I can say that I had a friend, Stefan Petelycky, whose Auschwitz tattoo number was 154922. I helped him prepare his memoirs for publication, and they're now available, so I heard a great deal about what happened at Auschwitz and by who and to whom.
From people like that and the people I interviewed for my doctoral dissertation, I learned not to pick sides, so I'm not going to pick sides on that question.
I will say that I, as a Canadian of Ukrainian heritage, was disappointed by the reaction of many members in the House of Commons, from all parties. I have a list of quotations here from every party; I made sure. I'm not going to read those into the record, but the point is that it was a knee-jerk reaction. You were all on a high because President Zelenskyy had come here, and we all recognize him as Ukraine's Moses. This is a man who is leading his people, his nation, the Ukrainian nation out of Russian Soviet bondage. He himself is of Jewish heritage. This is what he is doing, and this is why Putin is pushing back so hard. Putin is the pharaoh. He has just made himself immortal in terms of the “election”. He is going to be there longer than Stalin was.
We had a Ukrainian president here. You all welcomed him. You all applauded him, and in that euphoria, a man from North Bay, in a wheelchair, wearing an embroidered Ukrainian shirt was introduced. He just wanted to see his president, for whom he fought in the sense that he fought for Ukraine's independence.
Then the next day the left-wing press got onto it and said, ”Oh, he's an SS man”, and then people ran with it. There wasn't a single media report that I could find that took a different position, not one. There wasn't a single member of Parliament who paused and thought and said, “Maybe I should read a book. Maybe I should think about this.”
Most of you are a lot younger than I am, and the reality of it is that you might not know these things, but everyone rushed to condemn because it's so easy to say, “SS man, Nazi” and someone even elevated him to being an SS officer. He got promoted by the MP who said that.
Mr. Hunka was never a Nazi. There is no evidence that he did anything wrong. He's an innocent Canadian, yet he was condemned. He was condemned by people in every party, so, please, drop the partisan part of this.
How do you get beyond this? That was one of the questions from both of you. You get beyond this by thinking before you speak. You get beyond this by not falling prey to Soviet disinformation regurgitated by the Russian Federation and their operatives in Canada and their fellow travellers, of whom there are more than a few. They're very good at this, and they suckered you.