War and remembrance of my father

A Father’s Day tribute to the singular life of a proud, patriotic Ukrainian

Eugene Kuz in Nottingham, England, in 1948, a year after his release from a WWII prisoner of war camp.

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My late father, Eugene Kuz, would have turned 100 last Sept. 10. On that occasion, I wrote a remembrance of him for another site. I’m sharing a slightly updated version here on Father’s Day as I find myself back in his homeland.

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“Was he stubborn?”

The caretaker stood with a shovel in his hand at the foot of my father’s grave. He had almost finished preparing the hole, and his tone suggested genuine curiosity. Eugene Kuz would be laid to rest in a few days, and along with my mother and sister, I had gone to the cemetery a mile from the home where I grew up.

There was a pause. And then, in something like jumbled unison, we answered with variations of “Was he ever.”

My dad’s obstinance held the status of family legend. He had pressed onward to the age of 92 despite decades of declining health, which followed decades of assembling a new life in America, which followed decades of loss and struggle in his native Ukraine and post-war Europe.

When his body finally gave out in 2015, I believed that his will to live still burned at full flame, as bright and inextinguishable as it had been in 1943. That spring, as a young man not quite 20, he made the valiant, fateful decision to join Ukraine’s military in its fight against the Soviet Union’s Red Army during World War II.

“Fight” is perhaps the wrong word to describe his particular role. Eugene served as a field medic with the Galicia Division, applying skills he had begun to learn as a medical student in Lviv before war interrupted his education. He followed the unit through Slovenia, Slovakia and Austria, mending the broken bodies of soldiers who, like him, sought a free and independent Ukraine.

Their pursuit of that dream ended with the division’s surrender to Allied forces in 1945. Only the intervention of British, Polish and Vatican officials — who warded off the demands of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin — prevented their forced repatriation to Ukraine, sparing them from certain execution.

My father’s reprieve came at the incalculable cost of his past. He never again saw his family or his country. Yet he somehow persisted, drawing on a resolve — a stubbornness — that awes me even now.

After his release from a prisoner of war camp in 1947, he earned his medical degree in Ireland and worked in hospitals in England for a short time before immigrating in 1955 to the United States. There he had to start over once more, working nights as a restaurant dishwasher in St. Paul, Minn., as by day he rose from intern to resident to full-fledged doctor.

Along the way he met the woman who became his wife, Ingrid Eckermann, and later, they built a house and raised a family in a Minneapolis suburb while he worked 18-hour days to establish his solo medical practice. He gained U.S. citizenship and attained the American dream. Against odds that I cannot fathom, he reached a new future. More than that — he willed a new future.

Eugene was an imperfect man, full of flaws and contradictions, and I think the irretrievable loss of his homeland wounded him beyond healing. Yet his greatest feat of stubbornness may have been that, for everything Russia stole from him, he refused to succumb to self-pity. It is an enviable quality and one common among Ukrainians, whose steadfast resistance to Moscow after more than two years of war attests to the undimmed spirit of a people willing to face death for freedom, the same as my father in 1943.

Standing in the cemetery nine years ago, my mother, sister and I asked the caretaker why he wondered if Eugene was stubborn. When digging a grave, he explained, he sometimes found a boulder that needed excavating — a difficult task that could require hours of extra work. On extremely rare occasions, he would find two.

He waited a moment before smiling. “There were three in his.”

All of us laughed, and in time, our family chose to use one of those boulders to mark Eugene’s grave. The headstone captures the contours of a singular, complex, extraordinary life: the face is smooth and polished; the rest of the rock remains as it was when pulled from the earth, rough and jagged.

On this Father’s Day, as his brave, beautiful native land fights again to live free from Russia, I am here because of him, traveling through the country where he longed to return. His past has become my present, and as I yearn for one last embrace with him, his wish of lasting peace for Ukraine is now my own.