The Volhynia issue is one of the infamous examples of a failure to commemorate victims properly. Polish “elites” forgot the Poles who died on Volhynian soil and in Eastern Lesser Poland. They died solely because they were Polish. Ukrainians believed that if they “got rid of” Poles, Jews, Russians, Hungarians and Romanians, their land would be “ethnically pure.” This was supposed to be the first step toward an independent Ukraine.
Lower Silesia, although hundreds of kilometres from present-day Volhynia, has much in common with these events. After all, among others, it was from the Eastern Borderlands that new Polish pioneers arrived. They came into the unknown, to territories that were completely foreign to them.
Of course, it cannot be said that the victims of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army are never discussed. Their memory is kept alive by Borderlands communities, people from the Borderlands and their descendants, for whom the history and tradition of their ancestors remain important. The priest Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zalewski is very active in spreading knowledge about the Volhynia Crime. Anyone interested in the Borderlands or Volhynia will find much interesting information on the blog https://isakowicz.pl/_.
My text today is not an account of events or a description of the extermination of the Polish population. The subject is so extensive that one could write a book about it. The Ukrainian genocide is also a very complex issue. Many factors influenced these events, and I would like to mention some of them.
Poles in the Eastern Borderlands fell victim to terrible massacres carried out by the Ukrainian population. These events took place in Volhynia (the Volhynian Voivodeship) and in Eastern Lesser Poland. The latter comprised the territories of three voivodeships: Lviv, Tarnopol and Stanisławów. The term Eastern Galicia is also often used, although it is not territorially identical with eastern Lesser Poland. The capital of Volhynia was Lutsk, an important administrative centre.
The main problem faced by the Polish authorities in the South-Eastern Borderlands was ethnic diversity. In Volhynia, Ukrainians made up more than two-thirds of the entire population. In Eastern Lesser Poland, the situation was somewhat better: Poles and Ukrainians each accounted for approximately 40% of the population, while the remainder were Jews and Germans.
It must be stressed that in Volhynia, despite such major disparities, Poles and Ukrainians lived in harmony before the Second World War. There were no major uprisings by the Ukrainian population. Admittedly, there were isolated cases as early as the 1930s. Individual attacks and murders targeting Polish farms occurred. However, only Ukrainian nationalists were responsible for them.
The best-known organisation was the OUN, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists. This movement later split into two factions: OUN-M and OUN-B. The latter, which subsequently became an independent faction, was led by Stepan Bandera. OUN-B was chiefly responsible for the extermination of the Polish population. The “Banderites” created and commanded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Most interestingly, the nationalists initially intended to expel the Polish population from “ethnic Ukrainian land.” However, the plan was changed. The OUN decided to murder men aged between 16 and 60. Both objectives developed into a total purge. Women and children were also murdered.
Children constituted a very large proportion of those murdered. The Ukrainian nationalists paid no attention to their age, helplessness or, above all, their complete innocence.
As I mentioned earlier, nationalists were already attacking Poles in Volhynia in the 1930s. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists was also supported by Lithuanians. In Kaunas, the then capital of Lithuania, the Ukrainian Military Organization’s publication “Surma” was issued. The periodical was secretly distributed in Eastern Lesser Poland. The OUN also enjoyed the support of the Weimar Republic and Czechoslovak President Tomáš Masaryk.
One may wonder where the Ukrainian hostility toward the Polish Nation came from. After all, the accounts of many witnesses, residents of the Volhynian Voivodeship, show that Poles and Ukrainians respected one another, or at least did not interfere with each other. When our Countrymen celebrated, Ukrainians did not work either—and vice versa. Nationalists played a very important role in Volhynia, often educated people. They were the ones who incited Ukrainian youth and peasants to take up arms against Poles.
Several years ago, a resolution was adopted on the Volhynia Massacre. It became widely discussed because of the word genocide. It provoked such extraordinary controversy that it was decided to replace it with the less inflammatory phrase—ethnic cleansing bearing the hallmarks of genocide. Seemingly a minor change, but still significant. I remember the words of former Foreign Minister Radosław Sikorski, who appealed that the resolution should “not humiliate Ukrainians”.
Of course, this is already history. It should be assessed as objectively as possible, with emotions set aside. Yet those events cannot be whitewashed. Nor is it difficult to humiliate executioners who are still alive and proudly boast about their heroic “battles” with Poles.
It is difficult to call the premeditated murder of an opponent who has no chance, not even of a dignified death, a “battle.”
With reference to the Third Reich and its state authorities, senior military officers and people responsible for the extermination of various national groups, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg used the term “genocide” to mean “the extermination of racial and national groups of the civilian population of certain occupied territories with the aim of destroying particular races and classes, nations and peoples, racial and religious groups, especially Jews, Poles, Gypsies and others.” It is therefore difficult to debate or undermine this definition, especially in relation to the murders committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Dr Joanna Wieliczka-Szarkowa, who also studies the history of the Eastern Borderlands, advances a similar thesis.
Let us not undermine our history and the martyrdom of thousands of Poles in this way. Let us not humiliate them or ourselves by treating those events and their present assessment with “historical contempt.” It would be as if we said: let us not mention the Nazis, the crimes of the German army or the extermination of Poles and Jews (and many others); let us not humiliate the Germans. I think such reasoning would be unacceptable in Poland.
What were the actual causes of the genocide against Poles? There were at least several:
- Ukrainians sought their own statehood. The flourishing of Ukrainian nationalism and independence-minded thought took place in the nineteenth century. At that time, Polish-Ukrainian rivalry over the national character of the region developed in Galicia. This suited the Austrians very well. They themselves discriminated against Poles. One example was the Polish language at Lviv University, then the Franciscan University. Poles were allowed to lecture in Polish only in the Faculty of Literature, whereas a faculty teaching in Ukrainian, then referred to as Ruthenian, had existed earlier. Lectures were also given in Ukrainian in the faculties of theology and law. The principal language of instruction was, of course, German.
- The unsuccessful attempt to create a Ukrainian state after the First World War fostered bitterness among the young Ukrainian generation and resentment toward their “own fathers,” who were seen as lacking sufficient will to fight for a free Ukraine. As a result, Ruthenian youth became highly susceptible to nationalist slogans during the interwar period and the Second World War.
- Volhynia, both as a region and a voivodeship, was economically underdeveloped and heavily backward. This was caused primarily by the partitions and Russian rule. Volhynia developed rapidly in the Second Polish Republic. Roads were built, railway lines laid and city streets paved. For many Ukrainians, however, these activities were unnecessary. What use was a new municipal or courthouse building if Ukrainian peasants did not travel to cities? This way of thinking was widespread.
- The Ukrainian peasantry was a deeply backward, illiterate social class, susceptible to nationalist slogans.
- The most important cause was the possibility of creating a state with the help of the Third Reich. Hitler, however, opposed such a solution. Ukrainians were readily recruited into pro-German units, such as the SS Galicia Division, or into the Ukrainian police, but the creation of an independent Ukraine was out of the question.
The UPA’s method was very simple: kill, destroy, burn. Naturally, everything that might prove useful was taken. Villages and settlements were burned so that the Polish population could never return to them.
The following account is the best example of these bestial murders:
At night, the manor house was surrounded so that no one could escape. The Ukrainians (local nationalists) smashed down the entrance door and brought the residents who were preparing for sleep from the downstairs drawing room. They were the 50-year-old estate manager […], his 44-year-old wife […], their married daughter [lat 23, w ciąży] her three-year-old son, and the 24-year-old accountant together with his fiancée […]. All the victims’ hands were tightly bound with barbed wire; a huge log for chopping wood was brought into the drawing room from the woodshed, and by the light of several oil lamps, the heads of all of them were chopped off one by one on the log. […] A stiff sheet of white paper with the Ukrainian inscription—Taka bude smert’ wsim lacham (this will be the death of all Lachs)—was stuck into the blood-soaked log on a wire.
J. Wieliczka-Szarkowa, Wołyń we krwi 1943, pp. 168–169, Kraków 2013.
One of the survivors of the Ukrainian attack was the famous Polish cosmonaut Mirosław Hermaszewski. He survived only because his mother asked a Ukrainian who took part in the attack, and whom she knew well, to spare their lives. The Ukrainian ordered her to pretend to be dead and told his companions that all the Poles were already dead. The woman was so shocked that when she reached the home of a friendly Ukrainian family, where she found shelter and assistance, she realised that she had left her one-and-a-half-year-old son in the snow. Fortunately, he had survived, well wrapped up. His father found him the next day.
The most tragic and, at the same time, most symbolic event was the so-called Bloody Sunday. On 11 July 1943, the UPA, together with the Ukrainian population, attacked 99 Polish villages. The following day, another 50, and throughout July more than 520, cruelly killing approximately 10,000–11,000 Poles.
At this point, tribute must be paid to the Righteous Ukrainians who helped the Polish population. They often worked on Polish farms, knew their neighbours well and refused to agree to the murder of innocent people. Many of them were killed by their own countrymen for helping Poles.
The glorification of the OUN-B leader Stepan Bandera is the source of the greatest controversy. Monuments and commemorative plaques are currently erected in Ukraine both to him and to the UPA “soldiers.” The Ukrainian authorities approach the subject of the Volhynia Massacre with reserve. They do not regard it as genocide, and some Ukrainians justify the crimes as having been “committed on Ukrainian soil.”
Recently, I watched an interview with Wojciech Smarzowski, a Polish director making the film “Wołyń.” As it turned out, several major scenes remained to be filmed before the project could be completed. Unfortunately, funding ran out. The director is trying to raise the missing 2.5 million zlotys. Collecting this amount is not easy. Sponsors are not interested in supporting the film. Why? Because this subject “burns.” Someone unfamiliar with Polish history, a foreigner or a tourist who heard such a message might think that Poles must have done terrible things in Volhynia during the war, since the subject is uncomfortable and shameful for them. That might be the conclusion at first glance. But the facts are different. Ukrainians should be ashamed. For now, it is we who are ashamed of our own history.
This is confirmed by the position of the Polish ambassador to Ukraine, who recently stated that “Wołyń (the film) is an artistic statement, not historical truth.” It is difficult to agree with this, however. The film is indeed an artistic reconstruction, but it is based on facts and eyewitness accounts. Polish history cannot be denied and falsified in this way, nor can a clear message be sent to the international community that the Ukrainian genocide against the Polish population is something ambiguous. It is also worth mentioning what Ukrainian historians say about the Volhynia Crime. Their assessments vary. Some, particularly those working at Ukrainian universities, regard the murders of Poles as a “spontaneous effect of war,” a “fratricidal conflict” or even a “Polish-Ukrainian war.” Andrij Portnov, a historian at the Institute for Advanced Study at Humboldt University in Berlin, believes that “for Ukraine as a state and for Ukrainian society, unconditional recognition of the criminal nature of the Volhynia Massacre would be very important and beneficial. In the current socio-political context in Ukraine, however, this is very difficult.”
In conclusion, I would like to strongly emphasise that there can be no talk of the events in Volhynia and Eastern Lesser Poland being fratricidal in nature, or of a war between Poles and Ukrainians. The two nations did not fight one another. Poles were too weak to defend themselves. Isolated retaliatory actions did occur. The Ukrainian crimes were nothing other than planned genocide: an attempt to annihilate everything Polish.
The issue of the crimes in Volhynia is very complex and often complicated. I would like to recommend to everyone interested in this subject an excellent book by Joanna Wieliczka-Szarkowa entitled “Wołyń we krwi 1943.” This publication explains all the complexities and distortions to date in a comprehensive manner.
In total, during the war, 60,000 Poles were killed in Volhynia and 70,000 in Eastern Lesser Poland by Ukrainian nationalists. To this day, these are only estimates. There is a lack of precise research, and the Ukrainian side does not make access to the actual historical truth any easier.
Paweł Skiersinis
The author is a blogger and a history enthusiast, particularly passionate about the history of Lower Silesia and Poland. Why Lower Silesia? As he himself says: “Why not? The most interesting history is the history around us, concerning us and our ancestors.”
He adds: “I try to present history from a different angle, in an interesting way, not in the typical textbook style, full of dry dates and facts. My articles concern facts that we will not find in textbooks and well-known publications. The history of Lower Silesia is undoubtedly interesting and fascinating, so it is sometimes worth devoting even a brief moment to it.”