In Breaking through Painted over Windows, a photographer covering Ukrainian refugee crisis exams the loss and pain of displacement on future generations
of the refugee crisis have put a human face on the conflict and have given Globe readers a unique perspective on it.
In 1947, the Polish communist government forcibly relocated more than 140,000 people from annexed land along the border with Ukraine, simply because of their Ukrainian background. They were sent to Masuria and elsewhere ostensibly to suppress an armed insurrection among Ukrainians. It was only two years after her death that I started asking my family questions. That’s also when I began working on my book and listening to the stories of Ukrainians who were deported to Masuria.
I spent the next four years uncovering more truths including this: whoever you are, wherever you’re from, you always revolve around the same thing – the place where you were born, where your parents and grandparents lived.I needed to know more about the history of the house. I only knew it as the place where I visited my grandmother.But it’s also where Bogdan was born, where his grandmother and father were forcibly displaced, and where his father died 11 years ago.
When the war ended he was 17 years old. He had to leave the house at gunpoint and travel with his parents toward Germany. Like all refugees, they had no idea where they would stop. Ahafia was eight years old when she was resettled in Masuria with her father, stepmother and stepbrother. Her father and mother were Ukrainians.
But now, I wasn’t watching Ukrainians leaving. I was watching them coming by the millions, driven out of their homeland and seeking shelter in the same communities that once rejected my grandmother and thousands more, just because they had Ukrainian blood.
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