This year, more than 120,000 people took part in celebrations throughout Poland to mark Independence Day. The most well-attended was a march in Warsaw (75,000 people), during which a Ukrainian flag was publicly desecrated: demonstrators ripped it apart and stamped on it before setting it alight, while shouting obscenities aimed at the OUN-UPA and ‘icons’ of Bandera’s Ukrainian nationalists. It should be recalled that it was militants from the OUN and UPA, both Ukrainian nationalist organisations that collaborated with Hitler during the Second World War, who are responsible for the mass murder of Poles in Volhynia in 1943.

Other incidents that took place on 11 November were less widely reported in the media: a Facebook flag was set alight at the National Stadium to cries of “Poland against corporations!” This was the response of Polish patriots to Facebook’s attempts to block the pages of right-wing activists known for their anti-Bandera views on the eve of the march.

In Wrocław, demonstrators set light to a UPA flag to shouts of “Poland against Banderites!”, “Down with the Brussels’ occupation!” and “Give us a way out of the EU!”

Jacek Międlar, a former Catholic priest who is now a social activist, declared from the podium that there was a threat lurking on Poland’s eastern border far greater than Islamic fundamentalists, and that threat was Ukrainian Bandera worshippers. 

Anti-Banderite sentiment is gripping increasingly larger segments of the Polish population. For some time now, there has been a popular Facebook page called “Ukrainians are not my brothers” with a tag line aimed at Polish politicians: “Do you want to fight for Ukraine? Then fight without us and not with our money.” 

Polish leaders need to take these feelings into account lest they squander the public trust they currently have. That is why members of Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party, led by Jarosław Kaczyński, have supported a bill introduced into the Sejm by the opposition party Kukiz’15 that proposes a sentence of up to three years’ imprisonment for anyone denying the criminal nature of the OUN-UPA.

“There are a million Ukrainians in Poland, some say there are two million. The majority of these are infected with the bacillus of Ukrainian nationalism and Banderism. We soon risk facing the mass propaganda of Banderism and the relativisation of history, after which we will find out that we murdered the Poles in Volhynia ourselves,” said Tomasz Rzymkowski, a Kukiz’15 party deputy, commenting on the bill. 

Whether Paweł Kukiz’s bill is approved or not depends on the future behaviour of the Law and Justice Party. For the time being, Jarosław Kaczyński’s party is taking a tactical break, while keeping a close eye on the public mood. 

But the mood of the people, agitated by the release of the film Volhynia directed by Wojciech Smarzowski, is once again on the boil. There is also a new reason. The authorities of Ukraine’s Ternopol region have refused to give a local academic theatre its 444,000 hryvnia academic theatre subsidy as punishment for the fact that four of its actors were in Smarzowski’s film. The artistic director of the Maria Zankovetska Theatre in Lviv, Fyodor Strigun, supported the actors: “If someone invited me to film in Moscow tomorrow, then I would go! Just to spite everyone!” 

In Poland, meanwhile, the economic sanctions against the theatre’s actors have been regarded as an offensive against historical truth and an anti-Polish démarche. 

Recently, Kiev has been taking steps in its relations with Warsaw that cannot but elicit a response. For example, monuments to the OUN-UPA are being illegally erected in areas of Poland with a dense Ukrainian population; Andrei Tarasenko, People’s Deputy and Pravy Sektor leader Dmytro Yarosh’s right-hand man, is calling for 18 Polish border districts (powiat) to be given back to Ukraine and for the consul general of Poland in Lviv, Wiesław Mazur, to be reprimanded for calling Bandera a thug; not to mention the Verkhovna Rada’s condemnation of the Polish Sejm’s resolution to recognise the Volhynia massacre as genocide. 

Poland is aware of the danger posed by the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism. It has been argued that recent initiatives by the Polish Ministry of Defence to create territorial defence units numbering some 100,000 men to help the army and police protect vulnerable areas on Poland’s eastern border were established to prevent acts of provocation by Ukraine. At the very least, the territorial defence units will be more than capable of catching illegal immigrants crossing the Ukrainian-Polish border. 

It is no accident that Warsaw vigorously began putting these units together after Pravy Sektor militants exchanged fire with the Ukrainian police in July 2015 in the Ukrainian city of Mukachevo, just a few dozen kilometres from the Polish border. At that time, the Polish authorities were worried that the fleeing Pravy Sektor militants would head towards the Polish village of Ustrzyki Górne and slip across the poorly protected Ukrainian-Polish border.

With its current regime, Ukraine is increasingly becoming a real headache for Poland.

The ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) of Jarosław Kaczyński came to power mainly on promises to raise the topic of the massacre of the Polish population of Volhynia during the WWII by the butchers from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) in Kiev. «The crimes committed against our compatriots by the UPA should be termed genocide. I will not permit any excuses for what happened during the most terrible era in our history», exhorted Jarosław Kaczyński during the heat of the election campaign.

However, his actions never went beyond promises. Like its predecessors in the Civic Platform party, the PiS refuses to declare July 11 as Kresy Martyrdom Remembrance Day. (Kresy is the name for the region of western Ukraine, western Belarus, and Lithuania that was once part of the Second Polish Republic. On July 11, 1943, at the height of a wave of violence committed by the UPA, 100 Polish villages and farmsteads were attacked by Stepan Bandera’s gangs.)

Instead of commemorating July 11, Jarosław Kaczyński proposes to move Martyrdom Day to Sept. 17 (Sept. 17, 1939 was the day the Red Army launched its Polish campaign, returning of western Ukraine and western Belarus, respectively, to the Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics).

The state-run Polish Press Agency (Polska Agencja Pracowa – PAP) has joined in these efforts to distort the historical record. In order to subdue anti-Banderite tensions among the Polish public, one story published by the press agency called the UPA militants who were killed in clashes with the Polish army near the village of Bircza in 1946 as «Ukrainian war heroes» (bohaterów wojennych).

Sejm deputy from Przemyśl Wojciech Bakun sent the PAP a formal request to clarify what kind of war took place near Bircza in 1946 that had produced those «Ukrainian war heroes». The PAP formally responded that it was not possible to retract or edit the text of the report.

And then an information bomb exploded.

The chairman of Ukraine’s Verkhovna Rada, Andriy Parubiy, tweeted about a meeting he had had with the chairman of the Polish Sejm Marek Kuchciński. The leader of Poland’s parliament promised that the Sejm would not debate the bill to commemorate the victims of the Volyn massacre prior to the NATO summit in Warsaw on July 8-9.

The fallout was all the more deafening because one of the participants in the negotiations was Yuriy Shukhevych – the son of the chief culprit in the massacre of the Poles in Volhynia, the UPA commander Roman Shukhevych. Although the Polish mainstream media have kept silent about Kuchciński’s negotiations with Parubiy and Shukhevych Jr., the Kukiz’15 and Right Wing of the Republic party leaders demanded that Banderite ideology be banned in Poland and urged Kuchciński to resign.

Tadeusz Isakowicz-Zaleski, a Polish Roman and Armenian Catholic priest and author of Subdued Genocide in Kresy 2008 documentary book, has called upon the public to protest the PiS policies that maliciously distort history. «Contrary to previous assurances, the leaders of the PiS have again deferred a vote to pay tribute to the memory of the citizens of the Second Republic who were killed during the Banderite genocide in the Eastern Kresy region… This postponement of the voting procedure is yet another blow to the families of the victims of the UPA and the SS Galicia Division… I urge everyone who is affiliated with the Kresy to protest at the Sejm building on July 7 at 1:00 pm».

The very next day the PiS tried to get a jump on events. «I am opposed to reopening wounds… If I were Isakowicz-Zaleski I would have lowered the bar. If we want to have a talk with someone we shouldn’t set preconditions from the start», commented Stanisław Karczewski, the chairman of the Polish Senate, about the priest’s anti-Banderite initiative. But it was too late. A number of Polish parliamentarians had already posted videos supporting the idea of staging a protest at the door of the Sejm.

The very fact that negotiations were held between representatives of the Polish government and Ukrainian nationalists shows the desire of the ruling Law and Justice party to divert the public’s attention away from the subject of the Volhynia massacre as an act of genocide and to take the heat off Ukrainian nationalism as an ideology. This is a direct betrayal by the PiS of its voters.

If Sept. 17 is declared as a remembrance day instead of July 11, then eventually Poles will begin to approve of the crimes committed by the Ukrainian cutthroats, just like today many Japanese believe that Washington was correct in its decision to have the US Air Force drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The Volhynia massacre was an «atomic bomb» for Poland. By 1950, over 140,000 Japanese had died as a result of the 1945 US nuclear bombardment and its aftermath. The UPA militants slaughtered approximately the same number of Poles.

As the incumbent Polish leaders see Ukrainian nationalism as its strategic ally, the first victim of this policy will be the Polish people and its national conscience.

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There is another example – the pogroms in Wola that took place during the Warsaw uprising (Wola – a district of western Warsaw). German fascists killed around 60 thousand Poles in two days (August 5-6, 1944) – the largest single massacre in WWII. 

Today the Polish authorities do the best to get around the details that led to the tragedy. A lot has been said in Poland about the Warsaw uprising. By and large it all boils down to denigrating Soviet soldiers who deliberately remained where they were as allowing the Wehrmacht time to regroup and put the insurgence down. It is said that, whatever Russians say about liberating Poland «Bolsheviks are even worse than Hitlerites», no matter German fascists killed Poles just because they were Slav people. That’s exactly what they did in Wola. 

The reason Germans were so cruel towards Poles is an open secret. In their statements Nazi top officials were candid enough explaining their attitude. But Polish and Ukrainian propaganda outlets keep silent about it. The following examples are eloquent enough. Just one week prior to the launching of the attack on Poland, Hitler made an address to his chief military commanders at Obersalzberg on August 22, 1939. He said, «Our strength consists in our speed and in our brutality. Genghis Khan led millions of women and children to slaughter – with premeditation and a happy heart. History sees in him solely the founder of a state. It’s a matter of indifference to me what a weak western European civilization will say about me. I have issued the command – and I’ll have anybody who utters but one word of criticism executed by a firing squad – that our war aim does not consist in reaching certain lines, but in the physical destruction of the enemy. Accordingly, I have placed my death-head formation in readiness – for the present only in the East – with orders to them to send to death mercilessly and without compassion, men, women, and children of Polish derivation and language. Only thus shall we gain the living space (Lebensraum) which we need.» 

Hans Frank was appointed Governor General of the Occupied Polish Territories by a Hitler decree dated 12 October 1939. On January 1, 1940 the official told the conference of department heads that he was given an order to devastate the territory leaving no traces of economy, culture, social and political structures. He said Poland was wartime a booty to be treated accordingly.

The Nazi really made no difference between their words and deeds. The destruction of Warsaw and the Volyn massacre provide a good evidence to go upon. Neither the contemporary Polish Russophobe propaganda warriors, nor overseas story-tellers shed light on who was behind the tragic events. One has to get acquainted with the testimony provided right after the massacre by witnesses, those who saw what happened with their own eyes to testify right after the events. Underground Trybuna Wolnosci (the edition N 64, 1944), a newspaper of Polish Workers Party, published an article signed by Lieutenant Zenon (real name Zenon Kliszko), deputy commander of Army Liudova (the People's Army of Poland) at the time of Warsaw uprising. He said, «The very thought of bloodshed in Warsaw, the city lying in ruins, never leaves the minds of those who fight for full liberation of the country from the Hitler’s yoke. The stronger is the pain, the more clearly we realize how hard our people suffered and how important it is to pinpoint the real culprits. All the details have to be clarified and come into the open. The problem of uprising in Poland has been many times discussed on the pages of party press. The leadership of party noted that such an action cannot be improvised. It has to be thoroughly planned taking into consideration the experience gathered by guerilla movement. It has to coincide with an active phase of mass struggle. It is imperative to coordinate activities with allied military, especially with the Red Army liberating Poland…

These days the German Eastern Front was rolling back. There was an impression that the Red Army and Polish people were about to liberate Warsaw from Hitler’s occupants. The great victories of Red Army made leaders of Armia Krajowa (the Home Army) panic. They decided to seize Warsaw and bring their reactionary clique to power. 

Contrary to good reason and logic and ignoring the opinion of others, the Armia Krajowa incited the uprising in August 1. The rebellion unleashed by Bor (meaning «the Forest» – the code-name of General Count Tadeusz Komorowski, the commander in chief a day before the capitulation of the Warsaw uprising) and his accomplices happened to be a criminal political venture. 

As soon as the uprising started the real intentions of its leaders became known. The staff of Armia Krajowa failed to come up with an operational plan. The action was not well-prepared. True, the state of combat readiness had been declared a number of times for training purposes. There was no clarity about the start of combat action – the H-hour was changed all the time. Many Armia Krajowa units were not engaged in the operation at all. The real intent was not to organize an uprising against Germans, but rather liberate the city without the participation of Soviet forces. That’s what the root of the problem was and that’s what doomed the action to failure. Two days before the insurgence the «convent of independent organizations» spread around leaflets denigrating the Red Army. The leadership of Armia Krajowa was blinded by hatred. It forgot about Germans in Warsaw. It said that the units of Red Army deployed at the forward edge of battle area were nothing else but dozens of tank divisions ready to enter the city at any given moment. The Armia Krajowa commanders did not consider Germans to be their enemies anymore. 

They considered the Soviet Union and entire camp of Polish democracy as the prime target. That’s what made the leadership of Armia Krajowa and the Polish London-based government-in-exile commit this grave crime in Warsaw». 

The testimony adduced here provides undisputed evidence which allows to strictly define what really caused the Wola tragic events.

Note: The UPA is the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, a wing of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). In the days of the Second World War it collaborated with Hitler’s Germany, including the Wehrmacht, police and security services. It fought against the Red Army and was involved in killing Polish population in the western part of Ukraine. It organized the Volyn massacre when 200 thousand Poles and Jews in Volyn lost their lives. President Petro Poroshenko signed a decree proclaiming October 14 to be the day of celebrating Day of Defender of Ukraine, instead of the post-Soviet analogous holiday celebrated on February 23. Today the insignia and symbols of UPA became part of Ukraine’s state ideology. It was the main cause of the Donbass tragedy where Russian speaking population rejects fascism. 

They held posters «Stop Bandera’s fascism», «No to UPA Heroization»; there were also placards with the names of populated areas where the population was exterminated during the Volyn massacre. Professor Paez from the Wroclow University took part in the action. He said that he was worried because Ukrainian nationalists were represented not by groups of extremists but by political parties… He wondered what else was needed to make the Polish government react. There is no such thing as friendship at any price. The ball is on the Ukraine’s side. Ukraine has to admit the guilt and tell the truth. 

The Volynia massacre is one of the bloodiest episodes in the Ukrainian-Polish conflict of the mid-20th century. Polish historians interpret it as an anti-Polish campaign of the Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN/UPA. Researchers in Ukraine are attempting to shift the emphasis to the retaliatory anti-Ukrainian activities of the Armia Krajowa (AK) against the civilian population, including on the territory of Poland. 

«Now historians from the Ukrainian neofascist camp», writes one Polish author, «are attempting to invoke the so-called 'moral' justification of the Volynia massacre: they speak, for example, of the 'difficult situation of the Galician and Volynian population as part of Poland between the two World Wars'. Such attempts are yet another testimony to the extreme moral degradation of modern Ukrainian neofascism». 

However, in Poland the situation with regard to historical memory is not much better. 

On the 65th anniversary of the Volynia massacre, Polish authorities rejected a draft resolution in the Sejm which accused the OUN/UPA of the genocide of Poles. Something similar is planned for the 70th anniversary on July 11. The president at that time, Lech Kaczynski, did not take part in the events dedicated to the tragic date, confining himself to a stock letter to the participants. And the current Polish president, Bronisław Komorowski, states that the guilty party in the Volynia tragedy is…Soviet Russia. Such a statement is the height of cynicism and duplicity, if only because it was the Soviet partisans who protected the Poles from the Banderovites…

«It is difficult to justify the shameful acquiescence with which some in Poland are renouncing the truth, and the part of the elite which shapes public opinion reacts hysterically to any reminder of the OUN or the use of the most appropriate word in this case, 'genocide'», writes the central Polish publication Rzeczpospolita. «Instead of the truth, for several decades we have had a disgraceful charade in which the mouths of those who have a good memory are shut, and all this in the name of distorted geopolitics and 'reconciliation'… By agreeing to the falsification of history and consigning the Volynia tragedy to oblivion, the Poles are committing an act which is doubly worthy of the harshest censure. It is a disgrace, because a crime demands truthful illumination, and reconciliation is worthless if it is based on falsehood»…

Lipniki, Kostopol district, Łuck province, March 26, 1943. Here 179 Poles were slaughtered, mainly women, old men and over 50 children from 1 to 14 years of age. Photo 1 – Janusz Belawski (3), Roman Belawski (5), Jadwiga Belawska (18) and others. Photo 2 – the headless corpse of Jakub Warumzer. Photo 3 – the central part of the communal grave of Poles before burial at the National House.

Ukrainian nationalist ideologist Dmitro Dontsov was an ardent admirer of the works of Mussolini and Hitler, which he translated into Ukrainian and by which he was inspired when creating the program of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (1929), whose armed wing was the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), created in 1942. According to Dontsov and his disciple Stsiborskyi, the creation of a Great Ukraine «on the border of two worlds» requires the total elimination of non-Ukrainians and the liquidation of «racially unfit» Ukrainians in order to «purify» the lands for the «racially fit»: «Be aggressors and invaders before you can become rulers and masters…Universal human justice does not exist».

Today Dontsov's followers are predicting the «European future» of Ukraine with the same fanaticism. 

A Polish delegation which visited Ukraine in 1992 and obtained permission for research and exhumation on the sites of the occurrences found over 600 mass burial sites of the Ukrainian fascists' Polish victims. The total number of victims (figures vary based on what period is taken into account, as the killings were committed over the course of several years; July 1943 was only one of the peaks, when over 150 Polish settlements were attacked simultaneously and were mostly destroyed) varies from 36,000 to over 100,000 people, mostly women, children and old men.

The corpses of Polish children: Zamojszczyzna, Lublin province, 1942. 

«The Polish authorities and a significant part of the intellectual elite are zealously promoting the distortion of the memory of the Volynia tragedy by obscuring the guilt of the ideology behind it… Our circles which shape public opinion are eagerly taking up the propagandistic assertion of the Ukrainian nationalists that the crimes were of a mutual, symmetrical character and there is no sense in measuring the guilt of each side. This assertion contradicts the facts, and is just as monstrous as if some German politician addressed the Jews today, saying, 'The relations between our peoples have varied; you stabbed our army in the back during the war and robbed us during the great crisis, and then we took revenge for it. Well, maybe we went overboard a bit, but now it is time to forget old arguments, shake hands and never go back to this,'« writes the Polish publication Rzeczpospolita. – «What distinguishes the massacre in Volynia from all other known ethnic crimes is the incredible cruelty of the criminals. Neither Stalin's NKVD nor Hitler's Einsatzgruppen were noted for the personal cruelty of their agents. But the cutthroats of the OUN-UPA and other nationalist unions seemed to have a special passion for it». 

Below are several testimonies from the anthology of documents THE FORGOTTEN GENOCIDE: The Volynia massacre of 1943-1944:

Photo 1 – Lubycza Królewska, Rawa Russka district, Lwów province. June 16, 1944. 

Photo 2 – Czortków district, Tarnopol province. Residents of the village of Polowce in the Rosochacz forest, killed by the UPA the night of January 17, 1944. The victims' clothes were stolen by the executioners. 

«The night of March 17-18, Ukrainian nationalist Banderovites committed the mass murder of Poles in the village of Mogilnitsy. In the guise of Soviet partisans, in masks, they burst into the houses of the Poles and subjected them to the cruelest of abuse; they cut them with knives, chopped children with axes, and smashed heads, after which they burned everything to cover up their crimes.

That night the Banderovites tortured, stabbed and shot up to 100 Soviet activists, Jews and Poles to death. On that same night my family was slaughtered: my wife, my 17-year-old daughter and my son. Up to 15 nationalists burst into my house, among whom I recognized the Banderovite KRICHKOVSKYI Iosif Antonovich, who took direct part in the murder of my family».

In verifying the testimony of the witness JANICKI, 94 corpses of murdered residents of Mogilnitsy, killed by nationalists the night of 18.III.44, were found in pits in the forest near Mogilnitsy.

TsA FSB. F. 100. Op. 11. D. 7 L. 231-234.

…I remember that in the village of Zabara in the Szumski district we eliminated 10 or 15 families of the Polish population. How many families were eliminated in other villages, I don't remember. Put it this way, the people who had not yet moved out of the village were completely exterminated; during the extermination of the population we didn't pay attention to whether they were children or old men, we wiped out every last one, young and old…

DA SBU. F. 13. D. 1020. L. 214-220.

DA SBU. F. 13. D. 985. L. 130-133.

…the Taczynski family consisted of 4 people, and 3 people in the family were killed; I don't know how many people the Szczurowski family consisted of, but around 7 or 8 people; 4 people in their family were killed. The Poles put up no resistance…

…That night 11 Polish families were exterminated, but a few people from these families were able to run away. I don't know how many people total were exterminated.

…That night every last Pole in the village was killed, that is, adults, old people, children, and even infants. 

Question: Who was killed personally by your group?

Answer: From the Taczynski family, the wife of Jozef Taczynski, his 8-10-year-old son and an infant were killed. From the Szczurowski family, Antoni Szczurowski, two adult daughters aged 18-20, I don't know their names, and the wife of Antoni Szczurowski, about 50 years of age.

…I know that the Poles' property and livestock were partly divvied up by the people, but the best part – horses, 10 or so cows, about 10 pigs and the best part of the property – were seized right away by the Banderovites. 

DA SBU. F. 13. D. 1020. L. 136-143.

Original, manuscript.

After the shooting of the children of Anton Soszynski, the other bandits and I returned to the village of Svichev, and we immediately drove to the farmstead of citizen Jarmolinska Majewska. Iosif Lupinka and I found Majewska in the neighboring house, after which we led her to her farmstead, where I personally shot her. We left this corpse on the spot as well, and drove to the village council building. The bandits Iosif Lupinka, Vasilii Torchilo, Golumbitskii, I, and one whose name I don't know went to the Polish cemetery. There Lupinka and Torchilo killed citizen Dobrowolska, whose corpse we also left on the spot. When returning, Lupinka went into the priest's house and seized the housemaid, after which he led her to the neighboring farmstead and shot her there in the yard. 

DA SBU. F. 13. D. 1020. L. 26-34.

Photo 1 – Katarzynowka, Łuck province. May 7/8, 1943. The Gwiazdowski brothers – Janek (3), with broken limbs and Marek (2), stabbed to death with bayonets. In the middle lies Stasia Stefaniak (5) with his belly cut open and his entrails hanging out, and also with broken limbs. 

Photo 2 – Podziarków, Bobrka district, Lwów province. August 16, 1943. The Kleszczynski family – a married couple and two children. The perpetrators put out the victims' eyes, beat them about the head, burned their palms, attempted to chop off their upper and lower limbs, as well as their hands, inflicted stab wounds all over their bodies, etc.

From a special communication of the 4th Directorate of the NKGB SSSR from August 4, 1943

…During worship services in the Catholic churches, 11 priests and up to 2000 Poles were killed by the Banderovites on the city streets.

TsA FSB. F. 100. Op. 11. D. 7 L. 102.

My platoon took part in the burning of one large village and an adjacent farm. We slaughtered about 1000 Poles.

…We threw many Poles — men, women, old people and children — into the wells alive, then finished them off with gunshots. The rest we stabbed with bayonets, killed with axes and shot…

We burned the Polish settlements so that there would be no traces left of their existence and so that the Poles would never make any claims on Ukrainian lands…

DA SBU. F. 13. D. 1020. L. 164-176.

Tarnopol province, 1943. A so-called wreath of Polish children. The executioners fastened such «wreaths» to each tree on the rural road, above which they hung a banner on which was written in Polish: «The road to independent Ukraine».

In the more than 20 years that an independent Ukraine has existed, not one of its leaders has publicly pronounced words of repentance for the monstrous crimes committed by Ukrainian fascists or publicly condemned the practice of glorifying the OUN/UPA in our day. 

The Polish Sejm stated in its resolution, which was passed by unanimous acclamation without a vote in 2009, that the OUN/UPA conducted «an anti-Polish campaign: mass killings which had the character of an ethnic cleansing and the marks of genocide», emphasizing that it «honors the memory of the soldiers of the Armia Krajowa, the Self Defense Force of the Eastern Lands and the Peasant Battalions which rose up in a dramatic struggle in defense of the Polish civilian population». 

Today, to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Volynia massacre on July 11, a resolution has been drafted in the Polish Sejm describing the massive atrocities and killings of Poles by Ukrainian bandits from the UPA as «genocide». However, the ruling Civil Platform party intends to strike this definition from the text. To put it simply, Warsaw is trying to cover things up and twist historical truth out of political expediency, so as not to spoil the game before the Eastern Partnership summit in Vilnius and not to interfere with drawing Ukraine into its sphere of influence under the pretext of «joining Europe». In this two-part article we will attempt to answer the question of why petty politicos today are slighting the memory of tens of thousands of Poles who were the victims of Ukrainian fascists. 

* * *

The Volynia tragedy was the climax of the mass killings of the Polish population of Western Ukraine by the followers of Bandera in July 1943. The planned nature of the campaign is confirmed by numerous documents, including German ones. Note, however, that the Polish population had a chance to save their lives! At first the OUN / UPA tried to force the Poles to leave the «ethnic lands of Ukraine» using «only terror» without mass killings. The semi-official newspaper of the Banderovites «Do Zbroi» wrote in the July 1943 issue: «let them build Poland on native Polish lands, as here they can only hasten their own ignoble deaths».

However, the local Polish population had received an order from the leaders of the Armia Krajowa, which was subordinate to the London government, not to obey the Ukrainians! Otherwise, Poland would lose Volynia! It was this order that doomed the thousands of Poles who obeyed it to a horrible death at the hands of the nationalist beast. The Polish leaders who gave this order knew perfectly well what the likely consequences would be, as the systematic annihilation of the Polish population by Ukrainian nationalists began in Ukraine from the first days of Nazi occupation. 

On June 30, 1941 Bandera's deputy Yaroslav Stetsko and others, proclaiming the creation of an «independent Ukrainian State» in the «capital of Galicia», accompanied this with a massacre of the Polish and Jewish population of Lviv. Even the Nazis were dumbfounded by the atrocities committed by their Ukrainian «allies»; they decided to install their lackeys in the place of those who had taken the bloody initiative and send the most zealous to concentration camps. However, subsequently they did not bother to hinder the Slavic «subhumans» from destroying one another. On October 14, 1942 Bandera's OUN proclaimed the creation of the UPA (the Ukrainian Insurgent Army) and from then on the systematic annihilation of the Polish population of Volynia began and continued until the occupation of these territories by the Red Army in 1944. 

The Polish leadership knew perfectly well how «sane» the OUN members were. The Banderovites did not simply shoot the official couriers of the London government and the command of the AK, delegated in 1942 to negotiate with the leadership of the UPA regarding joining forces against Germany; they dismembered them alive with horses. But still the «Londoners» and the AK command continually ordered the Poles not to listen to the Ukrainians' threats!

Meanwhile, the OUN/UPA operation for the «depolonization of the land» spread to encompass the entire territory along the border of pre-war (September 1939) Poland: In March 1943 the Sarny, Kostopol, Rovno and Zdolbunov districts, in June the Dubno and Lutsk districts, in  July the Gorokhov, Kovel and Vladimir districts, and in August the Lublin district (the westernmost district)… 

At first the Ukrainians just intended to «push» the Polish population to the West. The operation, according to Polish historians, usually began with giving the Poles an ultimatum to leave their homes within 48 hours and move beyond the Bug. But as a rule, the Polish population did not submit to the Ukrainian ultimatums, remembering the order given by their leaders in London and counting on the support of the local AK detachments. They, in turn, figured that the Ukrainians' punitive actions would only fill their ranks with Polish victims…

Then UPA detachments mobilized their lowlife compatriots of both sexes from nearby Ukrainian settlements (deserters, relatives of polizeis, etc.) and surrounded the Polish villages and farms. With brutal cruelty they killed the residents and burned houses, churches, gardens and crops. They destroyed everything that could be burned in order to deprive the Poles of the hope of returning to the frightening burned-out wastelands.

Often they did not fire a single shot! They simply slaughtered the entire populace – from infants to old men – with scythes, axes and knives. The recollections of those who miraculously survived contain numerous testimonies of the tearing out of tongues, the putting out of eyes, the driving of nails into victims' heads, fetuses being cut out of pregnant women, quartering, nightmarish desecrations of corpses and sophisticatedly sadistic torture… 

In July-August 1943 alone, according to various estimates, between 35 and 85 thousand people were brutally wiped out, mostly children, women and old men (the figures vary widely, as frequently part of the victims from previous or subsequent months are included). The Banderovites spared no one. Along with the Poles they killed all Russians, Czechs, Jews, Armenians… A remarkable fact is that the German command did not send its compatriots to these campaigns, fearing for their psyches. Only the Ukrainian Banderovites, lowlifes from the Galician fascist movement, took part. 

Meanwhile, the leaders of the Armia Krajowa were sending their compatriots orders: do not leave the villages – they're Polish land! Their cynicism can only be compared to the statements of some modern Polish public figures such as Richard Szawlowski. While acknowledging that «while the Volynia massacre was the cruelest — all Poles were totally exterminated, from infants to old men, with the use of the most sophisticated and inhuman tortures», these public figures assert that the guilty parties in the genocide are the German Nazis and… the Soviet regime! The one whose army stopped the systematic annihilation of the Polish population and whose partisans (sometimes shoulder to shoulder with AK soldiers) defended Polish villages in Western Ukraine.

The Armia Krajowa, in defiance of the contradictory orders of its own command, conducted several «retaliatory» operations, including so-called «blind» ones, when out of vengeance they wiped out innocent peasants just because they were Ukrainians. The cruelest such campaign was that of the Lviv sabotage division of the AK in April 1944, conducted as part of a Polish offensive begun a month before and coordinated with the operations of the 27th Volynian division of the AK beyond the Bug. In that campaign alone, which was accompanied by the mass burnings of Ukrainian villages, civilian casualties reached several thousand people according to some data. The entire number of Ukrainians killed in revenge for the actions of the UPA varies from 10,000 to 20,000, plus the killings of Ukrainians in the area of Hrubieszow on the territory of Poland. 

Ukrainians were being killed not only by AK soldiers, but also by Poles who had survived during the Volynia massacre who had joined polizei and gendarme groups for this purpose. Today leading Polish publications and authors such as Rafal Ziemkiewicz explain that by saying that «sometimes in people who had lost all their loved ones who had died in torment there awakened a mad thirst for vengeance. There were many Poles who, to get it, joined the ranks of German groups in order to participate in the annihilation of the Ukrainian population. Ukrainians were killed by Polish underground divisions as well. However, the scale of such occurrences was incomparably less than that of the OUN-UPA's cold-bloodedly planned and systematically executed genocide; in July 1943, when the terror reached its peak intensity, its mop-up detachments appeared in over 200 settlements».

Polish politicians are trying to play with historical truth and profit even from the tragedy of their own people. They are covering up the guilt of their predecessors in the bloody massacre in Volynia; this guilt lies on the London government, which had no way to stop the lowlifes from the OUN-UPA but still ordered the leaders of the Armia Krajowa to prevent the evacuation of the Polish civilian population to the territory of Poland. The majority of those brutally martyred in Western Ukraine were the descendants of Polonized local residents of the southwestern «Russian» part of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Rus and Samogitia which was transferred to Poland in the Union of 1569. That is why they have practically no relatives in modern-day Poland who could demand justice and truth from their two-faced leaders who are striving to arouse hatred toward… the USSR and modern Russia, which had nothing to do with the Volynia massacre.

Politicians who seek to be honest on this issue, such as former vice marshal of the Polish Sejm Jaroslaw Kalinowski, consider the events in Volynia to be «a planned crime of the OUN-UPS» for which «modern-day Ukrainian politicians» should answer as well, and they urge others to «recognize the OUN-UPA and other Ukrainian nationalist organizations which collaborated with the Germans as criminal organizations». But that is only half the truth. The truth is, as the «Rzeczpospolita» acknowledges, that «out of the numerous crimes committed against Poles in the 20th century, which was a century of genocide, this one is special in that it is perhaps the only one which the Poles are voluntarily erasing from their memories… It is hard to believe the Poles when they state that on the issue of Katynia they are interested in the truth and not politics when at the same time in their relations with Ukraine they renounce the truth in the name of politics». 

(To be continued)