Activism in Ukraine Sparks Yearning for Home

Peter Bolechiwsky Boyan lifted the flag of the Ukraine with quivering hands.

“It is a beautiful flag for a beautiful country,” said the 79-year-old Glendale resident, spreading the blue-and-gold cloth across his knee.

“The blue is for sky, and the gold is for the wheat. The country is so fertile.”

The Ukraine is now fertile with news, and Boyan yearns for the homeland from which he was removed in the 1940s.

Boyan was lying almost dead in the Nazi concentration camp at Ebensee in 1945 when Soviet forces gained control of the Ukraine. He has not returned in 44 years.

Now he is encouraged by the attempts of the Ukrainian Rukh movement to reinstate the region’s native language and Catholic religion. But he is skeptical about the present liberalization policies of the Soviet government.

“I like what I see, but I want to see more,” he said. For the moment, he watches the events from afar and reminisces about his youth in the rural western Ukraine.

Boyan had planned to return to Munich, West Germany, for a memorial service on the 30th anniversary of the alleged assassination of Ukrainian nationalist hero Stefan Bandera at the hands of the KGB.

Boyan canceled the trip days before his intended departure on the advice of his doctor.

His frail health may prevent him from again seeing the homeland where he grew up the son of a wealthy landowner.

He planned a career in opera and pursued his love of classical music at the music academy in Lvov in the late 1920s. He toured the Ukraine with native musical troupes in the 1930s and performed with the La Scala Opera company in Italy in the spring of 1939. In the fall, he left the opera to returned to the Ukraine.

Nationalism there was resurgent at the time of the Nazi invasion.

“We try to assert our independence from the Soviet Union at first,” Boyan said. “We welcomed the Nazi forces.”

But he and his fellow fighters were soon fighting Germans, who captured him in 1941. In October, 1943, he was transported from a Lvov prison to Auschwitz.

“Three times I had so much despair that I wanted to throw myself against the fence,” Boyan said, referring to the electric barrier. “But my friends hold me back.”

He saved his life in Auschwitz by having a special skill: being able to play a tuba in a band, which he did for a year.

In the face of increasing Allied advances, Boyan was moved to a series of Austrian concentration camps in January, 1945.

Boyan was injured and lost consciousness just before the Allied liberation of the camp. When he regained consciousness, he saw a gum-chewing doctor checking intravenous needles in his arms. Boyan first thought that he was a victim of a Nazi medical experiment.

“I thought the doctor was grinding his teeth at me,” recalled Boyan, who had never seen chewing gum. “I tell him, ‘If you want me dead, kill me now!’ ”

When the hospital staff calmed his fears about the doctor’s intentions, Boyan exclaimed, “You saved my life!”

Boyan still surrounds himself with symbols of his fierce nationalism, both Ukrainian and American. An American flag and an autographed photograph of former President Ronald Reagan occupy prominent places in his living room. After two years in Munich, he boarded a train for Greece and departed for Canada aboard a cargo ship to join a brother who lived in Saskatchewan.

Boyan recalled his first positive image of the West: a crowd in front of a Canadian movie theater.

“I saw people standing in line. I thought it was a bread line,” he said. “What a wonderful country that people would wait in line for entertainment!”

Boyan did a cross-Canadian singing tour in 1949. His first concert was at the Ukrainian National Home of Education. He decided in 1955 to emigrate to the United States, where he opened a voice studio in Glendale.

To supplement his income, he opened a restaurant in 1957 in Pasadena. He sold it and opened a restaurant in Glendale named Peter’s Inn, at Central and California avenues, in 1962.

Taras, Boyan’s 32-year-old son, remembers Friday night dinners at Peter’s Inn as “a blast.”

“We’d play the jukebox and dance all over the place,” the younger Boyan said. “It was a great family business.”

Boyan sold the restaurant in 1965 and became a real estate agent.

Like many Americans, Boyan thought he might retire to the desert, and he lived for a time in Lancaster. In July he moved back to Glendale, close to Ukrainian religious and cultural events.

Boyan walked to the piano and began to play a concerto he wrote to commemorate the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986.

“One day I would like to return,” he said. “We’ll see how far the Gorbachev movement goes.”