UKRAINIANS, WAR, AND DISPLACEMENT IN CANADA

In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence: Canada's First National Internment Operations and the Ukrainian Canadians, 1914–1920. By Lubomyr Luciuk. Kingston, Ontario: Kashtan Press, 2001. viii + 170 pp. Photos, maps, illustrations, document copies, notes, bibliography, tables, index. $19.95.

Searching for Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory. By Lubomyr Luciuk.Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2000. xxix + 576 pp. Maps, illustrations, notes, sources, index. $70.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

Daria Markus
Chicago, Illinois

Both books by Lubomyr Luciuk, professor of political geography at the Royal Military College of Canada, are well researched, with extensive notes, documentation, illustrations, and bibliography. Both deal with Ukrainians in Canada. In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence deals with the internment camps (Luciuk refers to them as "concentration camps") during the First World War, where so-called "alien enemies" were detained. In the years 1914 to 1920 there were 20 such camps and 56 "receiving" stations, where a total of 8,579 prisoners were held along with 81 women and 156 children who accompanied them. Reports by Sir William Otter, director of the internment operations, give a detailed account of the operations. Luciuk goes beyond the official report to explore more subtle aspects of the operation such as "first class" enemies (Germans and Austrians) and "second class" enemies (those who came from the territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, mostly Ukrainians), the latter generally were treated worse than the "first class" enemies. He explores the questions of confiscated property that was never returned, retribution for the unjust internment to the surviving families, and motives for the benign neglect of this occurrence in the Canadian historiography.