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Roman Ferencevych |
Sixty years ago, fifteen-year old Roman Ferencevych lived through the waning months of World War II in war-shattered Berlin, far from his native Ukraine. After the war, he found himself in the United States -- a displaced person, a refugee, and an American soldier. Here he shares his memories of that turbulent time.
The day the war ended in Germany, , Roman Ferencevych was in a little village called Unteregg in Bavaria. Together with a group of Ukrainian refugees, he had fled there from Berlin just two weeks before.
“We had a little radio that we listened to, and there was a news item that said, 'Today General Jodl signed total surrender, and this is the end of the war.' “
The non-Germans who were in the village as forced laborers or refugees were jubilant at the news, Mr. Ferencevych says. The reactions of the local inhabitants were more muted.
“Unfortunately, the Germans in this little village didn't react… how should I describe it? For three or four days before, they hung out white flags. And even the poor German soldiers who were fleeing from the front, walking into this village saw everything white. Because the Germans in the little village, they didn't want to have this village destroyed, so they capitulated a week before the army did.”
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| Roman Ferencevych's August 16, 1944 work permit for Berlin, Germany |
Roman Ferencevych experienced the last year of the war in Berlin, assigned by the Germans to work as an office messenger boy.
“Each and every day, each and every evening around nine or ten o'clock there was a bombing raid by the British. These were small raids, because there were only one hundred twenty, one hundred fifty planes. At the end, a few months before the end, at least once a week the Americans came. But they usually came at nine, ten o'clock in the morning, and there were usually over two thousand or three thousand planes. And so if the air raid alarm [went off] in the morning, you looked for the deepest hole that you could get into.”
Each house had an air-raid shelter, but when the radio announced a heavy formation approaching, those who could sought shelter in the subways. Of course, says Mr. Ferencevych, there was no water, no electricity, no heat, and fires burned constantly. Mr. Ferencevych was in Berlin toward the end of the war because like many millions of young people in Ukraine and other East European countries occupied by the Nazis, he had been taken by the German authorities and brought to the Reich to work.
“Since there was no manpower in Germany as such, because all the young men, and even the older ones, were at the front, so they would forcefully take young people from these occupied eastern states… they would grab them on the street or in the villages and bring them to Germany to work, on farms or in armament plants. I was only fourteen, I was in high school, so they grabbed us, they put us on a train and just shipped us, away.”
Mr
. Ferencevych says he ran errands for a big publishing house in Berlin until the last weeks of the war, unable to leave because coupons to obtain food could be received only if you had a job. As the Soviet army advanced on the burning German capital, however, he and other refugees fled
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| Young Roman as a Ukrainian Scout in DP camp in Germany |
south. Mr. Ferencevych saw his first American soldiers in Unteregg, and was amazed by the contrast with the German soldiers that he was familiar with.
“These were very easy-going. Chewing gum. And after a day or two started playing something with a ball and a large glove, and we didn't know what the game was, and they would throw to us… I was only fifteen years old, and - we were buddies. They were very nice.”
Little did Roman Ferencevych realize at the time that barely five years later he himself would be an American soldier. He says it happened this way: After the war, he and millions of East European refugees who did not want to be repatriated to their native countries, now under Stalin, were put into camps for so-called Displaced Persons. These camps were overseen by the , but funded largely by the United States. Soon some countries - Belgium, Holland, Argentina, Brazil - started accepting these refugees for resettlement. In 1948, President Truman signed the D-P Act, which allowed two hundred thousand refugees from the Displaced Persons camps in West Germany to enter the United States and get so-called green cards.
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| U.S. soldier Roman Ferencevych in Schwabach, Germany 1952 |
As part of this quota, Roman Ferencevych arrived in the United States in June, 1950. Six months later, he was drafted into the U-S Army.
“One day I received a letter from the president of the United States. It said that your neighbors think that you'll be a very good soldier, and please report to such and such a place in Manhattan for your medical examination.
Mr. Ferencevych says his parents tried to dissuade him from enlisting. They reminded him that he did not have to sign up, and would not be deported if he refused to go into the army. However, he would never have the right to become a U.S. citizen.
“So my parents, being parents, they said, 'Oh, you don't have to be an American citizen, you don't have to go. But somehow, I personally, I said, no, that is not right. Because Americans took care of us in West Germany for five years, fed us, did everything for us, one should give back something. So I went into the army…”
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| Former Ukrainian Service editor Roman Ferencevych in a VOA studio |
Emerging from the U.S. Army two years later, Mr. Ferencevych took advantage of the , which paid for veterans' schooling, and enrolled in college. He became a U.S. citizen. Although his degree was in English Literature, his professional life in America has mostly been in the Ukrainian language: for more than twenty y
ears he worked for a Ukrainian newspaper and publishing house in the New York area, then for another twenty-one served as an editor in the Ukrainian service of the Voice of America. Retired now for ten years, Roman Ferencevych looks back on an eventful, productive life irrevocably changed by World War Two.
“As I get older and older, you think more and more about your previous years, and now that I have grandchildren here in this country, I consider myself lucky that I could get here fifty-five years ago, because it's a beautiful country, and I'm thankful.”
Hear Roman Ferencevych describe life in a Displaced Persons' Camp
Roman Ferencevych talks about the goals of the Ukrainian Community in the U.S.
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