Visited Pier 21 in Halifax today, this time with my kids. It's a great museum and even more impactful if your family sailed to Canada here like my Mom and her parents did. I looked up their departure records, then, asked gpt to tell me a little about how it would have been for them, the conditions and processing, in the 50s.
My Baba and all my moms side of the family is Ukrainian. So I backtracked a little and mentioned in the prompts she was seized during the war, and, in Dusseldorf in an ammunition factory as slave labour for the Nazis. Gpt indicated I could look up those records online, the Arolsen archives, were a free search tool. And holy #### I found several records for her. I always wondered why she had Poland listed as her nation of birth on her southampton depature record, as I was under the impression she was born in Ukraine since she was... Ukrainian. The nazis record keeping answered this for me, she was born in ethnically Ukrainian Poland, in a town called Leshaniwka in Galicia. Modern day Ukraine, at the time ethnically mixed but primarily Ukrainian (Ruthenian) and some Poles.
It's disturbing going through these records and imagining my Baba, as a teenager, being in Dusseldorf and forced to build shells etc. She would tell us how they'd feed them soup they'd find worms in, and, one lady told her after the war she would be her slave working in her house for her. I sometimes wonder what happened to that woman. I hope she was killed by allied shelling.
And now, there are thousands of refugees again fleeing Ukraine due to war, with Russia again being Russia. What an evil country.
I dunno where else to post this. This seems as good a place as any.
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