On Jan. 19, Ukraine lost a devoted fighter for the country’s freedom, Omelan Kowal, whose 98 years spanned some of Ukraine’s darkest times, including World War II, and who devoted himself to cementing Ukraine’s sovereignty in the turbulent decades since independence.
“The passing of Omelan Kowal is a painful loss not only for his family, but for several generations of Ukrainians who remember Omelan Kowal as an undefeatable warrior in the struggle for an independent Ukrainian state, and since 1991 – for its consolidation, and also for his tireless efforts in building a strong Ukrainian community worldwide,” Ukrainian World Congress said in a statement.
Kowal was born into a farming family on Feb. 24, 1920, in the village of Rakhynya, in what is now Ivano Frankivsk Oblast. In the inter-war years the area, as with most of present-day western Ukraine, was part of a newly reconstituted Poland, one of the new countries whose borders were defined by the victorious American, British and French-led allies following World War I.
The young Kowal’s family was a patriotic one and he was active in the Prosvita organization which promoted Ukrainian culture and education. From an early age he took part in patriotic organizations which protested Poland’s heavy-handed rule of their Ukrainian ethnic territories where they strove, often brutally, to eliminate attempts to promote Ukrainian national identity or autonomy.
After completing the village school with distinction he went on to grammar school and college studies, learning about the cooperative business unions that Ukrainians had devised to get a measure of economic autonomy in a country whose industry and agriculture were dominated by Poles who often tried to give Ukrainians a raw deal.
Early membership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists
He joined the underground Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) in 1938 and remained a lifelong member assuming a series of increasingly senior roles in the leadership of the faction led by Stepan Bandera. OUN’s ideas were later instrumental in forming the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which fought a guerrilla war against Soviet power into the 1950s.
In 1939 the Soviets invaded what was then eastern Poland to occupy the ethnic Ukrainian portions of its territory. Nearly two years of savage Soviet rule followed, which saw hundreds of thousands of leading, nationally-conscious Ukrainians (and Poles) deported or executed.
By the time Nazi Germany invaded in June 1941, Kowal was already a prominent OUN activist in his area. When OUN proclaimed Ukrainian independence on June 30, 1941 he took part in local preparations for self-rule and was arrested by the German Gestapo secret police in September that year.
He was sent to the notorious Auschwitz concentration camp, where he remained until January 1945, when he was shuffled between other concentration camps before being liberated by American forces in May 1945.
He lived in displaced persons’ camps in Germany until moving to Belgium in 1948, where he studied at Louvain University, receiving a master’s degree in trade and diplomacy studies. He later settled in the Belgian capital, Brussels, which remained his home until he moved to Ukraine.
Omelan Kowal’s funeral in Lviv following his Jan. 19, 2019 death.
A second chance at life
Kowal, a devout Christian, felt lucky not to have been murdered, like so many other inmates of the concentration camps, and when he survived he felt he had been offered a second life which should be spent on something more meaningful than material gain.
In his memoirs he wrote: “I devoted the rest of my life which followed after I nearly lost it in the concentration camps, to the education [of the young] and to the Ukrainian Youth Association, to enable those who would continue to work within the community; who would believe in Ukraine and her future and would work, live and fight for her.”
He was a leading member of the Ukrainian European students association and other community groups in Belgium.
From 1951 he threw his energy into reviving the Ukrainian Youth Association (SUM), which had been violently suppressed by Soviet authorities in the 1920s for advocating independence. He was pivotal to turning SUM into an organization boasting thousands of members in its branches scattered across the globe wherever there was a Ukrainian community.
Along with the Scouting organization, Plast, the two youth organizations helped keep alive the spirit of Ukrainian independence among young generations of Ukrainians born in the diaspora.
From 1958 – 1978 Kowal was SUM’s worldwide head. That saw him visiting the various countries where the association operated. Its largest branches are in the U.S., Canada and Britain and Kowal became a familiar figure for many young people in the diaspora and was influential in prompting them to get involved in Ukrainian community life and to work for Ukrainian independence.
Kowal resumed his work within OUN almost as soon as he was released from the concentration camps. The organization operated within Ukraine and from abroad, where its headquarters was in Munich.
He worked closely with OUN leader Bandera until his assassination by the KGB in Munich in 1959. Kowal became a member of a Ukrainian government-in-exile headed by Bandera’s successor as OUN leader, Jaroslav Stetsko.
Kowal always emphasized the importance of education and acquiring knowledge. As part of the SUM organization, he ran a Ukrainian publishing company that produced magazines for the youth organization and printed scores of books, pamphlets and other publications about Ukraine.
He was a prominent executive member of the World Congress of Ukrainians, the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (an umbrella body for independence movements from all countries under communist oppression) and other organizations uniting Ukrainians around the world.
Return home
He spent much time in Ukraine after the country declared independence in 1991, becoming a Ukrainian citizen in 1997. He and his wife, Ivanna, who was also tremendously active in the cause for Ukrainian independence, settled in Lviv in 2013.
He had become engaged in political and community organizations in Ukraine from the 1990s and was a founder member of the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists (KUN) Party.
Kowal visited every region of Ukraine and advocated a pro-western, democratic and patriotic system for the country based on the ideals OUN and UPA had fought for. Those ideals indeed resonated with many Ukrainians and were evident during the mass protests of the EuroMaidan Revolution, which drove President Viktor Yanukovych from power on Feb. 22, 2014, and in the war sparked by Russia’s 2014 invasion.
More than once at public appearances abroad, Kowal faced people plying the much-used insulting Kremlin trope that Ukrainian patriots or nationalists were German collaborators or are fascists. He would still his detractors by pulling up the sleeve of his shirt and pointing to the concentration camp identification number tattooed on his forearm by his Nazi captors.
Kowal’s wife, Ivanna, died in 2016. The couple have two daughters and two sons, all adults, who have also worked assiduously for Ukrainian causes.
Kowal received a state funeral in Lviv organized by the City Government and with his many Ukrainian, diaspora and foreign awards adorning a coffin draped with a blue and yellow national flag. The service was held at the St. Yura Cathedral in Lviv, the world’s principal Ukrainian Greek Catholic shrine.
At many funerals of Ukrainian refugees who died abroad and had not fulfilled their dreams of returning to their homeland, the somber, final words of farewell as people scattered handfuls of earth over the coffins, were often “May this foreign soil lay lightly upon you.”
Ukrainian soldiers shouldered Kowal’s coffin to Lviv’s Lekachivsky Cemetery, the last resting place of many other prominent fighters for Ukraine’s freedom. And then an honor guard fired volleys of shots from their rifles over a grave that was not scooped out of “foreign soil” but out of the black earth of Kowal’s beloved homeland.
