It has taken more than a decade to bring myself to read my late grandfather’s account of being torn from his family and imprisoned in a Canadian residential school in the 1950s. And I’ve never felt this kind of heartache.
At just eight years old, and after two years in hiding, my grandfather, Peter Savinkoff, was one of more than 200 children violently seized by police in the Canadian province of British Columbia. Authorities were struggling to assimilate and subdue a misunderstood group of Russian immigrants known as the Sons of Freedom Doukhobors, who refused to send their children to state schools on the basis of their faith, and paid the price.
Coverage of the Sons of Freedom, a splinter group in the wider Doukhobor community, has historically focused on their unconventional modes of protest, including naked marches, arson and anti-materialist demonstrations – none of which were ever aimed at taking lives.
But what has been glossed over is the state-sponsored violence against children caught in the middle of a cultural battle between their families and a provincial government that was determined to “solve” the Doukhobor problem.
As in the more widely known horror stories from Canada’s Indigenous residential schools, many Sons of Freedom children faced severe physical, emotional and sexual abuse at the hands of government-paid staff from 1953 to 1959. The experience left them carrying immeasurable trauma throughout the rest of their lives.
My dyeda – as I call him in Russian – tried to summarise the mistreatment that he and others faced in that childhood prison in New Denver in 1999, shortly after the British Columbia ombudsman determined that “an unconditional, clear and public apology”, as well as compensation, was owed to the children.
The resulting 31-page account, dictated to my grandmother over three months, offers harrowing details, and the story of an eight-year-old boy forced to cower under the floorboards to evade capture. He watched as drunken police violently trashed his parents’ home, beat his father, called his screaming mother a whore, and threw pitchforks into haystacks to try to flush him out.
Policemen took pickaxes to the foundations, missing my dyeda’s head by inches, as he failed to dodge sharp nails exposed by the destruction. Bloodied and bruised, he was carelessly thrown over one police officer’s shoulder, past his beaten father’s unmoving body, before being taken to a courthouse for sentencing on the basis of “truancy”. He was then driven three hours away to another waiting hell.
Frightened and homesick, he was left with no love or care, even for head injuries from his capture that eventually landed him in hospital. At the school, he quickly learned that children were beaten for speaking Russian, the only language they knew, and for refusing to eat meat, despite it being against their religion, and were punished for involuntarily wetting the bed, or even sleepwalking. Boys were given wooden guns and told to parade in the military style, despite their pacifist beliefs.
Staff frequently tormented and bullied children who failed to hold back their tears, or whose stuttering got worse amid constant intimidation.
In his account, my dyeda remembers watching in horror as a matron held one child’s head in the toilet. He later walked in on a teacher who had forced a child to lie naked on a bed while she whipped him for having misplaced his swimming trunks. He also relays numerous accounts of sexual abuse.
My dyeda was beaten by a gym teacher, after asking to leave class early to go to baseball practice. The teacher kicked him so hard he landed six feet away.
Children were punished for disclosing mistreatment to outsiders – including their parents, who were only allowed to visit for a few hours, twice a month. Those visits eventually took place through an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence, which the children had been forced to build themselves.
The horrific New Denver residential school eventually closed in 1959, but the damage was done. The dark episode sparked decades of turmoil, and created lingering divisions within the wider Doukhobor community.
The resulting shame led some survivors to completely deny their Doukhobor heritage, changing or dropping the “-off” suffix from their surnames to avoid detection. Others were left with a deep mistrust of state authorities and adopted views far more extreme . Others turned to substance abuse, became alcoholics, lost marriages, killed themselves, or died early by other means.
On Thursday, 70 years after the horror began, the government finally issued a formal apology, alongside a $10m fund for mental health services, cultural programmes and archival research.
It came too late for my dyeda, who died in 2019. But for the remaining survivors and their families, it may bring them a step closer to healing, even if it can never truly right those wrongs.
Kalyeena Makortoff is the Guardian’s banking correspondent
