Andrew Kushnir in The Division.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
In 2019, playwright Andrew Kushnir published a short eulogy in The Globe and Mail for his grandfather, a steady-handed watchmaker who fought in the 1st Division of the Ukrainian National Army.
Kushnir’s remembrance highlighted his grandfather’s work ethic; his love of clocks; his love of Ukraine. But in the obituary’s comment section, someone pointed out that the biographical details of Kushnir’s hero suggested a soldier who hadn’t only defended his home country – more likely than not, Peter Kushnir, the last clockman for the Canadian Pacific Railway, had fought alongside Nazis.
That revelation sent Kushnir, writer and director of The Division, into a tailspin of research, travel and writing to discover the sides of his grandfather he might never have known while he was alive. The Division, a documentary play by Project: Humanity and Pyretic Productions, set to open at Crow’s Theatre on Thursday night, recalls Kushnir’s 19,000-kilometre odyssey through Europe, a trip that left the theatre maker with just as many questions about his grandfather as answers.
The Globe and Mail spoke with Kushnir and associate director Lianna Makuch – with a Kushnir family timepiece also present for the interview – about the play, its roots in the comment section of Canada’s national newspaper and the power of documentary theatre.
Documentary theatre is one of those terms that can mean different things to different artists – so-called documentary plays can include everything from verbatim court transcripts to re-enactments of interviews and memories. What makes The Division a documentary play?
Andrew Kushnir (AK): I started working in this way in 2007. If I had to cook it down, documentary theatre is about affording audiences encounters they may otherwise not have. And on this occasion, the work itself is the product of my encounters, from me going into the world. There’s no other way for audiences to meet some of the folks I met on this journey – the historians, the survivors of this history, even members of my own family. That’s only possible through theatre, and mediated through me. Documentary theatre short-circuits the journey from a story to its audience.
Lianna Makuch (LM): I remember spending time in eastern Ukraine, talking to people who were listening to the sounds of bullets and mortars in the distance. People would initially think that we were journalists, and not want to talk to us. But then we explained to them that we were artists, and that’s when people became willing to engage with what we were doing, which completely countered my expectations. I thought people in Ukraine would have bigger things to think about than art, but their experience has been frequently transactional, as the subject of headlines, and clickbait, almost like animals in a zoo.
I think people appreciated that we’re not just taking their stories, taking their words. We’re synthesizing that with the experience of being there, and with deeper engagement than journalism is sometimes able to achieve.
The Division in rehearsal.Dahlia Katz/Supplied
Can you talk a little about how your eulogy in The Globe sparked this play?
AK: I wrote that piece for the Lives Lived series, since my grandfather was notable in Canada as CP Rail’s last company clock man. He was this extraordinary community man and patriarch, and so larger-than-life in my upbringing. I pitched it pegged to the idea of his horological dialect – my grandfather spoke in watches and in time, in ticks and bells. It was a love letter to my grandfather, and I got lots of people writing to me saying what a beautiful tribute it was.
But then I see this comment. My heart drops. If it’s true, it means my grandfather was in a German uniform during the Second World War. I had always carried the idea of the Ukrainian National Army, the Galician Division – I grew up around those phrases, and I’m almost embarrassed to say it, but I was in my late 30s when I realized I might not have had the full picture. My grandfather’s side lost the Second World War, and I had always seen him as a hero.
He loved Canada. He was passionate about this country, and the Ukrainian community in this country. It was so impossible to square that he’d been on the losing side of the war. It bowled me over – but lit a fire under me as a documentarian to go, like, ‘What’s the truth here?’
Was there any part of you that wanted to retreat from the story, or turtle inwards?
AK: Yes, and I explore that in the play. I try to own, with utmost vulnerability, that I couldn’t ask certain questions in this research project in front of certain people. I think, eventually, I turned over the scariest stones, but not in the ways I thought I might.
What was the scariest stone?
AK: I think it’s when I’m told that these men had Nazi ideology, and that that’s why they either volunteered or found themselves aligning with the German armed forces. The notion of Nazi ideology is so deeply horrifying to me, and when I tried to think of a single moment when that way of thinking might scan with my upbringing, or the way my grandfather talked about people, it never surfaced. I couldn’t find a smoking gun, or even breadcrumbs.
This was scary research for me, navigating where responsibility lies. We know what the Nazis did, what antisemitic sentiment in that part of the world did. We know that there was a Holocaust of bullets in what is now Ukraine. Asking how my 16-year-old grandfather might have moved through that reality was really scary – how did my family intersect with all those horrors?
Canadian audiences are likely to bring at least some knowledge of Ukraine’s overlap with Nazi Germany into the theatre with them. In 2023, Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian-Canadian who fought in the SS Division Galicia, received two standing ovations in the House of Commons. How does that incident resonate with the play?
AK: That incident is in the play. It had to be. There was already a draft of the play at that time, but when that happened, I was so sickened by what we saw in the media, and the rhetoric that ran right alongside Vladimir Putin’s. I was invited to write an essay about it for a newspaper, but quickly realized it was not an 800-word issue. But I had a real desire to weigh in and share my findings, since I’d spent years researching this exact thing. Even though I knew I had this very well researched perspective, I feared I risked being swallowed by the flames of the media cycle at that time.
The play, I think, was always going to be the way I’d talk about this. Navigating the Hunka scandal in it was inevitable.
This interview has been edited and condensed.