are attacking Russian troops, and unarmed citizens are blocking Russian tanks. Fathers and grandfathers are escorting their families to safety and then taking the next train back to the cities to join the fight.

And even if Putin manages to occupy Ukraine, he will never beat the Ukrainians. They cannot be defeated.