Why Poland condemns OUN-UPA crimes, but supports Ukrainian nationalists. Hero of Ukraine Bandera and the crimes of the oun-upa UPA and the Jewish population
The problem of the OUN-UPA is one of the debatable topics of Ukrainian society, the point of view throughout the years of independence fluctuates between positive (fighters for independence, Heroes of Ukraine) and negative (German collaborators, traitors to Ukraine). Their assessment is often based on propaganda clichés from both sides. The question of the official recognition of the UPA as a belligerent in World War II and the provision of benefits to veterans for state level(several western regions made this decision at the regional) still remain unresolved. The author does not set himself the goal of highlighting the UPA problem as much as possible, which is almost impossible for an ordinary article, but he hopes that the material will allow the reader to make an approximate picture of one of the pages of the Ukrainian one.
general characteristics
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA-OUN-B) is a partisan army of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of the Bandera Movement. Chief Commander of the UPA in 1943-1950. was Roman Shukhevych, from 1950 to 1954. - Vasily Cook.
Name. The abbreviation UPA stands for "Ukrainian Insurgent Army", although the wording is much more accurate as follows - Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists of the Bandera Movement. There were several divisions with the name UPA. Initially, this term was carried by the renamed (formerly "Polesskaya Sich") military partisan structure of Vasily Borovets (aka Taras Bulba, Bulba-Borovets), the embryo of which, under the guise of a local police, which was de jure under the control of the Germans, was created by August 1941 Borovets was not associated with the OUN and was subordinate to the government of the UNR in exile. After the Nazi authorities disbanded the self-defense units, Bulba went underground. The armed formations of the OUN-B also receive the name "Ukrainian Insurgent Army", as a result, until July 1943, the two organizations bear the same name. Not wanting to associate himself with the latter's terror against the Poles, Bulba renamed the UPA-PS into the UNRA. In 1943, the Bulbovites were surrounded by the OUN and defeated them, which is logical, because the scattered peasant detachments could not resist the rigid, clearly structured OUN.
period of existence. The creation of the UPA was preceded by the activities of its underground predecessors UVO and OUN in 1920-1940. October 14, 1942 is considered the official date of the creation of the OUN UPA, although many historians consider it to be propaganda and postpone the founding period for about six months ahead. Officially, the activities of headquarters and subunits were terminated on September 3, 1949, however, the anti-Soviet nationalist underground in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR functioned until the end of 1953, separate small groups - until the beginning of 1956.
Territory of military operations. The UPA-OUN detachments operated in the Ukrainian SSR, BSSR, Poland, Romania, Kuban, but achieved some results only in the territories that now make up Western Ukraine. Particularly active since the spring of 1943, incl. Galicia - from the end of 1943, Kholmshchyna - from the autumn of 1943), Volyn - from the end of March 1943), Northern Bukovina - from the summer of 1944).
Structure. A common myth is that the Ukrainian Insurgent Army is an ordinary gang that was engaged only in robbery and terrorist acts. This is not true. The UPA was divided into four General Military Districts: UPA-North (Volyn and Polesie), UPA-West (Galicia, Bukovina, Transcarpathia and regions beyond former line Curzon), UPA-South (Kamenets-Podolsk, Zhytomyr, Vinnitsa, the southern part of the Kyiv regions), UPA-East practically did not exist. The UPA was a partisan army that had captured weapons (mainly German and Soviet), ammunition (including special uniforms in some departments), discipline, military tactics, the Security Service (OUN SB), agents, intelligence, counterintelligence and etc.
Compound. The UPA was formed from many social strata of society. Peasants were present there (they made up the largest stratum in the UPA, more than 60%), workers, and the intelligentsia. Basically, the rebel army consisted of the poor and middle peasants, the third group - the rich - was almost absent. In addition to the Ukrainians, who were the vast majority, there were Russians, Jews and other national minorities. The attitude towards them was extremely cautious, therefore, at the slightest suspicion, they were liquidated by the Security Council of the OUN.
Number. The number of the UPA-OUN is estimated differently by various sources. For Russian and Polish, an underestimation is typical (up to 10-20 thousand), for nationalist Ukrainians - an exaggeration (from 200 to 500 thousand). The most optimal figure is the result of the commission of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine (1997-2004) - from 20 to 100 thousand people.
UPA and other armed formations
UPA and German troops
The surviving documents of the UPA contain references to small combat clashes with the Germans, but there is no information about battles with large Wehrmacht forces. The final decision to speak out against the German occupiers was made by the OUN-B at the III Conference on February 17-21, 1943. By the second half of 1943, the OUN-B and UPA armed detachments took control of a significant part of the rural territories of the Volyn and Podolia districts of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine. The losses of the Wehrmacht from the upovtsy are estimated at a maximum of 15 thousand people.
The clashes between the Nazis and Bandera are confirmed by Soviet partisans: in his diary, S.V. Rudnev wrote on June 24, 1943: “Nationalists are our enemies, but they beat the Germans. Here and maneuver, and think. In one of the reports of the Reichskommissar of Ukraine, Erich Koch, it is said: “The performances of the national Ukrainian gangs in the Kremenets-Dubno-Kostopol-Rivne regions are especially dangerous. On the night of March 20-21, national-Ukrainian gangs seized all the district agricultural points in the Kremenets region and completely destroyed one service point. At the same time, 12 German business executives, foresters, soldiers and policemen died. Although the forces of the police and the Wehrmacht were immediately placed at disposal, only 2 districts have been recaptured to date ... ".
It should be noted that the main opponent of the OUN-UPA was the Soviet Union. By the end of 1943, the OUN-B set a course for the maximum curtailment of offensive operations against the Germans and began to accumulate strength for the fight against the USSR. More precisely, the results of the German-UPOV confrontation are reflected in one of the conclusions of the commission of the Institute of History of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine: “The anti-German front of the OUN and UPA, which arose in early 1943 and lasted until mid-1944, played an exceptionally important role in the Ukrainian resistance movement during the years of the Second world war. The armed uprising against Nazi Germany, which categorically denied the possibility of the existence of an independent Ukraine, allowed the OUN-B to rally thousands of Ukrainian patriots in the ranks of the UPA and unite them around the idea of fighting for a Ukrainian independent conciliar state. However, the struggle of the OUN and UPA on the anti-German front did not acquire priority in the strategy of the Ukrainian movement and was of a temporary nature, because Moscow imperialism was recognized as the main enemy of Ukrainian independence. This basic principle has fighting rebel army against the Germans to forms of "self-defense of the people" and interpreted the Nazis as temporary occupiers of Ukraine. The armed actions of the UPA on the anti-German front were of no strategic importance and did not affect the course of the struggle between Germany and the Soviet Union, but only limited the activities of the German occupation administration regarding the economic exploitation of the territories of Volyn-Polesye, where the material base of the Ukrainian liberation movement was being created. At the same time, the resistance of the OUN and UPA to German policy in the northwestern region of Ukraine to a certain extent limited the Nazis' ability to fight the Soviet partisan movement in Volyn-Polesie and in the adjacent areas of Right-Bank Ukraine. In general, the actions of the OUN and UPA on the anti-German front did not play a significant role in the liberation of the territory of Ukraine from the German invaders.
UPA and Soviet partisans
Relations between the UPA and Soviet partisans occupy a special place in military history. The Soviet stage of the organized partisan war dates back to September 5, 1942 - order No. 00189 "On the tasks of the partisan movement", signed by I. Stalin. The first vague and inaccurate reports about the form of popular resistance on the territory of the Western Ukrainian regions began to arrive at the Ukrainian headquarters of the partisan movement from the end of 1942. Over time, information from Soviet intelligence about the creation of the so-called. "Ukrainian Insurgent Army" came to Moscow.
The initial stage of the neighborhood of partisans and upovtsy can be called a policy of mutual neutrality. But after the ethnic cleansing against the Poles, hostilities started between them. Mutual losses are estimated at 5-10 thousand people. Both sides used scorched earth tactics. On August 18, 1944, the 1st Ukrainian partisan division named after V.I. S.A. Kovpak, which then numbered over 3 thousand people. The compound was previously subordinate to the UShPD, from 18.08.44 it was placed at the disposal of the NKVD of the Ukrainian SSR.
UPA and Red Army
The first minor clashes between the Red Army and the UPA began in the Left-Bank Ukraine. In the western lands, the number and intensity of conflicts increased dramatically.
The facts of transitions of Ukrainian Red Army soldiers to the UPA, armed clashes between spacecraft fighters and NKVD units due to the Upov problem, direct meetings of rebels and Red Army soldiers were recorded. The counter and propaganda activities of the UPA-OUN - leaflets, newspapers, brochures, disinformation - had a huge impact on the Red Army. distribution of underground literature, mass placement of slogans and appeals on the walls of houses, fences, and other structures.
And yet, the flames of the Upov-Red Army conflict were inevitable for many reasons. The military actions of the UPA and the spacecraft were initially partly caused by confusion in the conditions of hostilities, partly by the orders of the commanders of the rebels and the Red Army. The active struggle of the Red Army against the rebel movement began after the death of General N. Vatutin, the constant destruction of the military infrastructure by the rebels, the disruption of the mobilization of the population (by the way, the method of forced mobilization was used by almost all parties represented during WWII).
But soon the Soviet government changed tactics. There were several reasons for this: firstly, the psychological impact of the upovtsy on the Red Army soldiers, which contributed to the moral decay of the latter; secondly, the inefficiency of using the soldiers of the Red Army against the nationalist movement; thirdly, the underestimation of the capabilities and forces of the OUN-UPA. Then the NKVD troops went into action.
UPA and NVKD troops
The main opponents of the rebels in Western Ukraine in 1944-1949. were the Internal and Border Troops of the NKVD-MVD of the USSR, the counterintelligence structure SMERSH, the NKVD-MVD and the NKGB-MGB of the Ukrainian SSR. Unlike the Red Army, they are more disciplined, better armed and prepared. Used against the UPA various methods struggle: raids, blockades, special groups, extermination battalions. The details of the terror by the Soviet punitive organs are depicted in the documents of the rebels and party reports. During 1945, in the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR, the prosecutor's office recorded/revealed 1,109 violations of "socialist legality" by 274 NKVD-NKGB employees. Among them - 77 murders, 75 arsons and destruction of property, 378 robberies, 213 beatings, 46 illegal arrests. In 1946, according to the statistics of party organs, 1,602 cases of "violation of Soviet laws" were recorded. In the "Reference on the most characteristic cases of violation of Soviet legality by employees of the UMGB of the western regions of the Ukrainian SSR" dated July 1, 1946, one can find information about "illegal methods of interrogation" (torture), falsification of charges by the Chekists (whole anti-Soviet organizations were invented), unreasonably long terms of pre-trial detention, insults, beatings, robberies of suspects, witnesses.
The OUN terror was in no way inferior to the Soviet one: “The archives of the Security Service of Ukraine and regional departments contain thousands of criminal cases of past years about the terrorist actions of specific individuals, which reveal the brutal methods of torture and reprisal of OUN-UPA militants, who not only killed, but also tortured their victims: they cut off their arms, legs, heads, hung them and strangled them with ropes / “strangleholds” / or barbed wire, stabbed them with knives and dumped the half-dead and alive into wells, under the ice of rivers and fell asleep in pits, burned and so on ".
It is curious that the archives captured cases when violators were judged by their own associates for exceeding military powers and committing crimes. This applies to both the Security Council of the OUN and the UPA, and the NKVD-RKKA. The same can be said about the facts of dressing up in the form of the enemy/terror of the local population in order to compromise. The number of losses by the NKVD in 1943-1945. is about 10 thousand people, from the side of the rebels - about 15 thousand.
Cooperation
Cooperation between the OUN-UPA and the Third Reich is a proven fact. This is confirmed by both German/Soviet documents and OUN documents. It is enough to look at the report of SS Sturmbannführer Dr. Vitiska zid dated 02/05/1944, sent to the command in Berlin and Krakow, the radiogram of the district leader Neringa from Kamenka-Strumilova to the governor of Galicia dated 04/02/1944, the report dated 04/04/1944 "Cooperation with the UPA in the area of Rava-Russkaya” or the testimony of 1946 at the preliminary investigation and in court of the referent of the II department of the group “South” Lazarek Yu.F. to make sure that the actions of the joint struggle of the Wehrmacht and the UPA are coordinated in some cases against the Red Army and Soviet partisans, mutual neutrality or the supply of ammunition from the Germans to the upovtsy.
Similar agreements were concluded with representatives of the military authorities of Romania and Hungary, Germany's allies. After the defeat of fascist Germany, the leaders of the OUN established contacts with the special services of Great Britain and the United States.
In the so-called. The “problem of collaborationism” needs to be emphasized on one essential detail: to be able to clearly distinguish between the tough leadership, the totalitarian OUN, members who were the top of the Bandera UPA, and the popular rebels. This issue requires a special additional investigation, because it is not clear whether cooperation with the German authorities was one-sided or, on the contrary, mutually beneficial. The same can be said about the crimes of the upovtsy.
UPA and civilians
UPA and the Soviet population
In the flames of war, civilians have always suffered. The Ukrainian SSR was no exception. Its western regions, annexed to the Soviet Union in 1939, experienced all the "charms" of the Stalinist regime - deportations, forced km - deportations, a thorough investigation. arny OUN, which were the top Bandera UPA, from the popular post-collectivization, repression, the planting of Soviet ideology. In less than two years, this influenced the local population so much that already in 1941 the Germans were greeted as liberators with bread and salt. About three years later, the totalitarian regime returned to Western Ukrainian lands. The answer was not long in coming.
For 1945–1953 on the territory of the western regions of Ukraine, the rebels committed 14,424 sabotage and terrorist acts. For 10 years (1945-1955) they killed 17 thousand Soviet citizens. In 1948–1955 329 chairmen of village councils, 231 collective farm chairmen, 436 workers of district party committees, employees of district organizations and activists, 50 priests were killed. In total, the UPA fighters destroyed from 30 to 40 thousand people. .
The terrorist activities of the OUN did not justify the goals, therefore, after 1946, the scale of its terror, like the Soviet one, began to decline. war time were shot, sent to the front, to the eastern regions of the Ukrainian SSR, to the Urals, to peaceful - were limited to deportations or prison term. According to official Soviet statistics, in 1944-1952. in the western regions of Ukraine under repression in various forms punitive structures hit almost half a million people, incl. more than 130 thousand people were arrested, 200 thousand people were deported outside the Ukrainian SSR. On the other hand, the underground activity of the OUN-UPA for almost 15 years confirms the thesis of popular support on the territory of Western Ukraine, which is confirmed by modern social studies.
UPA and the Polish population
Ukrainian-Polish relations have always been distinguished by complexity and inconsistency. In the 20th century, they reached a new level and took on the appearance of an ordinary meat grinder. The policy of the Polish official circles was extremely simple: Western Ukrainian lands should be under the control of the new Commonwealth. Ukrainian nationalists thought differently. As a result of the clash of official points of view, the civilian population was drawn into the conflict. The OUN-B launched large-scale actions against the Poles in March 1943. In world history, the bloody tragedy was called the Volyn Massacre. The uncompromising positions of the Polish government and the leadership of the OUN in the territorial issue led to the death of at least 70-80 thousand Poles and 10-20 thousand Ukrainians: in 1943-1944. UPA detachments are responsible for the ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in Western Volyn, Eastern Galicia, in the Kholm region; Army Regional - for terror against the Ukrainian.
UPA and the Jewish population
The resolutions of the II Great Congress of the OUN-B recorded the negative attitude of the organization towards the Jews: “The Jews in the USSR are the most devoted support of the Bolshevik regime and the vanguard of Moscow imperialism in Ukraine. The anti-Jewish mood of the Ukrainian masses is used by the Muscovite-Bolshevik government to divert their attention from the real culprit of the misfortunes and to direct them, in the hour of the uprising, to pogroms of the Jews. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists is fighting the Jews as the backbone of the Moscow-Bolshevik regime, at the same time explaining to the masses that Moscow is the main enemy. In May 1941, the OUN-B developed an instruction "Struggle and activities of the OUN during the war." It indicated that national minorities are divided into: a) friendly to us, that is, members of all enslaved peoples; b) hostile to us, Muscovites, Poles, Jews. It is noteworthy that the details of the second paragraph stated: “Isolate the Jews, remove them from government institutions in order to avoid sabotage, especially Muscovites and Poles. If there was an irresistible necessity to leave a Jew in the economic apparatus, put our policeman over him and liquidate him for the slightest offense. The leaders of certain areas of life can only be Ukrainians, and not strangers-enemies. Assimilation of Jews is excluded.
By February 1943, the UPA was created under the leadership of the OUN-B. Later, the first military conference was held, and a decision was made to focus on the UK and the USA. The anti-Jewish program of the OUN-B was softened: Jews living on Ukrainian territory must be deported, while at the same time, captured political officers and Jewish military personnel should be destroyed. In the spring of 1943, the Jews, along with the Poles, came under attack from the UPA-OUN and the Security Council of the OUN. The anti-Jewish course of the OUN leadership was finally curtailed in 1944. The exact number of victims is unknown, according to the Israeli researcher Aron Weiss, about 28 thousand Jews were killed by the OUN in Western Ukraine.
UPA and modern Ukraine
Problem Solving History
Since the mid-1990s, the issue of giving a special status to OUN-UPA veterans has been raised in Ukraine. For a long time, no significant changes occurred. In September 1997, a government commission was established under the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine to study the activities of the OUN-UPA. On July 10, 2002, a decision was made with the help of NASU to create a working group of historians to conduct Scientific research activities of the UPA and, on the basis of the data obtained, determine their official status. Viktor Yushchenko on January 29, 2010 by his decree recognized the members of the UPA as fighters for the independence of Ukraine.
public thought
44% of respondents negatively assess the armed struggle of the OUN and UPA against the Soviet regime, 20% of respondents - positively, 14% - neutrally, 18% - found it difficult to answer, 4% - did not hear about such an event (April-May 2011, Research & Branding group).
23% of respondents support the idea of recognizing the OUN-UPA as participants in the struggle for the state independence of Ukraine, 51% of respondents do not support it, 26% have not decided on this issue (September-October 2012, the Rating Sociological Group).
conclusions
Second World War- the most bloody in the history of mankind. It acquired the character of total, the massacre was with everyone and against everyone. Archival materials coldly testify to both the crimes and the heroism of the OUN-UPA. The latter are also responsible for thousands of innocent victims among the peaceful Polish, Soviet and Jewish population. On the other hand, the upovtsy fought against the German invaders, Soviet troops (including the Red Army, partisans, the NKVD-MGB), the Home Army, etc. The OUN terror was not inferior in size to the Soviet one, it was condemned by the Bulbovites and Melnikovites, and the principle of collective responsibility was applied by all sides without exception.
The mythologization of the UPA-OUN is one of the main problems of the current stage of the study of military history. Supporters of the absolute glorification of the upovtsy argue that the latter fought almost a real battle with the Wehrmacht, did not cooperate with the Nazi regime, did not kill civilians, which is not true. In this regard, the topic of “whitening” the pages of the UPA-OUN, the spread of misinformation, whether it is quotes from Charles de Gaulle and Che Guevara, the death of Viktor Lutze, the post-war cleaning of archives or exaggeration / embellishment of the scale of activity, is relevant. A picture is created that during WWII there were only two enemies - the Third Reich and the OUN-UPA.
Opponents of the glorification of the OUN-UPA are stepping on the same rake as the adherents. Idealization Soviet Union automatically jeopardizes everything that does not fit into this framework, and causes unfounded criticism. At the same time, they forget about the crimes of the Soviet regime, which in the first half of its existence was a cruel totalitarian machine, repeat the myths about Roman Shukhevych, whom Hitler allegedly awarded with two Nazi crosses, the Ukrainian trace in Khatyn, that the upovtsy of the Germans did not kill the OUN-UPA condemned Nuremberg.
The problem of the UPA-OUN is one of the most difficult in Ukrainian society. In view of the fact that there is direct and indirect evidence of military clashes between the OUN-UPA and the Red Army, UPA-UNRA, the Home Army, etc., against the peaceful Polish, Soviet (including Ukrainian), Jewish population, it is necessary:
1. Create an independent highly professional commission to investigate the activities of the OUN-UPA. The commission level should be at least at the level of the CIS. It should include historians, military historians, sociologists, half of whom are Ukrainians (50%), the rest are experts from other countries (Poland, Belarus, Russia, Germany, Moldova, the USA; in other words, the CIS and EU countries + those who directly or indirectly involved in this problem).
2. The duties of the commission will include: collecting, processing information, screening out false data, polling the population, participating in the process of living participants in the OUN-UPA, KA, AK, Wehrmacht and their descendants, including a possible lie detector test, the use of archival materials from Ukraine and others powers, summarizing. Each stage of the commission's work is covered in the media, informatization of the population should be carried out, cooperation with the SBU and the Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine (in the case of identifying those who committed crimes against humanity), public opinion should be taken into account (in the latter case, as long as it does not contradict truth of the process).
3. Statistics, figures and facts, a limited number, a certain region of hostilities, low results in the struggle of the OUN-UPA allow us to assert at the moment their maximum regional heroic status. It will be specified and corrected by the commission. Regional status means additional payments to pensions for veterans of the OUN-UPA from the regional / state budgets, however, the issue of “subsidizing” is possible only after the conclusions of the commission and the end of the investigation. Actions of memory and their activities should be held at the regional / all-Ukrainian levels, taking into account the opinion of the local population. Individual members of the OUN-UPA can go beyond the regional level, equal in status to veterans of the Soviet army and receive all-Ukrainian veteran status, subject to confirmation by the commission (based on facts and irrefutable evidence) of their heroic activity during World War II.
The analytical material can be ended with the thesis of the authors of the collection “The NKVD-MVD of the USSR in the fight against banditry and the armed nationalist underground in Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and the Baltic states (1939-1956)”, to which the author of the article joins: “The authors of this publication do not take any responsibility to judge the participants in the brutal struggle of the 1940s-1950s, to determine the right and the wrong. We respect the right of any nation - large and small - to self-determination and the right of any person to have his own point of view on the national question. The only thing that cannot be justified is violence, and from this point of view we condemn both the repressions of the central government and the terror of the nationalists.”
Sources
Sergei Tkachenko, "The Rebel Army. Fighting Tactics.
Collection of Ukrainian and Polish historians for the bags of the IX-X international scientific seminars - Warsaw, 5-11 leaf fall, 2001.
OUN i UPA, 2005, Rozd. four.
Dovidka about the activities of the OUN-UPA. Working group of spivrobitnikov of the Security Service of Ukraine. Date 30 April 1993
A. I. Kokurin, N. I. Vladimirtsev, “The NKVD-MVD of the USSR in the fight against banditry and the armed nationalist underground in Western Ukraine, Western Belarus and the Baltic States (1939-1956)
OUN in 1941 rotation. Documents. In 2 hours. Part 1.
Bitter truth. Crime OUN-UPA (Confession of a Ukrainian) Polishchuk Viktor Varfolomeevich
Evidence of UPA crimes
If we were to describe all the crimes of the UPA against the Polish and Ukrainian peoples, in respect of which there is evidence, it would be necessary to publish a separate book, citing the facts themselves without comment, on several hundred pages of small printed text. I myself have collected more than a hundred, signed by people, with addresses, references. But for now, about them - first personal evidence:
In the summer of 1943, my maternal aunt Anastasia Vitkovskaya went with a Ukrainian neighbor in the afternoon to the village of Tarakanov, located three kilometers from the city of Dubno. They spoke Polish because my aunt, an illiterate woman, originally from the Lublin region, could not learn Ukrainian. They went to change something for bread, because the aunt has six children. Neither she nor Uncle Anton Witkovsky, also a completely illiterate person, never interfered in any politics, but had not a single idea about it. And she, as well as a Ukrainian neighbor, was killed by Bandera from the UPA or the Bush Self-Defense Departments just because they spoke Polish. Killed brutally, with axes, and thrown into a roadside ditch. This was told to me by the second aunt - Sabina, who was married to Ukrainian Vasily Zagorovsky.
My wife's parents lived before the war in Polissya. Her father is Czech and to have is Polish. The family spoke Polish. When, at the beginning of 1943, the massacres of Poles began in Southern Polissya, the whole family fled to Kremenchuzhchina to their father's relatives in the village of Ugorsk, near Derman. One day, a familiar Ukrainian told his wife's father that the UPA was preparing to destroy his family. They fled to Kremenets. Someone heard the conversation of this young Ukrainian with his wife's father. Suspecting him of "treason", they hung him in the middle of the village and attached the inscription on his chest: So it will be with all traitors. The Hanged Man was not allowed to film for several days.
Two facts that took place in different places and in different time, unites one thing: the authorship of the OUN-UPA, the causelessness of the killings.
My father had a brother, Yarokhtey, who lived in the village. Linden, Lubnensky district. For the fact that he openly branded the UPA, he was shot in the mouth. Uncle Yarokhtey was an ordinary, illiterate peasant.
Due to lack of space in one book, it is not possible to cite the facts of single and mass muzzlings on Poles and Ukrainians committed by the OUN-UPA, so I will limit myself to only a few of them.
A person very close to me, M.S., said: On March 24, 1944, on a frosty night, Bandera attacked our house, set fire to all the buildings. We lived in the village of Polyanovitsy (Tsitsivka), Zborovsky district, Ternopil region, in which there were only Poles, but not military colonists. The colonists were taken out by the Bolsheviks in February 1940 to Siberia, and Ukrainians from Przemysl arrived in their place. My father is a Pole, he married a Ukrainian. Before the war, we lived in harmony with Ukrainians from nearby villages, like our entire village. We heard about muzzling in Volyn, but at first we did not allow the thought that we could be killed. Somewhere in February 1944, Bandera - we did not distinguish who was from the UPA or from another group - everyone was called Bandera, because they themselves sang the "leader" Bandera, put forward a ransom demand in front of our village. The peasants collected the money and gave it to Bandera. But it did not help. On the mentioned night, members of the male family, that is, father, younger brother and I, like other nights, spent the night in a storehouse under the household houses. And my mother (Ukrainian) with my two sisters and my father's sister, who married a Ukrainian from near Kharkov, spent the night in the house. Around midnight, we smelled smoke in the shelter and guessed that the UPA had set fire to the houses. I was the first to jump out of the shelter, lifting the lid. Opening the lid, I burned my hand, then, running through the fire, I burned my face. They shot at me, who was running away, but did not hit. I hid in the dark. The father also tried to get out of the shelter, but he could not, burned down. In the smoke shelter, my younger brother was strangled. The mother, who was running away from the burning house, was wounded by a shot, but she ran away. A seven-year-old sister also ran away, although she was wounded in the knee by a hunting weapon. The father's sister also ran away, who was wounded by a shot in the arm, because of this, the arm had to be amputated. The second, 13-year-old sister, while running away, ran into a Banderite who pierced her chest with a bayonet and she died on the spot.
On the same night, the Banderaites burned and killed our neighbors - Beloskursky and Baranovsky. That same night, they burned and killed others from our small village, but I don’t remember their names.
After that, we went to the village of Zarud'e, where our family, Ukrainian by mother's side, was hiding us.
T.G. from Glukholazy, Poland, writes: We lived in the Polish village of Chaikov, Serny county. In June or July 1943, Bandera on horseback came from the Ukrainian villages before dinner, from the village of Khinoch. They surrounded the houses, set them on fire, and those who ran away from them were killed with axes and bayonets. So six families were muzzled, and their houses were burned. They killed from the Romanovsky family, Mandrich, Yakimovich, Grodovsky and two more. The UPA did not fight the Germans. Before the war, there was no enmity between Ukrainians and Poles.
E.B. from the USA: we lived in the village of Radokhovka, commune Klevan. In March 1943, at midnight, the Upovites set fire to the house of their neighbor Yancharek. We did not sleep at home, only in a shelter not far from the house, and one person from the family was always on guard. Therefore, we saw figures coming from the side of the Ukrainian Radokhovka, straight ahead, not expensive. They set fire to Yancharek's house, and those who ran out of it were shot at. Only son Jan was saved, the rest died: Jakub Janczarek, his wife, his mother, son Janusz, daughter Lyodzia, second daughter with a baby. Bandera's victims were thrown into a well. After this event, we fled to Klevan.
My mother was killed in May of the same year - she was going to the village, and she was shot, her head was also broken. Before the war with the Ukrainians, we lived in harmony.
M.P. from the USA: Bandera attacked the village of Dubovitsa on April 6, 1943 at 11 o'clock. Jozef Moskal's parents were told to take out valuables from the house, then they pushed them back into the house and set it on fire. Oshkroba was shot near the mill. Oshkroba's wife was hiding in the basement with her daughter and grandchildren, a grenade was thrown there. G. Pavlovskaya spent the night with the Ukrainians, with Ilko Humenny, they dragged her out of there together with her small children, beat her so that she could tell where her husband was. They placed him with Anufry Balanda, who was beaten for helping the Poles. There were many Ukrainians who helped the Poles - Ivan Chmil, who informed about the intentions of Bandera, Yusko Fedyshyn, priest Sofron Ivanchyshyn. And the priest's son, Nikolai, renounced the church and joined the Bandera people. Volodya Kukhar hid me and my brother, and Daniil Splavinsky hid my father. Ilko Humenny hid G. Pavlovskaya with her children and Stefania Reitz. Józef Ortel with his wife and children were thrown into the fire, into a burning house on Virkhna. All died. One person jumped out of the fire, one Ukrainian brought him to the hospital in Kalush, but he was never rescued. Four people from the Svezhevsky family were walking from Voynilov to Kalush, all of them were killed by Bandera. There were 400 houses in Dubovice and only 5% of Poles. 18 people were killed during the attack. Many Ukrainians helped the Poles. When the Germans began to retreat, the young Ukrainians converged and consulted - what to do with the Poles? Mikhail Kumtsov said that it is easier to kill a Pole than a sparrow.
Z.Kh. from Poland, the city of Walch: The village of Nikolaevka, the parish of Korets, in Volyn. The Bandera attack was on 04/29/1943 at dawn. Bandera, who were returning from Kobylnia, attacked the Polish families of the Brukhlevskys and Zagadlovs. Bandera entered our house and began to muzzle, stabbing with bayonets. They brought straw and set it on fire. I was also pierced with a bayonet, and I lost consciousness, falling on my aunt. When the flame got close to me, I woke up, jumped out the window. Bandera was no more. My groan was heard by a neighbor, Ukrainian Spyridon, he brought me to another Ukrainian - Bezukha, who on horseback brought me to Korets to the hospital. As a result of the attack, 14 people died, here is their list: last names, first names, how old, among them was a pregnant 20-year-old woman. This person is Z.Kh. - attached to the story photocopies of death records issued by the local steamer.
G.K. from the USA: on July 14, 1943, in Kolodna, Banderists muzzled 300 people. They drove them, ordered them to lie down, they say, they will look for weapons. And they started shooting at those who were lying down. A clear witness - Antek Polyulya, who hid in a barn mother's sister. Bandera from Kolodna: Andrei Shpak, Semyon Koval, Volodya Snichishin; from Oleshkov - Pavel Romanchuk. I don't know any other names. The priest incited to muttering, during the procession he said: We will hallow the knives so that we can cut the cockle out of wheat.
V.V. from Great Britain says that on 07/12/1943 in the village of Zagai, Gorokhov district, Bandera was killed - and here is a list of 165 surnames, names, how old, among them are babies, small children, pregnant women, old people. He says that living together with Ukrainians before the war was good, the enmity began when Hitler began to promise a free Ukraine.
GD from Poland: On Tuesday, July 14, 1943, in the village of Silets, Volodymyr Volynsky uyezd, Ukrainians killed two senior people - Jozef Witkowski and his wife Stefania. They were shot dead in their own house, which was then set on fire. Their adult children fled to Vladimir-Volynsky the day before, and the old people did not want to leave their homes. At noon on the same day, two old Mikhalovichs and their 7-year-old granddaughter, the old spouses of the Gronovichs and the wife of a priest named Zofia were killed with axes. Ivan Shostachuk took part in the murders, who before the war was a corporal in the Polish army and then changed his religion to Roman Catholic. His younger brother Vladislav, an Orthodox, warned the Morelevsky family (father and four daughters) and the Mikhalkovich family (father and two daughters), and therefore they were saved. There was a Ukrainian in the gang - Yukhno, who killed the Poles, and his father saved the Stychinsky family. Before the war, relations with the Ukrainians were good, they began to deteriorate in early 1943, when agitators began to arrive from the Lviv and Stanislav regions, who rebelled against the Ukrainian youth, promising a free Ukraine. Not everyone succumbed to the incitement, in particular, the elderly did not succumb. teacher elementary school Maya Sokolova, the wife of the head of the school, who was sent to Silets from the Soviet Union, a Russian woman, along with her husband, mother and one-year-old son Slava, were drowned in a well. Some of the young people ran away from the village, and the old people were killed. From the Morelovsky family, their daughter Irena, who married Jozef Popovshek and lived with her family near Lutsk, was killed. The Bandera people muzzled their parents - Apollonia and Stanislav, daughter-in-law Irena (19 years old) and son Jozef (20 years old). All but Irena were killed under the forest. Irena was taken to the house by the leaders of the gang, kept in the basement, raped, and then thrown into the well. Irena was pregnant. The Bandera people were not allowed to leave the village, on the contrary - in one case, the Ukrainian Nedzelsky did not allow the village to be left to Morelovsky. Mixed families were also killed.
POISON. from Canada: On our village of Lozov, Ternopil region, which is above the Gnizdechnaya River, Bandera attacked on the night of December 28, 1944. About 800 people were muzzled. I made a list of those killed whom I knew well, there are 104 people in this list. Maryan Stotsky, his sister Maryana, who were then children, had mutilated faces. At about 23.00 hours, they surrounded the village from three sides, and then went on the offensive. The first group, after firing a rocket, knocked out windows and broke down doors, the second group of Bandera killed, and the third robbed, after which they prepared to set fire to houses. Someone managed to ring the bell from the church and a Soviet armored train arrived. The gang began to run away, the Soviets chased after it, but the Bandera people seemed to have disappeared into the darkness. 2 km to the north of us was the village of Shlyakhetsky Kurniki, and to the south the village of Shlyakhtintsy.
V.M. from Canada: Grabina village, Oleski commune, Vladimir-Volyn region. On August 29, 1943, on Sunday, the news came that the Bandera people were muzzling. My father ordered me to hide in the barn, and he also hid himself. When they entered our yard, my mother was there, who was immediately shot with a pistol. The father saw this and could not stand it, he came out, saying: What do you need, because I didn’t do anything bad to you!? Bandera in response hit him with an ax in the head. The father fell, then the bandit shot him again. Mother was killed immediately, and sister Kazimira on the third day. There was me and my sister, who had previously been taken to Germany to work.
K.I. from the UK: Germanovka, Borshchiv district. The attack took place in September 1943 at dawn. I was attacked by close neighbors - Kostetsky, Golovasty and Zaplitny. They only beat me up and robbed me. February 14, 1944 was the wedding of my cousin, not far from me, on our street. The young man worked at the post office, which is why they invited the chief, and when he left, the Bandera people shot him dead. Shooting began, grenades were thrown. All the guests at the wedding were killed, the house was burned down. The musicians were killed, there were six of them, the orchestra was called "Shelest", among them there were several Ukrainians, they were also killed. There were also several Ukrainians among the guests, they were also killed. 26 people were killed. One Ukrainian, a neighbor, allowed me to spend the night in their house, but one day, coming from the church, he said that he could no longer hide me, because the priest, that is, their priest, said: “Brothers and sisters, the time has come when we can repay Poles, Jews and Communists. And my neighbor worked for the Bolsheviks at the state farm, so he was considered a communist. This priest's name was Voloshin. There was one Polish-Ukrainian family, she, like all Poles, was killed. Before the war, the Ukrainians lived well, enmity set in when they began to organize the UPA. At the end of November 1944, a piece of paper was attached to the gate, on which it was written that in three days I would get out of the village, because they would kill and burn me. I left everything and ran away.
E.P. from Poland sent an extract from the parafial book of the village Mosty Bolshie, Zhovkva county, in which it is indicated that Vladislav Klodnoy was killed on September 6, 1943; on Palm (Catholic - V.P.) Sunday they were killed with axes ... sixteen surnames and names are indicated, and three people: Kazimir Vititsky, sexton, his wife and child were drowned in an ice hole.
And so on and so forth. I repeat: it is not possible to publish all the reports. I did not have the opportunity to get such reports from Ukraine, in particular, from Volyn and Galicia about Ukrainians muzzled by Bandera. When I applied to Ukraine, they did not answer my letters or kept silent about the essence of the matter. I can’t understand - either they are still afraid of Bandera, or they are already afraid of them again. If I lived in Ukraine, I would get such reports. I consider it necessary, while some witnesses of these crimes are still alive, to create a common, Polish-Ukrainian, and maybe Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish commission or committee in order to receive reports from direct witnesses of muzzling. In order to be able to combine such data with those that already exist and print at least a small circulation, a document so that such a book is in scientific institutions in Poland and Ukraine, in libraries. Those who live in Poland and Ukraine should take care of this.
But A.L. from Poland sent lists of families in which people died at the hands of the UPA. The lists are very accurate, they indicate the names of family members, the number of family members, the number of those killed, including children under 15 years old. List from the village of Ostrovki, Lyuboml uyezd. It was about this village that the "Gazeta" reported. The list includes 439 people killed, including 191 children. The list from the village of Kuty includes 106 people killed, including 47 children, from the village of Yankovitsy - 39 people killed, including 13 children. The lists were compiled by two former residents of the village of Ostrówki in 1981 from memory. The lists include only those muzzled about whom the compilers of the lists had no doubts and knew them personally. Let us recall that the Polish "Gazeta" in Toronto pointed out that 1,700 Poles were "executed" by the UPA in these villages. No, they were not shot, they were killed, sometimes only with shots. Because "to shoot" is "to put to death" on the basis of a sentence or legal order. This means that they shoot the one whom the court has sentenced to death or another body has issued an order for the execution of a specific person. Another infliction of death with a firearm is not a firing squad, it is an ordinary murder. Then a person is not shot, but shot.
When it comes to the three villages mentioned above, the method of killing was different. Yu. Turovsky and V. Semashko write about this: August 30, 1943 Yankovtsy, Polish village, gm. Berezhtsy, Lyuboml district, and residents of farms adjacent to Gushcha and Opalina, were attacked by UPA departments and residents of the Ukrainian villages of Rivne and Prekurka, hm. thick. They muzzled with axes, pitchforks, sticks and the like, and those who ran away were killed with firearms. They also muzzled the Ukrainian Nina Shlapak, who was pregnant. Most people died in the northern part of the village. In the southern part, the majority escaped, its inhabitants were able to escape to Rimachev. Of the total number of residents of the village in the amount of 762 people, 79 were muzzled, including 18 children.
August 30, 1943 Kuty, Polish village, gm. Berezhtsy, Lyuboml district, at dawn was surrounded by UPA "shooters" and Ukrainian peasants, mainly from the village of Lesnyaki, who committed a massacre of the Poles living there. They killed everyone, not letting women, children, old people through. They killed in houses, in yards, in utility rooms with axes, pitchforks, sticks, and the like, and they shot at those who were running away. Whole families were thrown into wells, covered with earth. Pavel Pronchuk, a Pole who jumped out of the shelter to protect his mother, was seized, laid on a bench, his arms and legs were cut off and left to die longer. The Ukrainian family of Vladimir Krasovsky with two children was brutally muzzled there. Of the total number of residents of the village of Kuty in the amount of 282 people, 138 were killed, including 63 children.
Will Ostrovetskaya... (on the same day - V.P.) Of the total number of inhabitants of the village in the amount of 806 people, 529 were killed, including 220 children.
There is also a description of muzzling in the village of Ostruvki, out of 604 inhabitants, 437 were killed, including 146 children.
The book of Yu. Turovsky and Vl. Semashko on 166 pages of thick and small print indicates the names of villages, the number of inhabitants, the number of muzzled, the way of muzzling, the number of killed children, including Ukrainians. This is an amazing lecture! The authors at the same time each time refer to the sources of information. They didn't come up with what they wrote. The description of the crimes of the UPA is in the form of a calendar, beginning in September 1939 and ending in July 1945. The authors are noted for their objectivity, repeatedly describe the assistance provided to the Poles by the Ukrainians, write about the murders of Ukrainians. They estimate that 60-70 thousand Poles died at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists in Volhynia in 1939-1945, which was about 20% of the then Polish population of that region.
Against the background of the book by Yu. Turovsky and Vl. Semashko's reflections are as follows: In the West, for a number of years, a general diaspora action, managed by the MKSU, has been taking place in defense of Ivan Demyanuk, for which Ukrainian society has spent many millions of dollars to date. The reason for this is supposedly "defaming the Ukrainian people" due to the fact that during the trial of Ivan Demyanuk in Israel it was indicated that he was a Ukrainian, and that the prosecutor, as well as the court, repeatedly referred to the facts of the crimes of other Ukrainians. The involvement of the society controlled by Ukrainian nationalists in this case can be explained by paragraph 2 of the "Decalogue": Do not allow anyone to soil (stain - V.P.) either the glory or the honor of Your Nation. If on this occasion the nationalist Ukrainian diaspora has become so financially and politically biased, then why does it, in the person of the MKSU - the World Congress of Free Ukrainians - not prosecute Oleksandr Korman for his false statements about the crimes of Ukrainian nationalists, why does not prosecute the authors - priest Vaclav Shetelnitsky, Bishop Vincent Urban for their assertions that the OUN-UPA brutally muzzled tens of thousands of Polish civilians? Now there are all the possibilities of such prosecution before the court in Poland, where there are many Ukrainian lawyers. At the same time, it is possible to bring the publishing house to responsibility, to seek a court order to stop the distribution of books. And all - for "defaming the Ukrainian people." Because, according to Ukrainian nationalists, the OUN-UPA has never committed the crime of murder on the peaceful Poles of Volyn, Galicia. And if the named authors disseminate other statements, then - they need to be brought to court!
But somehow the Ukrainian nationalists do nothing in this direction. And the authors of the books, I think, would be glad to appear before the court, to prove to them the truth about what they wrote. And the court, having established the facts of the murder of the Poles committed by the OUN-UPA, would simultaneously confirm the guilt of the OUN-UPA. This is what Ukrainian nationalists are afraid of.
That is why the Ukrainian nationalists are silent. People say: The pussy knows whose fat she ate! They won't do anything to get to the point of litigation. Because it would be a forum where those who seek the disclosure of the truth could publicly compare their evidence with the statements of the OUN regarding the UPA's genocide on the Poles. I repeat: there are no procedural obstacles to such a process. Poland is now an independent state. And if Western lawyers think, they will find a way to bring the authors to trial in the West.
The named book by Yu. Turovsky and Vl. Semashko should be purchased by former members of the UPA. Maybe after reading it, their conscience will respond? Maybe someone will remember those terrible years, that "heroism", that shed blood of the defenseless. The book contains the names of the localities, the names of the victims, and in some cases also the names of the perpetrators.
Since 1946, I have been convinced that the UPA, Bandera and other nationalists killed Poles and Ukrainians who were unfavorable to them. They killed brutally. Subsequently, I also learned about how they killed Ukrainians who were sent by the Soviet authorities to Western Ukraine, often against their will. OUN-UPA also killed them. Until now, Polish authors, Soviet authors, including Ukrainian ones, have written about these terrible murders, about genocide. However, the latter wrote under strict censorship. And they were not too interested in the cases of the murders of the Poles. They weren't very trustworthy. They did not believe the Poles - because they are Poles. They did not believe the communists - because they are communists. But how not to believe when there is so much evidence of living witnesses? Moreover, after the expiration of time, they declare that they do not feel hatred, do not want punishment. They only want to tell the truth. They do not consider Ukrainians as enemies. They know that crimes are on the conscience of the OUN-UPA.
Although the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism, like German National Socialism, is far from Christian ideals, however, Ukrainian nationalists willingly refer to God, to the Ukrainian, in particular, the Greek Catholic Church, which is subordinate to the Pope of Rome, therefore, is related not only in Christ with the Roman Catholic Church, including the Polish one. Therefore, we honor - this is how the Catholic priest Vaclav Shetelnitsky writes about the crimes of the OUN-UPA. Only excerpts from his book, published in 1992, will be included here. If you don't trust him anymore, then who do you trust?
... in 1943 and at the beginning of 1944 there were very often (in the Terebovel parish - V.P.) the funeral of the victims of the murders committed by Bandera. In particular, the population was shocked by the mugs committed in the late evening of 11/24/1943 on 11 Poles, residents of the village of Plebanovka, 2 km from Terebovl ...
A Jew was hiding in the houses of the brick factory in Plebanovka. Somehow, the Ukrainian police found out about this, and they turned to the local Pole Yan Yukhnevich, trying to get him to take the Jew out of the shelter. When Yukhnevich entered the territory of the brick factory, a policeman shot him there.
Bandera drove up in two trucks with the lights out on the street. Zofia Chrzanowska and lingered near the white figure ... went to the village on foot. After some time, a cry was heard from Plebanovka. The Pole Polishevsky, a resident of Terebovlya, saw and heard this. That night, together with a Ukrainian, he guarded the railway. He warned him: If you want to live, then remember - you have not seen or heard anything.
The attackers dispersed in groups around the village, entered some houses and muzzled the inhabitants there. Then they killed with axes and knives: Jan Gliva, Jan Krukovsky ... (further list - V.P.) ... On the day of the funeral, vicars from Terebovlya arrived there: priest Piotr Lewandowski and the author of this report, who read prayers over the bodies of the dead. Before us was a stunning picture of human remains, cut with knives, chopped with axes, with severed legs and arms.
In 1944–1945 in the village of Mogilnitsa, the nationalists muzzled such Poles: (here is a list of surnames and names - V.P.), a total of 53 people. At the same time, in the village of Romanovka, which belonged to the parochy in Mogilnitsa, Poles were muzzled (list - V.P.), a total of 16 people.
A few kilometers from Terebovlya is the village of Bavorov, in which priests Karol Protsyk as a paroh, and priest Ludwik Rutyna as a vicar were pastors... for the fact that they took part in the funeral of the Poles, muzzled by members of this organization. The execution of the sentence took place on November 2, 2943 .... Around 18.00, a group of murderers broke into the estate (plebaniy) in Bavorovo. The organist was shot dead on the spot, and priest Protsik was dragged out of the room. Priest Rutina escaped through the window, a grenade was thrown behind him, but it did not explode. Priest Protsik started screaming, they pierced him with a bayonet, tied him up and took him to the forest ... His body was not found.
From the author's report, it appears that on January 21, 1945, the Banderists killed priest Wojciech Rogowski from the parish in the square near Kopychynets. On February 10, 1945, priest Jan Valnichka was buried in a brutally mutilated manner - before the murder they mocked him, forced him to dance before his death. They killed him with a shot in the mouth. He was from the parish in Kotsyubintsy.
On Easter 1944, priest Kazimir Bialovons, a parokha from Gleschava, spent the night in the church. At night, Bandera attacked the village. The priest with several people hid in the basement, but the attackers opened the shelter, threw several grenades into it, and then they threw lit straw on the dying people. When the Bandera retreated, the priest, who was saved from the fragments of grenades by a rough featherbed, left the shelter.
The author gives several descriptions of muzzling committed on the Poles. He describes that on March 19, 1989 in Wroclaw, in the Church of Christ the King, a memorial service was held for the Poles of the village of Verbovets who were killed on the night of March 19, 1944. After the memorial service, Anthony Gomulkevich, a witness of the events, spoke, who, among other things, said:
Already 45 years have passed since those tragic events in our village near Budzanov, between Terebovl, Chertkovo and Buchach. Since ancient times, our cohabitation with Ukrainians has developed normally, as usual between neighbors. We visited each other, helped in various jobs, and mixed Polish-Ukrainian families were on the agenda.
Meanwhile, already in the first days of July 1941, the Ukrainian police, who were called "Schutzmanns", took away the first Pole from the village under the pretext of interrogation. Verbovets twenty-seven-year-old Maciej Beletsky. He was bullied and died from beatings. Then, during the attacks on the neighboring village of Mogilnitsa, Leon Sonetsky, Stanislav Gotz, as well as the Malinovsky, Mazurov, Yanitsky families and others were muzzled ...
In the neighboring village of Lyaskovtsy, having muzzled the Jews, the Schutzmanns and Bandera reached the Polish population. On the basis of the verdict of the chief of the gang in Lyaskovtsy, Nikolai Poperechny, Bronislav Grushetsky, Michal Grushetsky, Nikolai Friedrich, Piotr Ovsyansky, Vladislav Ovsyansky and Kazimir Snezhek were martyred in the parish house of the Greek Catholic parish. This brutal crime involved stripping each of them, tying them up with barbed wire, and beating them to death. Even before they died, they drove nails into their heads, chopped them off with an ax or cut off their arms and legs with a saw and pierced their stomachs with a bayonet ... they walked and mumbled at the expense of "Independent" ...
March 18, 1944 ... comes 23.00. From Lyaskovets, in the direction of Verbovets, they fired a rocket ... They guessed that it would begin soon ... And so they set fire to the first buildings of Polish residents, first from three sides, and after midnight the entire part of the Polish Verbovets was engulfed in fire. In the gardens swarming from Bandera. Houses were doused with gasoline and set on fire with torches and grenades. People ran away. In the open space, the Polish population became a victim of Bandera. Those who hid were suffocated by the smoke. In the morning the shooting died down. Survivors began to come from the fields. They later spoke about the death of their loved ones.
At the hands of vengeful criminals died:
- Bartosiewicz Grzegorz and Anthony
- Basilkevich Gelena
- Bulyak Aloisi, Stefan and Andrzej with a small child
- Bula Jan and Wawrzyniec
- Bull Franciszek, Grzegorz and Jozef
- Gypsy Anna with two children
- Grican Aloisi, Andrzej, Anthony, Apolonia, Jozef and Michal
- Gotz Maria
- Kinal Jozef, Katarzyna and Maria
- Kubachkowski - Maria, Tadeusz and Anna
- Oleinik Yan
- Penkovsky Stanislav and Maria
- Polloliak Stefan
- Rutko Aloisi, Maria and Rosalia
- Skubitskaya Mikhalin
- Snezhek Malgorzata with three children
- Smigel Michal and Apolonia...
We have gathered today at the Church of Christ the King in Wroclaw to take part in a memorial service on the forty-fifth anniversary of the burning of the Polish part of our Verbovtsy and the murder of our mothers, parents, brothers, sisters, friends and acquaintances by Ukrainian nationalists. We came here without hatred for the perpetrators of the crime, we just want to remind, in particular, the younger generation of that red tragic night 45 years ago.
We, Poles from the Ternopil land, do not know how to take revenge. Even now, after the tragedy, there was not a single case of revenge on the part of the Poles who survived.
Now, after the tragedy, from March 18 to March 19, 1944, armed Germans arrived at the scene of the crime in the burnt Verbovtsy in armored vehicles. We directed machine gun fire towards the Ukrainian population and asked the barely alive Vincent Sadlyak, who is present among us today, whether to shoot at the Ukrainians? He said no, don't shoot. Let this fact be an answer to those who at home and abroad in various newspapers every time more and more often write about the Ukrainians of Podolia and Volhynia allegedly muzzled by the Poles ...
Parochial parish in Verbovtsy, priest Eugeniyush Butra, escaped only because he was warned by a local Greek Catholic paroch. He managed to leave for Budzanov.
In the eyes of the Poles - OUN, UPA, Bandera - are synonymous. It is known, however, who is at stake.
And Vladimir Mazur, deputy chairman of the OUN-b Wire, at a big veche in honor of the UPA in Kyiv on Sophia Square on August 9, 1992, said:
In the twentieth century, the UPA, more than any other Ukrainian institution or formation, contributed to the education of the Ukrainian people of national consciousness, national dignity and national pride ... The UPA and the OUN declared to the whole world with their images that the Ukrainian nation lives, and it is the only one master in his native Earth - the Motherland with the right given to her by God to her own national state.
And not a word about the murders of Poles.
The historian Miroslav Prokop, the main figure of the OUN-s, is also silent about the killings of Poles, who published a study of p.n. "Ukrainian Anti-Nazi Underground 1941–1944".
Also prof. Yaroslav Pelensky in an interview with the magazine "Contact" (a Polish magazine in Paris) talks about the OUN, its genealogy, various details of the period of occupation, but ... says nothing about the killings of Poles. Does he not know about them?
In the book about Vatslav Shetelnytsky, places, dates, surnames are indicated. There are also similar data in the reports that I collected from Poles from Poland and other countries. If what is written here is a lie, then let the OUN refute it even through lawsuits. One of these cases has already been matched in place. We are talking about those 1,700 victims near Lyuboml. The Ukrainian Toronto newspaper "Ukraine and the World" also wrote about him.
No mention of the killings of Poles in Volhynia and Galicia in a number of other publications in 1992 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the UPA. They were also not mentioned during the scientific conference about the UPA b.s. "Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the national liberation struggle in Ukraine in 1940-1950", a report on which was submitted by its participant Stepan Semenyuk.
Instead, prof. Piotr Potichny from Canada talks about "mutual Polish-Ukrainian bloodshed".
Lev Shankovsky, a nationalist historian, in his work "History of the Ukrainian Army" writes that the UPA used only retaliation against the Polish population, and then only in the first half of 1944 in Galicia. And so the UPA fought in Volyn only with A.K., that is, with the Polish underground armed organization.
Both sides - Poles and Ukrainians - mutually blame themselves. This is linked to the question: Who started it and why? But more on that in a separate section.
Here, instead, in confirmation of the evidence of the killings of the Polish civilian population in Volhynia, I will refer to absolutely objective sources: to Czech authors, former residents of Volhynia. Czechs settled in Volhynia in the second half of the 19th century after the suppression of the January (in 1863) Polish uprising against tsarism. From those Poles who supported the rebels, from large landowners in Volhynia, the tsarist government took away the estates that became the property of the tsar's treasury. It was from the royal treasury that the Czechs bought land by agreement of the Russian tsar and the Austrian tsar. The Ukrainians have something to thank those Czechs for, from them they adopted many methods of cultivating the land, growing grain and industrial crops. Not far from the village of Lipy, Lubnensky district, there is the village of Mirogoshcha, half of which was Czech Mirogoshcha, and half - Russian Mirogoshcha. It was from those Czechs that the local Ukrainians, including my grandfather, learned to grow hops, because they gave birth very well on the Volyn black soil. The peasants began to get rich.
A Czech I know, but not from Mirogoshcha, in which the Poles did not live, they also did not live in the villages nearby Mirogoshcha, a respectable man, a colonel (my wife's father is a Czech by birth, so we often went to Czechoslovakia after the war) to my question is - Is it true that the Ukrainians killed the Poles in Volhynia? - answered: Killed! If you do not delve into this issue, it looked like all Ukrainians killed. But it's not. There were many who disapproved of the killings. But mostly they were silent, because the terror of the OUN-UPA ruled. Many Ukrainians paid with their lives for resisting the OUN-UPA. UPa, Sat. The OUN terrorized the Ukrainian population of Volhynia.
This Czech pointed to a number of facts of Ukrainian assistance to the Poles in the form of a warning about a planned attack. He also pointed to Vasily from the Valley of the Cossacks, which is near Boremlya, who, even under the Bolsheviks, said: The Germans will come - there will be a free Ukraine. And as the Bandera people began to muzzle the Poles, the same Vasily said: So we will not build Ukraine. People heard it. Two days later, his body was found in a well with a wire around his neck, and his 24–25-year-old wife was also found there.
The same Czech told about one case with S. B. OUN - Security Services. One of its chiefs himself shot 18 Bandera because they fought badly in a fight with the Germans in order to take away their weapons, and also to seize their livestock. And the Orthodox priest said: We will fight for a free Ukraine in every possible way. It was already when the Poles were being killed.
The Czechs did not quarrel with the Ukrainians, and the Bandera people basically did not hurt them.
The book "Volyn Czechs", written by Jozef Foitik and four other authors, fell into my hands, the subject of which is the history of the settlement of the Czechs in Volyn, their life, way of life, and the like. And only on the pages of the book, the authors, when describing the years in the German occupation, write:
The Ukrainian police at first willingly served the Germans, but when the occupiers did not satisfy their desires, they fled into the forest (p. 13)... The Ukrainians were very happy about the arrival of the Germans, welcomed them, helped them like police. The same thing happened in Russian Novoselki… In 1942, the Ukrainians began to resist the Germans, the Ukrainian police subsequently went into the forest, they became partisans, that is, Bandera (p. 42)… When the Russians withdrew, Bandera arose - it was the same fascism, only in the nationalist Ukrainian form (p. 43)… On the feast of Peter and Paul, June 29, 1943, a gang of unknown people with axes passed through the village. The next day we learned that at night they attacked the Polish colony of Zagai and brutally killed all its inhabitants (p. 50) ... In the village of Rachin ... in 1943, Ukrainian nationalists killed a Polish citizen Golyakovskaya (p. 63) ... In 1942 Bandera began to kill Polish citizens of Volyn (p. 67) ... In the summer of 1943, Bandera attacked Senkevichevka, burned the church, hospital and houses, after which they fled into the forest (p. 76) ... Bandera burned Polish villages: Marusya, Vydumka, Maryanovka and part of Skurchi. In the morning they attacked the dairy, burned the houses of the Pole Kilyan. They burned the houses of the Pole Krupinski, and when he ran away, he was shot dead (p. 83) ... In addition to the Nazi occupier, Bandera also harassed, who stole everything they came for (c. 89) ... Volyn was flooded with blood and fire - at night, Bandera attacked the Polish villages, and during the day the Germans burned and killed the Ukrainians. In Senkevichevka, Bandera burned a church, a hospital, a mill and many other houses. The Poles fled to Nevchi or Lutsk.
The named book was published in Czech in Czecho-Slovakia, it does not contain the year and place of publication. It does not contain a single mention of any actions of the Poles against the Ukrainians.
The Poles tried to quickly Polonize the inhabitants of Volhynia. When the Red Army retreated in June 1941... the Ukrainians slaughtered each other for political reasons. In Boyarka, the chairman of the village council, Pasechnik, and his 14-year-old son were killed with a pitchfork in a forest near Moskovshchina. Several Ukrainians were shot dead by their own ... Together with the Germans, Ukrainian nationalists returned home, who had previously fled to Poland occupied by the Germans, where they underwent special training at a school in Krakow. In Krasnaya Gora, they staged something like a people's trial of Soviet activists from 1939-1941. The enmity leaked out with such force that the mother did not protect the son or daughter, the son of the father, the brother of the brother.
On page 45 : Somewhere in a week (in July 1941 - Vii.) The Gestapo came for the front-line army and with it Ukrainian nationalists trained at a school in Krakow: one of them was a platoon commander (platoon commander - V.P.) of the Polish Army Dmitry Novosad from Krasnaya Gora ... Together with the Germans, they disarmed the police (called up by the Pole Anton Yakubovsky, burgomaster appointed by front-line units in Mlynov near Dubna - V.P.), put them on a car, took them to a forest called Khvoroshcha and shot there. Young guys from the Polish community of Ludwikowka were also taken into the cars, supposedly to work in Germany, and they were shot in the Khvoroshcha forest. Without any court. In Mlyniv, a number of Polish intellectuals were shot dead - 40 Poles and 20 Jews. This is how the Ukrainian police "shutsmans" began to operate under the command of Dmitry Novosad ... During 1941-1942, the Ukrainian police, together with the Gestapo, staged several smaller-scale pogroms in the vicinity.
Page 47: During the winter of 1942 until 1943, it came to single, then mass murders of Poles, before Easter they threw the slogan: "Remove Poles and Jews from Ukraine", that is, drive them out or kill them ... Bandera extremists said: Blood is needed up to the knees for a free Ukraine to come ! Somewhere at the end of 1942 or at the beginning of 1943... in Turetska Gora, unknown people killed Ukrainian Mykola Dombrovsky. He was not a communist, but he was an intelligent, logical thinker, a good friend of the Czechs. He valiantly proclaimed views that did not coincide with the official ideology of the Bandera underground. He was neither the first nor the last. Bandera terror strangled the voices of reason ... Bandera focused on arson and the murder of entire Polish families, later entire villages. The spring of 1943 passed in continuous fires. Polish villages and colonies were on fire at night. During the day, columns of smoke came from the fires of Ukrainian villages. The Poles, expelled from their villages to the cities, entered the service of the Germans, the police, and took revenge on the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians fled into the forest. Several Ukrainians were shot dead... Bandera killed several Czechs in the vicinity, mostly Catholics or from families mixed with Poles, no one was killed in Czech Dorogostai... Polish departments attacked the families of prominent Ukrainian nationalists at night... In the winter of 1943, on the road from Uzhyntsev, Bandera attacked a cart in the evening with Polish women from Karolinka, who went to Maslenka to spend the night at the Poloshchanskys, thinking that it was safer there. They shot Yuzef Poloshchansky's wife and another woman. In addition, in the Polish estate of Lebendzyanka, Bandera shot the wife and daughter of Jozef Olshak from Maslenka when they were visiting their relatives. At the end of 1943, they attacked the Pole miller Stets, whose wife was Ukrainian, killed her and her five-year-old daughter ... In the winter of 1942 in Mlynov. There was a massacre of the Jews. They went to their death like a flock of sheep, without resisting. Many fled, hiding with the Poles, Czechs and, in some cases, with the Ukrainians. The occupiers and the Ukrainian police threatened death for harboring Jews, hunted them in the forests and villages. In the courtyard of Volodymyr Vostroy from Frankov, a 14-year-old Jewish boy was attacked, who was driven all the way to Karolinka and mercilessly shot dead. In the "Grafchyna" forest not far from Frankiv, 14 Jews who were hiding in a bunker were shot dead, among them Josef Grinberg from Mlynov. Four children aged 12-14 were shot dead in the Czech forest near Frankiv.
The head of the Mlyniv policemen - "shutsmans", Dmitry Novosad became a bunch - an ensign, he boasted: I exterminated all the Polish intelligentsia in Mlyniv! He personally shot 869 Jews! I promised myself that I would shoot a thousand of them!
It was written by a Czech. As you can see - absolutely objectively.
But in the Czech magazine "Respekt", which is published in Czechoslovakia, Pavel Janko writes in the article "Experienced trouble, experienced grief":
At that time, the murders of Polish families and entire villages began. If the wife of a Ukrainian was a Pole, he killed her or her neighbors killed her, and he was proclaimed a traitor. Every evening, as soon as it got dark, a glow could be seen from all sides, and shooting could be heard. We knew that there were Poles who were being killed. When we got there the next day, everyone was killed - men, women, old people, children. All valuable property was taken away. Many people were thrown into wells. Many Poles went to the Germans, created detachments of pursuers and raided Ukrainian villages, who were caught, shot dead. The fleeing Poles were shot like rabbits. They did not shoot, however, at small children, as the Ukrainians did. They made such raids because the Ukrainians provoked it..
A Czech woman from Czecho-Slovakia writes to me: We didn’t have Poles (in Mirogosh, near Dubno), so we didn’t kill anyone, we only visited five Czech families, ordered the barns to be opened, took away half of what was in them. Our father (Orthodox - V.P.) Fyodor Shumovsky and his son, also a priest, asked in sermons not to harm people. And her brother, a doctor from Czechoslovakia, writes to me that this could be allowed Orthodox priests in Mirogoshcha or in Zavala, but not in Derman, in the village that was captured by Bandera. Instead, he writes, the majority of Greek Catholic priests from Galicia were associated with the OUN, later with the UPA.
This is how the image of events in Western Ukraine during the German occupation gradually emerges. Not all, as it seemed, Ukrainians muzzled, not all priests called for murder, not all hallowed axes.
Not all Ukrainians OUN-UPA was able to terrorize. Isn't the most expressive proof of this is the memoir of Alexandra Glovinskaya, originally from Gorokhovshchina in Volhynia, published in the Polish "Politics". Here is his translation:
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To begin with, a brief educational program - based on Wikipedia and slovari.yandex.ru:
Stepan Andreevich Bandera(Ukrainian Stepan Andriyovich Bandera) (January 1, 1909 - October 15, 1959) - one of the leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement in Eastern Poland (Galicia), Hero of Ukraine (2010), in 1941-1959 head of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN (b)) .
Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN)- a terrorist organization of a nationalist persuasion, operating in western regions Ukraine in the 20-50s. 20th century It emerged in 1929 as the "Ukrainian Military Organization" (UVO), then changed its name. The founder and first leader of the OUN was Evgen Konovalets, a former colonel in the Austro-Hungarian army. During the Revolution of 1917 and civil war he actively participated in the nationalist movement in Ukraine together with S. Petliura. At one time he served as the military commandant of Kyiv. The ideological platform of the OUN was the concepts of radical Ukrainian nationalism, distinguished by chauvinism and xenophobia, which had a pronounced anti-Russian orientation and focused on the use of extremist means to achieve the goal - the creation of "independent", "square" Ukraine.
After the Red Army entered the territory of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus in September 1939, the OUN, in cooperation with German intelligence agencies, began the fight against Soviet power. The preservation of the influence of the nationalists was largely facilitated by the methods by which the communist regime was imposed on the Western Ukrainian lands. Ukrainian nationalists warmly welcomed the attack of fascist Germany on the USSR and from the first days of the war supported German troops and occupation authorities. Members of the OUN helped the German fascists in the "final solution of the Jewish question", that is, the destruction and deportation of Jews in the occupied territories, served in the occupation administration and the police. Even when it became completely clear that Hitler would not give Ukraine any semblance of "independence", the nationalists did not stop cooperating with the Nazis. With their active support, the SS division "Galicia" was formed.
The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) is an armed formation of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.
It operated from the spring of 1943 in the territories that were part of the General Government (Galicia - from the end of 1943, the Kholm region - from the autumn of 1943), the Reichskommissariat Ukraine (Volyn - from the end of March 1943), and the Romanian Transnistria (Transnistria) (Northern Bukovina - from summer 1944), which until 1939-1940 were part of Poland and Romania.
In 1943-44. UPA detachments carried out ethnic cleansing of the Polish population in Western Volyn, Kholmshchyna and Eastern Galicia.
In 1943-1944, UPA detachments acted against Soviet partisans and detachments of the Polish underground (both communist and subordinate to the London government, i.e. Home Army).
But about the crimes of the UPA.
The UPA was established on October 14, 1942 by decision of the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). It was headed by Roman Shukhevych, a cavalier of two knightly orders Nazi Germany. President Yushchenko declared him a hero of Ukraine, and from the UPA itself he is trying to represent a belligerent during the Second World War.
Meanwhile, there is not a single document testifying that the UPA units fought with large Wehrmacht forces. But there are more than enough documents on the joint actions of Ukrainian nationalists with the Nazis. And even more documents tell about the savagery that the "national hero" Roman Shukhevych and his brothers in arms did.
It is known for sure that the published newspaper Surma, bulletins and other nationalist literature were printed in Germany. Part of the nationalist literature was illegally published in Lvov and other cities of Western Ukraine. Recently, the Russian Foreign Ministry published documents. Here is some of them:
The head of the 4th Directorate of the NKVD of the USSR, Pavel Sudoplatov, in a message dated December 5, 1942, testifies: “Ukrainian nationalists, who were previously underground, met the Germans with bread and salt and provided them with all kinds of help. The German occupiers widely used the nationalists to organize the so-called "new order" in the occupied regions of the Ukrainian SSR.
From the Protocol of interrogation of Kutkovets Ivan Tikhonovich, an active Banderite. February 1, 1944:
“Despite the fact that, at the behest of the Germans, Bandera proclaimed an “independent” Ukraine, but the Germans delayed the issue of creating a national Ukrainian government ... It was unprofitable for the Germans to create a Ukrainian national government, they “conquered” Ukraine and considered it an eastern colony of the “Third Empire” and power over They did not want to share Ukraine with Bandera, and they removed this rival. In addition, at that time, the Ukrainian police, created by the OUN, carried out an active security service in the rear of the German army to fight partisans, to detain Soviet paratroopers and to look for Soviet party activists.
Worthy of attention is the circular "On the Treatment of Members of the UPA" issued on 12.2.44 by the so-called Prützmann Fighting Group. From it it is clear how the UPA "fought" with the Germans a year and a half after its creation:
“Negotiations that began in the Derazhnya region with the leaders of the nationalist Ukrainian Insurgent Army are now also continuing in the Verba region. We agreed: members of the UPA will not attack German military units. The UPA is currently sending scouts, mostly girls, to the territory occupied by the enemy and reporting the results to the representative of the intelligence department of the combat group. Captured Red Army soldiers, as well as captured persons belonging to Soviet gangs, will be delivered to a representative of the intelligence department for interrogation, and the alien element will be transferred to the combat group for assignment to various jobs. In order not to interfere with this cooperation, which is necessary for us, it is ordered:
1. UPA agents who have certificates signed by a certain “Captain Felix”, or pretend to be members of the UPA, let them through freely, leave their weapons to them. Upon request, agents must be immediately brought to the 1st (representative of the intelligence department) battle group.
2. Parts of the UPA, when meeting with German units for identification, raise their left outstretched hand to their faces, in which case they will not be attacked, but this can happen if fire is opened from the opposite side ...
Signed: Brenner, Major General and SS Brigadeführer.
Another "heroic" stage in the history of Ukrainian nationalists and personally UPA commander Roman Shukhevych is the fight against Belarusian partisans. Historian S.I. Drobyazko in his book “Under the banner of the enemy. Anti-Soviet formations as part of the German armed forces” writes that in 1941 on the territory of Belarus the first Ukrainian police battalions were already formed from prisoners of war of the Red Army.
“Most of the Ukrainian auxiliary police battalions carried out security service on the territory of the Reichskommissariats, others were used in anti-partisan operations - mainly in Belarus, where, in addition to the battalions already created here, a number of units were sent from Ukraine, including 101, 102, 109, 115, 118 , 136th, 137th and 201st battalions.
Their actions, as well as the actions of other similar units involved in punitive actions, were associated with numerous war crimes against the civilian population. The most famous of which was the participation of a company of the 118th battalion under the command of cornet V. Meleshko in the destruction of the village of Khatyn on March 22, 1943, when 149 civilians died, half of whom were children,” he writes.
And now - the word to Bandera themselves. Here is what was published in 1991 in No. 8 of the Vizvolny Shlyakh edition, which was published in London:
“In Belarus, the 201st Ukrainian battalion was not concentrated in one place. His soldiers in couples and hundreds were scattered over different strongholds .... After arriving in Belarus, the kuren received the task of guarding the bridges on the Berezina and Zapadnaya Dvina rivers. Departments stationed in settlements, was charged with protecting the German administration. In addition, they had to constantly comb through the forests, identify and destroy partisan bases and camps, ”writes Bandera M. Kalba in this publication.
“Each hundred guarded the square allotted to it. The 3rd hundred of lieutenant Sidor were in the south of the zone of responsibility of the Ukrainian battalion, the 1st hundred of ROMAN SHUKHEVICH was in the center ... Pursuing the partisans in unfamiliar territory, the soldiers fell into an enemy ambush and were blown up by mines ... The battalion spent nine months on the "partisan front" and gained invaluable combat experience in this struggle. According to approximate data, the legionnaires destroyed more than two thousand Soviet partisans,” he notes.
As they say, no comment. Even the Banderaites themselves directly indicate what the “national hero” Shukhevych was doing in Belarus. For what kind of Ukraine he fought against the fraternal Belarusian people - one can only guess.
Finally, in 1943-1944. UPA detachments in Volhynia and Galicia exterminated over 100 thousand Poles. The Polish publication “Na Rubieїy” (Nr 35, 1999), published by the Volyn Foundation, describes 135 methods of torture and atrocities that the UPA fighters used against the Polish civilian population, including children.
Here are just a few of those fanatics:
001. Driving a large and thick nail into the skull of the head.
002. Stripping hair from the head with skin (scalping).
003. Striking with the butt of an ax on the skull of the head ...
005. Carving on the forehead "eagle" (Polish coat of arms) ...
006. Driving a bayonet into the temple of the head. ..
012. Piercing children with stakes through and through.
016. Cutting the throat….
022
023. Cutting the neck with a knife or sickle….
024. Striking with an ax in the neck ...
039. Cutting off women's breasts with a sickle.
040. Cutting off women's breasts and sprinkling salt on wounds.
041. Cutting off the genitals of male victims with a sickle.
042. Sawing the body in half with a carpenter's saw.
043. Infliction of stab wounds to the abdomen with a knife or bayonet.
044. Punching the belly of a pregnant woman with a bayonet.
045. Cutting the abdomen and pulling out the intestines in adults ...
069. Sawing a body lined with boards on both sides, in half with a carpenter's saw ...
070. Sawing the body in half with a special saw.
079. Nailing the tongue of a small child to the table with a knife, which later hung on it ....
080. Cutting a child into pieces with a knife and throwing them around ...
090. Hanging a monk by his feet near the pulpit in the church.
091. Planting a child on a stake.
092. Hanging a woman upside down on a tree and mocking her - cutting off her chest and tongue, dissecting her stomach, gouging out her eyes, and cutting off pieces of her body with knives ...
109. Tearing the torso with chains...
126. Cutting the skin from the face with blades ...
133. Nailing hands to the threshold of the dwelling ...
135. Dragging a body along the ground by legs tied with a rope.
We only add that the list of UPA crimes is by no means limited to this. Russians, Czechs, Jews became their victims, but most of all... the Ukrainians themselves, who did not actively cooperate with them.
Current page: 1 (total book has 4 pages)
Victor Polishchuk
Bitter truth. Crimes of the OUN-UPA (Confession of a Ukrainian)
We want to acquaint readers with fragments of Viktor Polishchuk's book “The Bitter Truth. Crimes of the OUN-UPA (Confession of a Ukrainian)”, published in Toronto. This book is unusual in many ways. And above all, the personality of the author and his position.
Viktor Varfolomeevich Polishchuk was born in 1925 in Volyn, on the territory that until 1939 belonged to Poland. Comes from an ethnically mixed family (father - Ukrainian, mother - Polish), of which a great many lived in Volyn. By religion - Orthodox. In September 1939, when Soviet troops entered Western Ukraine, V. Polishchuk's father was arrested by the NKVD. Until now, nothing is known about his fate. Victor Polishchuk with his mother and sisters were deported to Northern Kazakhstan. In 1944-46. worked in the Vasilkovsky grain farm of the Dnepropetrovsk region. In 1946 he left for Poland, where he received a higher legal education. Since 1981 he lives in Canada, owns his own publishing company. He has Ph.D. in Law and Doctor of Political Science degrees, the author of a number of scientific and journalistic works. The book "Bitter Truth" tells about the little-known events of the Second World War in Western Ukraine: massacres by members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army of the Polish civilian population, as well as Ukrainians who helped them. V. Polishchuk collected a huge number of documented facts about the atrocities of the fighters for the "Ukrainian idea". It is impossible not to pay tribute to the courage of this man. His desire to recall the bitter lessons of history, to prevent the revival of Ukrainian nationalism, in which he sees a terrible evil, aroused the hatred of Bandera of different generations and the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada and the United States, for the most part, according to the author, controlled by the OUN. Far from the realities of modern Ukraine, V. Polishchuk sincerely cannot understand how historians, who yesterday stigmatized Banderaism, justify it today, how literary figures, who once shed poetic tears over the victims of nationalist criminals, now sing of their executioners. The Ukrainian people are not infected with nationalism, says V. Polishchuk in his book. They seek to revive nationalism, plant it in Ukraine. In response to the accusation of anti-patriotism, he remarks: "I do not blame my people, but I cleanse them from the filth that is the OUN-UPA."
Part II. Crimes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army
… you who did iniquity.
Gospel of Matthew
.To the memory of the victims of the OUN-UPA I dedicate this work.
Section I
About the crimes of the Ukrainian Insurgent ArmyThose who do not remember the lessons of history are doomed to experience them again. Is the Ukrainian Insurgent Army a good or bad lesson for Ukrainians? Should we include it in textbooks as an example of heroism and glory, or should we be ashamed of the activities of the UPA, repent?
Victims of the UPA. Lyuboml. In the area of Ostrowki near Lyuboml, in Ukraine, the remains of Poles shot by the UPA on August 30, 1943 are being exhumed. On that day, more than 1,700 Poles from the villages of Ostrówka died in Ostrówki. Will of Ostrovetska, Yanovets and Kuty. Their remains will be transferred to the Polish cemetery in Rymachi near Yahodyn (Gazeta, Toronto, August 24-25, 1992).
“Before the war, I finished 9 classes. When the Germans took young people to Germany for hard labor, they took me too. But I was lucky enough to escape, and I joined the partisans. He ended up in the partisan association of M. Shukaev, which fought on the rear from Chernigov to Czechoslovakia. That is, through the Zhytomyr region, Rivne region, Ternopil region, Lviv region, Prykarpattya ... So, I had to meet with Bandera (OUN, UPA) more than once or twice. And not at the table, but in battles ... God forbid it was to fall into their hands! They mocked worse than the Germans. They carved stars on their chests or on their foreheads, twisted their arms and legs, and tortured them to death. And how many Polish villages they burned and slaughtered the Poles with “sacred knives”! How many civilians, employees, teachers were killed after the war! This is what their struggle for a free Ukraine was like (Robitnicha Gazeta, Kiev, September 29, 1992).
The conference "Ukrainian Insurgent Army and National Liberation Struggle in Ukraine 1940-1950", which was held in Kyiv in August 1992, recommends to the President of Ukraine: UGOR (Ukrainian Main Liberation Rada) the most consistent fighters for the independence of Ukraine, and the fighters of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army - the belligerent." ("New Way"; Toronto, September 26, 1992)
M.Zelenchuk, chairman of the All-Ukrainian Brotherhood of the UPA on Sophia Square 26.08. 1992 demanded: “Recognize the struggle of the UPA as a just liberation struggle of the Ukrainian people for their Independent Power” (“Homin of Ukraine”, Toronto, September 16, 1992) ...
So what is the UPA?.. Was it the army that brought glory to Ukraine?
Evidence of UPA crimesIf we were to describe all the atrocities of the UPA against the Polish and Ukrainian people, about which there is evidence, then it would be necessary to publish a separate book, citing only the facts without comments on hundreds of pages in small print. I myself have collected more than a hundred, signed by specific people, with an address. But first, let me give you some personal evidence.
In the summer of 1943, my maternal aunt Anastasia Vitkovskaya went with a Ukrainian neighbor in the afternoon to the village of Tarakanov, located three kilometers from the city of Dubno. They spoke Polish, because my aunt, an illiterate woman, originally from the Lublin region, could not learn the Ukrainian language. They went to change something for bread, as the aunt had six children. Neither she nor her uncle, Anton Vitkovsky, who is also a completely illiterate person, never interfered in any politics, but had no idea about it either. And she, as well as her Ukrainian neighbor, was killed by Bandera from the UPA or Self-Defense Bush Departments (they included local peasants, often armed with pitchforks, knives, subordinates of the OUN-UPA) just because they spoke Polish. They were brutally killed with axes and thrown into a roadside ditch. Another aunt, Sabina, who was married to Ukrainian Vasily Zagorovsky, told me about this.
My wife's parents lived before the war in Polissya. Her father is Czech and her mother is Polish. The family spoke Polish. When, in early 1943, massacres of Poles began in southern Polissya, the whole family fled to their father's parents in the village of Ugorek near Dermani.
One day, a familiar Ukrainian told his father-in-law that the UPA was preparing to destroy his family. They fled to Kremenets. Someone overheard the conversation of this young Ukrainian with my wife's father. Suspecting him of "treason", they hung him in the center of the village and attached a sign to his chest: "So it will be with all traitors." The hanged man was not allowed to film for several days.
Two facts that took place in different places at different times. They are united by one thing: the authorship of the OUN-UPA, the causelessness of the murders. My father had a brother, Yarokhtey, who lived in the village. Lipa Dubno district. For the fact that he openly branded the UPA, he was shot in the mouth. Uncle Yarokhtey was an ordinary illiterate peasant.
It is not possible in one book to tell about all the individual massacres of Poles and Ukrainians committed by the OUN-UPA, so I will limit myself to only a few.
A person very close to me, M.S. said: “On March 24, 1944, on a frosty night, Bandera attacked our huts, set fire to all the buildings. We lived in the village of Polyanovytsia (Tsytsivka) of the Zborovsky district (the author named the old administrative division - ed.) of the Ternopil region. My father, a Pole, married a Ukrainian. We lived in peace with Ukrainians from neighboring villages. We heard about the killings in Volhynia, but at first we did not think that we could be killed. Somewhere in February 1944, Bandera (we did not understand who was in the UPA, who was in another group - they all called Bandera, since they themselves glorified the "leader" Bandera) put a ransom demand in front of our village. The peasants collected the money and gave it to Bandera. But it did not help. At night, all the men, that is, father, younger brother and I, as on other nights, slept in a shelter under the outbuildings. Mother (Ukrainian) with my two sisters and my father's sister, who married a Ukrainian from near Kharkov, spent the night in a hut. Immediately after midnight, we smelled smoke and guessed that the UPA had set fire to the houses. I jumped out of the cellar, lifting the lid. They shot at me, who was running away, but did not hit. The father also tried to get out of the cellar, but could not - he burned down. My little brother was suffocated by the smoke. The mother, who was running away from the burning house, was wounded, but she escaped. A seven-year-old sister also ran away, although she was wounded in the knee. The father's sister also ran away, who was wounded by a shot in the arm, as a result of which the arm had to be amputated. The second 13-year-old sister, while running away, caught the eye of a Bandera man who pierced her chest with a bayonet, and she died on the spot. On the same night, Bandera burned and killed our neighbors - Beloskursky and Baranovsky and others from our small village "...
T. G. from Glukholazy (Poland) writes: “We lived in the Polish village of Chaikov, Sarny county. In June or July 1943, before dinner, Bandera on horseback arrived. They surrounded the houses, set them on fire, and those who ran away were killed with axes, bayonets ... The UPA did not fight the Germans. Before the war, we had no enmity between Ukrainians and Poles.”
E.B. from the USA: “We lived in the village of Radokhovka. In March 1943, at midnight, the Upovites set fire to the house of Yancharek's neighbor. Those who ran away from it were shot. Only the son Jan was saved, the rest died: Yakov Jancharek, his wife, mother, son Janusz, daughter Ledzya, second daughter with a baby. Bandera's victims were thrown into a well. My mother was killed in May of the same year - she was going to the village, and she was shot dead.
Before the war, Ukrainians and I lived in harmony...
3-X. from Poland, Valch: “The village of Nikolaevka in Volyn. The Bandera attack was on 04/24/1943 at dawn. Bandera entered our hut and began torturing us with bayonets. They brought straw and set it on fire. I was also pierced with a bayonet, and I lost consciousness, falling on my aunt. When the flames got to me, I came to my senses and jumped out the window. Bandera was no more. My groan was heard by the Ukrainian neighbor Spiridon, he brought me to another Ukrainian, Bezukha, who took me to the hospital on a horse. As a result of the attack, 14 people died, among them was a pregnant woman "...
G.K. from the USA: “On July 14, 1943, Bandera tortured 300 people in Kolodna. Having driven them away, they ordered to lie down, they say, they will do a search. They started shooting at those who were lying down. The witness is Antek Polyula. Bandera from Kolodnya: Andrei Shpak, Semyon Koval, Volodya Snichishin, from Oleshkovo - Pavel Romanchuk. The priest called for the murder, who said: “We will sanctify the knives so that we can cut the kukel out of wheat.”
V.V. from the UK reports that on July 12, 1943, in the village of Zagai, Bandera people were killed - and here is a list of 165 surnames, including infants, pregnant women, and the elderly. He says that before the war there were normal relations with the Ukrainians, hostility began when Hitler began to promise a free Ukraine.
G.D. from Poland: “On Tuesday, July 14, 1943, in the village of Selets, Vladimir-Volyn region, Ukrainians killed two elderly people - Jozef Witkowski and his wife Stefania. They were shot dead in their own hut, which was then set on fire. In the afternoon, the same axes killed two elderly people of the Mihalovičs and their 7-year-old granddaughter, the husband and wife of the Gronovičs, the housekeeper of a priest named Zofia. Ivan Shostachuk took part in the murders, who before the war was a corporal in the Polish army and changed his religion to Roman Catholic. His younger brother Vladislav, an Orthodox Christian, warned the Morelevsky and Mikhalkovich families. There was a Ukrainian in the gang - Yukhno, who killed the Poles, and his father saved the Stichinsky family. Before the war, relations with the Ukrainians were good, they began to deteriorate in early 1943, when agitators began to arrive from the Lviv and Stanislav regions, who rebelled among the Ukrainian youth, promising a free Ukraine. Not everyone succumbed to whispering, in particular, older people did not succumb. Primary school teacher Maya Sokoliv, the wife of the head of the school, who was sent from the Soviet Union, Russian, together with her husband, mother and one-year-old son Slavik, were drowned in a well. From the Morelevsky family, Bandera killed their parents, daughter-in-law Irena (19 years old) and son Jozef (20 years old). All but Irena were killed near the forest. Irena was taken to the hut by the leaders of the gang, kept in the basement, raped, and then thrown into the well. Irena was pregnant. Mixed families were also killed."
POISON. from Canada: “On the night of December 28, 1944, Bandera attacked our village of Lozov in the Ternopil region, above the Gnezdechnaya River. About 800 people were tortured. The first group of Bandera, after the signal of the rocket, broke windows and broke down doors, the second group killed, and the third robbed, after which they set fire to houses ... "
V.M. from Canada: “The village of Grabina, Vladimir-Volyn region. On Sunday, August 29, 1943, the news came that the Bandera people were being killed: Father ordered me to hide. When they entered our yard, my mother was there, who was immediately shot with a pistol. The father saw this and, going out, said: “What do you need, because I didn’t do anything wrong to you?” Bandera in response hit him with an ax in the head. The father fell, then the bandit also shot him. The mother was killed immediately, and the sister on the third day.
E.P. from Poland sent an extract from the parish book of the village of Mosty Velikie near Zhovkva, in which 20 dead were indicated. In the village of Rokitna on Palm (Catholic) Sunday, 16 people were killed with axes, and three people: Kazimir Vititsky, a palamar, his wife and child were drowned in an ice hole.
K.I. from the UK: “Germanovka. The attack took place in September 1943 at dawn. I was attacked by close neighbors - Kostecki. Headed and Braided. They beat me and robbed me. February 14, 1944 was the wedding of my cousin, not far from me, on our street. The young one worked at the post office and invited his boss, and when he was driving away, the Bandera people shot him dead. Shooting began, grenades were thrown. All the wedding guests were killed, the hut was burned down. The musicians were also killed, there were six of them, among them there were several Ukrainians. There were also several Ukrainians among the guests, they were also killed. 26 people were killed. One Ukrainian, a neighbor, allowed me to spend the night in his hut, but one day, coming from the church, he said that he could no longer hide me, as the priest said: “Brothers and sisters, the time has come when we can repay the Poles, Jews and Communists” . And my neighbor worked at the state farm, so he was considered a communist. The surname of this priest is Voloshin. There was one Polish-Ukrainian family, so she, like all Poles, was destroyed. Before the war, life together with the Ukrainians was good, enmity came, as they began to organize the UPA. At the end of November 1944, a leaflet was nailed to the gate, on which it was written that I should get out of the village in three days, otherwise they would kill and burn me. I left everything and ran away."
And so on and so forth. I repeat: it is not possible to publish all the facts. I did not have the opportunity to receive information from Ukraine, in particular from Volyn and Galicia regarding the Ukrainians tortured there by Bandera. When I applied to Ukraine, they did not answer my letters or kept silent about the essence of the matter. I can't understand - either they are still afraid of Bandera, or they are already afraid of them again. If I lived in Ukraine, I would get such information. I consider it necessary, while some witnesses of these atrocities are still alive, to create a joint Polish-Ukrainian, and perhaps also a Polish-Ukrainian-Jewish commission or committee to obtain facts from direct witnesses of the murders. To be able to combine these data with those that already exist, and print at least a small circulation of a document so that such a book is in scientific institutions in Poland and Ukraine, in libraries. Those who live in Poland and Ukraine should take care of this...
On August 30, 1943, Kupy, a Polish village in the Lyuboml district, was surrounded in the morning by UPA “streltsy” and Ukrainian peasants, mainly from the village of Lesnyaki, who carried out a massacre of Poles. Everyone was killed, including women, children, the elderly. They killed in huts, in yards, in utility rooms, using axes, pitchforks, dryuchki, and they shot at those who were running away. Whole families were thrown into wells, covered with earth. Pavel Pronchuk, a Pole who jumped out of the shelter to protect his mother, was caught, put on a bench, cut off his arms and legs and left him to suffer longer. The Ukrainian family of Vladimir Krasovsky with two children was brutally tortured there. Of the 282 inhabitants of the village, 138 people were killed, including 63 children.
In Wola Ostrovetska on the same day, out of 806 inhabitants, 529 were killed, including 220 children (the author quotes data from the book of Polish authors Yu. Turovsky and V. Semashko about the atrocities of the OUN-UPA - ed.).
In the book of Turovsky and Semashko, on 166 pages of small print, the names of the villages are listed, the number of inhabitants, the number of those killed, the methods of murder, the number of children killed, and the help of Ukrainians are called. The authors at the same time each time turn to the sources of information. The description of the atrocities of the OUN-UPA has the form of a calendar, starting in September 1939 and ending in July 1945. The authors are notable for their objectivity, many times describe the assistance provided to the Poles by Ukrainians, write about the murders of Ukrainians. They calculated that 60,000-70,000 Poles died at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists in 1939-1945 in Volyn alone, which was about 20% of the then Polish population of this region.
Against the background of these facts, the multi-year campaign conducted by the Ukrainian diaspora in the West, aimed at protecting Ivan Demjanjuk (a sadistic overseer in one of the Nazi concentration camps, the trial of which took place in Israel - ed.), is striking. Many millions of dollars were spent on this action. Since this process is allegedly directed against all Ukrainians, why does the Ukrainian nationalist diaspora, which has such political and financial opportunities ... not bring Oleksandr Korman (author of a book about the crimes of Bandera, published in London - ed.) to trial for him, as she believes , false allegations about the atrocities of Ukrainian nationalists, why not involve the priest Vatslav Shetelnitsky, Bishop Vincent Urban for their allegations that the OUN-UPA brutally tortured tens of thousands of Polish civilians. Now there are all the possibilities of such prosecution before the court in Poland, where there are many Ukrainian lawyers. At the same time, it is possible to hold publishing houses accountable, to seek a court decision to stop the distribution of books ... But Ukrainian nationalists are doing nothing in this direction. And the authors of the books, I think, would be glad to appear before the court, to provide evidence of the truth of what they wrote. And the court, having established the facts of the murder of the Poles, would simultaneously recognize the guilt of the OUN-UPA. This is what Ukrainian nationalists are afraid of. And the named authors did not dishonor the Ukrainian people in any way, they did not tarnish their honor. They all say: Ukrainian nationalists, OUN-UPA, Nachtigal (a battalion formed by the Nazis from nationalists - ed.), the SS division "Galicia" and others killed and tortured.
That is why the Ukrainian nationalists are silent. People say: "The cat knows whose fat it ate." They will not do anything to bring about a trial... The book by Y. Turovsky and V. Semashko should be purchased by former members of the UPA. Maybe after reading them, a conscience will wake up? Maybe someone will remember those terrible years, that "heroism", that spilled blood of the defenseless. The book contains the names of localities, the names of the victims, in some cases the names of the perpetrators.
Since 1946, I have been convinced that the UPA, Bandera and other nationalists killed Poles and Ukrainians who did not support them ...
Soon I also learned about how they killed Ukrainians sent by the Soviet government to Western Ukraine, often against their will. Until now, Polish authors have written about these terrible murders, as well as Soviet ones, including Ukrainian ones. However, the latter wrote under severe censorship. And they were not very interested in killing Poles. They were not very trusted. The Poles did not believe, because they are Poles. The communists did not believe, because they are communists. But how can one not believe when there is so much evidence presented by living witnesses.
Although the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism, like German National Socialism, is far from Christian ideals, Ukrainian nationalists love to turn to God, rely on the Greek Catholic Church, which is subordinate to the Pope of Rome, like the Polish one. Therefore, we read what the Catholic priest Vaclav Shetelnitsky writes about the crimes of the OUN-UPA. There will be only fragments from his book published in 1992. If you do not believe him, then who to believe then at all?
“... in 1943 and at the beginning of 1944, very often (in Terebovelskaya paraffin - V.P.) funerals of the victims of the murders committed by Bandera took place. In particular, the population was shocked by the murder of 11 Poles - residents of the village of Plebanovka, 2 km from Terebovlya, committed late in the evening on November 24, 1943. A Jew was hiding in a brick factory in Plebanovka. Somehow, the Ukrainian police found out about this, and turned to the local Pole Yan Yukhnevich, demanding that he take the Jew out of the cache. When Yukhnevich entered the territory of the plant, a policeman shot him. Bandera drove up two trucks with extinguished headlights on the street. Zofia Chrzanowska... We went to the village on foot. After some time, a cry was heard from Plebanovka. The Pole Polishevsky, a resident of Terebovlya, saw and heard this. That night, together with the Ukrainians, he was on duty on the railway. He warned him: "If you want to live, then remember - you have not seen or heard anything."
Bandera dispersed in groups around the village, entered some huts and tortured people there. With axes and knives, they then killed Jan Gliva, Jan Krukovsky ... (hereinafter referred to as V.P.). On the day of the funeral, then the vicars from Terebovlia arrived: priest Peter Lewandovsky and the author of this message, who sent prayers over the bodies of the dead. Before us was a terrible picture of human remains, cut with knives, chopped with axes, with severed legs and arms ...
A few kilometers from Terebovlya is the village of Bavoriv, where priests Karol Protsik and Ludwik Rutina were shepherds. The organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in Smolyanets at a meeting on 10/28/1943 issued a death sentence to these priests and the organist Wisniewski for taking part in the funeral of the Poles tortured to death by members of this organization. The execution of the sentence took place on November 2, 1943. Around 6 pm, a group of murderers broke into the church. The organist was shot dead on the spot, priest Protsik was dragged out of the room. Priest Rutina escaped through the window, a grenade was thrown at him, but it did not explode. Priest Protsik began to scream, they pierced him with a bayonet, tied him up and took him into the forest. The body was never found."
From the author's data, it is known that on January 21, 1945, Bandera killed priest Wojciech Rogowski from the parish in Maidan near Kopichynets. On February 10, priest Jan Valnichka, who was brutally murdered, was buried - before the murder they mocked him, ordered him to dance before his death. They killed him with a shot in the mouth. He was from the parish in Kotsyubintsy… The author writes that on March 19, 1989 in Wroclaw in the Church of Christ the King, a memorial service was held for the Poles of the village of Verbovets who were killed on the night of March 19, 1944. After the memorial service, Anthony Gomulkevich, a witness to the events, said: “Forty-five years have passed since those tragic events in our village, which is located between Terebovlya, Chortkiv and Buchach ... For a long time, our relations with Ukrainians have developed normally, as usually happens between neighbors. They visited each other, helped in various jobs, and mixed Polish-Ukrainian families were a common occurrence.
In the meantime, already in the first days of July 1941, the Ukrainian police, who were called “Schutzmanns”, took away the first Pole from Verbovets, twenty-seven-year-old Maciej Bielsky, under the pretext of interrogation. He was bullied and died from beatings. Then, during an attack on the neighboring Tomb, they tortured Leon Sonetsky, Stanislav Gotz, as well as the families of Malinovsky, Mazurov, Yanitsky and others. In the neighboring village of Lyaskovtsy, having destroyed the Jews, the Schutzmanns and Bandera took up the Polish population. On the basis of the verdict of the chief of the gang in Lyaskovtsy, Nikolai Poperechny, Bronislav Grushetsky, Michal Grushetsky, Nikolai Friedrich, Piotr Ovsyansky, Vladislav Ovsyansky and Kazimierz Snezhek were martyred in the parish house of the Greek Catholic parish. Everyone was stripped, tied with barbed wire and beaten to death. Even before they died, they drove nails into their heads, cut off their arms and legs with an ax or cut off their arms and legs with a saw, and pierced their stomachs with a bayonet ... they tortured them for “independence” ... On May 18, 1944, eleven o'clock in the evening was approaching. A rocket was fired from Lyaskovtsy in the direction of Verbovets ... we guessed that it would begin soon ... And then the first houses of Polish residents caught fire. Bandera poured gasoline on the houses and set them on fire. People ran away. In the open space, they became victims of Bandera. Those who hid suffocated from the smoke ... In the morning the shooting stopped. Survivors began to come from the fields. They told about the death of their loved ones (the following is a list of families who died at the hands of the OUN - ed.). We have gathered today at the Church of Christ the King in Wroclaw to take part in a memorial service on the forty-fifth anniversary of the burning of the Polish part of our Verbovets and the murder of our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends and acquaintances by Ukrainian nationalists. We came here without hatred... We, Poles from the Ternopil land, do not want to take revenge. Even now, after the tragedy, there was not a single case of revenge on the part of the Poles who survived. Immediately after the tragedy, the Germans arrived in cars at the burnt Verbovets crime scene. They pointed their machine guns at the Ukrainian population and asked the barely alive Vincent Sedlyak whether to shoot at the Ukrainians. He replied: "No, don't shoot!"
Let this fact be an answer to those who abroad in various newspapers are increasingly writing about the Ukrainians of Podolia and Volhynia allegedly destroyed by the Poles ... Priest Zugeniusz Butra from Verbovets escaped only because he was warned by a local Greek Catholic priest. He managed to leave for Budzanov.
In the eyes of the Poles - OUN, UPA, Bandera - are synonymous. Volodymyr Mazur, deputy chairman of the OUN-b Wire at the great veche in honor of the UPA in Kyiv on Sophia Square on August 9, 1992, said: “In the 20th century, the UPA, more than any other Ukrainian institution or formation, contributed to the education of the Ukrainian people national consciousness, national dignity and national pride... The UPA and the OUN declared to the whole world that the Ukrainian nation lives and it is the only master in its native land, with the right given to it by God to have its own national state.”
And not a word about the murders of Poles. These facts are hushed up by the historian Myroslav Prokop, an active figure in the OUN, who published a study “Ukrainian anti-Nazi. underground 1941–1944”… No mention is made of the killings of Poles in Volhynia and Galicia in publications in 1992 on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the UPA, at a scientific conference devoted to this date.
In confirmation of the evidence of the killings of the Polish civilian population in Volyn, I will cite absolutely objective sources - Czech authors, formerly residents of Volyn. My friend, a Czech, a colonel, answered my question: “Is it true that Ukrainians killed Poles in Volhynia?” - answered: "They killed. But not all Ukrainians. There were those who did not approve of the killings, but were silent, since the terror of the OUN-UPA reigned. Many Ukrainians paid with their lives for the resistance of the OUN-UPA. The UPA, the OUN Security Service terrorized the Ukrainian population of Volhynia. “This Czech pointed to a number of facts of Ukrainian assistance to the Poles in the form of a warning about planned attacks. Pointing to Vasil from Kozakova Dolina, not far from Boremlya, who, under the Bolsheviks, said: "The Germans will come - there will be a free Ukraine." And as soon as Bandera began to exterminate the Polish population, the same Vasil said: "So we will not build Ukraine." People heard it. Two days later, his body was found in a well with a wire around his neck, and his wife, aged 24–25, was also found there...
The book “Volyn Czechs” by Józef Foitikai and four other authors fell into my hands. Describing the years of the German occupation, the authors write: “When the Russians left, Bandera began - it was the same fascism only in the nationalist Ukrainian form ... On the feast of Peter and Paul, June 29, 1943, a gang of strangers with axes passed through the village. The next day, we learned that at night they attacked the Polish colony of Zagai and brutally killed all its inhabitants ... In the village of Rachin ... in 1943, Ukrainian nationalists killed a Polish citizen Golyakovskaya ... In 1942, Bandera began to kill Polish citizens of Volhynia ...
Bandera burned Polish villages: Marusya, Vydumka, Maryanovka and part of Skurchev. And here is another Czech book by the author Vaclav Shirz "The Past, Closed by Time", which also describes the life of the Czechs in Volyn. By the way, it says here. “When the Red Army retreated in June 1941, the Ukrainians began to settle scores among themselves. On Boyarka, the chairman of the village council and his 14-year-old son were killed with a pitchfork. Several Ukrainians were shot down by their own... Together with the Germans, Ukrainian nationalists returned home, who had previously fled to Poland occupied by the Germans, where they underwent special training at a school in Krakow. In Krasnaya Gora, they staged something like a people's trial of Soviet activists in 1939-1941. The enmity manifested itself with such force that the mother did not protect her daughter or son, the son - father, brother - brother.
... A week later (in July 1941 - V.P.), the Gestapo front-line troops came after the front-line troops and with it Ukrainian nationalists trained at a school in Krakow: one of them was a soldier of the Polish Army Dmytro Novosad from Krasnaya Gora ... Together with The Germans disarmed the policemen, put them in a car, took them to the forest, and there they shot. They also took young Pole lads from Ludvikovka to work in Germany and shot them in the forest. Without any trial, Polish intellectuals were shot dead in Mlinov - 41 Poles and 20 Jews. This is how the Ukrainian police began to operate, the "shutsmans" under the leadership of Dmitry Novosad ... During 1941-42. the Ukrainian police, together with the Gestapo, staged several pogroms in the vicinity.
... During the winter of 1942 until 1943, it came to single, then mass murders of Poles, before Easter they called out: “Remove Poles and Jews from Ukraine”, that is, drive them out or kill them ...
Bandera's extremists said: "We need blood up to our knees, so that Ukraine will be free." At the end of 1942 or at the beginning of 1943, unknown people killed Ukrainian Nikolay Dombrovsky in Turetskaya Gora. He was not a communist, but he was an intelligent, logically thinking man, a good friend of the Czechs. He bravely expressed views that did not coincide with the official ideology of the Bandera underground. He was neither the first nor the last. Bandera terror strangled the voices of reason. Bandera focused on arson and murder - of entire Polish families, later of entire villages. The spring of 1943 passed in continuous fires. Rural villages burned at night. The Poles, expelled from their villages to the cities, entered the service of the Germans, the police and took revenge on the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians fled into the forest. Several Ukrainians were killed. Bandera killed several Czechs in the vicinity, mostly Catholics or from families mixed with Poles. Polish departments attacked the families of active Ukrainian nationalists at night ... In the winter of 1943, in the evening, on the road from Uzhintsy, Bandera attacked a cart with Polish women from Karolinka, who were going to Maslenka to spend the night at Poloshchansky, hoping that it was not so dangerous there. They shot Yuzef Poloshchansky's wife and another woman. At the end of 1943, a miller, a Pole Stets, who had a Ukrainian wife, was attacked, and her five-year-old daughter was also killed. Before the winter of 1942, there was a pogrom of Jews in Mlinov. They went to their death like a flock of sheep, without resisting. Many fled, hiding with the Poles, Czechs, and in some cases with the Ukrainians. The occupiers and the Ukrainian police threatened with death those who hid the Jews, hunted them through the forests and villages. In the estate of Volodymyr Vostroy from Frankiv, a 14-year-old Jewish boy was caught, driven all the way to Karolinka, and shot dead. 14 Jews who were hiding in a bunker were shot dead in the Grafchina forest near Frankiv... Four boys aged 12-14 were shot dead in the Czech forest near Frankov. The head of the Mlinovsk policemen - "shutsmans" Dmitry Novosad became a bunch - an ensign. He boasted: “I destroyed the entire Polish intelligentsia in Mlinov. He personally shot 869 Jews. I made a promise to myself that I would shoot a thousand.”
