Against the Current: The Memoirs of Boris Ragula (review)

A few years ago, while walking through my neighbourhood, I came across a Belarusian boy who could speak no English but was stubbornly learning to ride a bicycle on a side street. He had been brought to Canada for a six-week vacation. This youngster was living with a Canadian family that was participating in a program that brought poor children from Belarus to Canada in order to escape their poverty and nuclear-contaminated living conditions, if only for a short while. I marvelled at the generosity of the Canadian family that took him in but had no idea that one day I would be reviewing a book about Boris Ragula, one of the founders of the Charitable Fund for the Children of Chernobyl.

Boris Ragula lived a life that most Canadians cannot possibly imagine. He was born in Polish-occupied Belarus in 1920, wanted to study medicine as had his father but was drafted into the Polish army instead and captured by the Germans in September 1939. After he escaped his POW camp, he fled to Soviet-occupied Belarus where, not much later, he was picked up by the NKVD, interrogated and tortured, and saved by the German attack upon Minsk on 22 June 1941.

In order to win them over, the Germans allowed the locals to establish a Belarusian Independence Party in 1942, similar to the Rada (Council) of the Belarusian National Congress, which the Germans had also allowed back in 1918, after they had defeated the Russian army and concluded peace with the Soviets. Boris, who had been a platoon commander in the Polish army, was also authorized to form a cavalry unit or 'Escadron' to fight against the local communist guerrillas. He and his fellow Belarusians hoped that it would become the nucleus of a future Belarusian army of an independent Belarusian Republic. The defeat of the Germans by the Red Army dashed all of these hopes and in 1944 the 'Escadron' retreated with the German army back to the German homeland.

Meanwhile, Boris married the beautiful Ludmila, sister of his best friend. Together they fled the Red Army and hid from the victorious American army in Thuringia until it stopped repatriating refugees from the Soviet Union. They then enrolled at the University of Marburg, he into medicine and she into pharmacology. After three years they sneaked into more prosperous Belgium, where they completed their studies at the Catholic University of Louvain. By 1954 they decided to emigrate to Canada and ended up in London, ON, where Boris quickly completed his residency and medical exams and began to practise medicine in 1956. As a family practitioner, Boris led the fight to ban smoking in doctors' waiting rooms and also in hospitals. This crusade would last for thirty years. He also encouraged physical fitness among his patients and used hypnosis during minor surgical procedures and childbirth.

Boris did not forget his homeland. Upon his arrival in Canada he was aided by the Belarusian Canadian Alliance. He joined this émigré group and became its president for two terms starting in 1963. In 1975 he was elected president of the Belarusian Democratic Council in Exile and in 1996 president of the Rada of the Belarusian National Congress, which was headquartered in New York City. Most Belarusians cheered when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 but those in exile were disheartened by the 1992 election of the populist and pro-Russian Aleksandr Lukashenko as president. In spite of this disappointment, Boris Ragula raised money for independent Belarus, he arranged for badly needed medical and dental supplies and equipment to be shipped to Minsk, and he took in some of the poor children that were brought to Canada under the auspices of the Charitable Fund for the Children of Chernobyl. Boris died on 21 April 2005 after having lived an exciting and fulfilling life.

Since Boris was not much of a writer, his friend and colleague...