Enemy Alien: a true story of life behind barbed wire

 

Enemy Alien / Kassandra Luciuk; illus. by Nicole Marie Burton
TO: Between the Lines, c2020.
140 p.

This is an interesting read -- it is based on the memoir of a Ukrainian man, but the authors note that it's not clear who exactly the author was. They've given the main character the name John Boychuk, partly because he's the most likely candidate for author, and because the name is a kind of "John Smith" name.

In any case, it is based in the first person, contemporary account of the experience of Ukrainians in Canadian internment camps during WWI. There were a number of these camps across Canada, with many new Canadians locked up because they'd come from Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. And in this book, it's also shown that other men, even some Americans, were randomly caught up in the sweep to intern anyone "foreign". The illustrations are straightforward, black and white, and clearly representative of the people and the camps.

For those of us who like to think that Canadians are wonderful, kind, sweet etc., we just need to take a look at our history (both older and recent) to see how that's a false narrative. These camps resulted in the expected behaviour that crops up when some men are put into a position of power over others - lots of sadism, abuse and everyday bullying by guards, including withholding food, or making men undress in the middle of winter and run around on a frozen lake until they agree to camp demands. There were men who died due to untreated illness, or who were shot trying to escape. This book focuses on the camp at Kapuskasing, which was full of only men, but there were also other camps like the one at Spirit Lake which interned whole families. The book also shows that once they left the camp, they were sent to factories and industries far away from their homes, as forced labour -- and the end of the war was not the end of this practice. 

If you didn't know about the internment of Ukrainians during WWI already, this is a good introduction to the topic. There is an introductory essay that is a few pages long, which situates the story and provides historical background to the issue and to the specific source for this story. There is also a page long bibliography at the end if you then want to read more on this subject. I would also recommend Barbara Sapergia's novel Blood & Salt, for a fictional look at Ukrainian internment in Western Canada.