Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
The massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia (Polish: rzeź wołyńsko-galicyjska, lit. 'Volhynian-Galician slaughter'; Ukrainian: Волинсько-Галицька трагедія, romanized: Volynsʹko-Halytsʹka trahediya, lit. 'Volyn-Galicia tragedy') were carried out in German-occupied Poland by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) with the support of parts of the local Ukrainian population against the Polish minority in Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, parts of Polesia and the Lublin region from 1943 to 1945.[6] The ruling Germans also actively encouraged both Ukrainians and Poles to kill each other.[7][8]
Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia
1943–1945
Massacre, ethnic cleansing, considered a genocide in Poland
The peak of the massacres took place in July and August 1943. These killings were exceptionally brutal and targeted primarily women and children.[9][3] The UPA's actions resulted in up to 100,000 deaths.[10][11][12] Other victims of the massacres included several hundred Armenians, Jews, Russians, Czechs, Georgians, and Ukrainians who were part of Polish families or opposed the UPA and sabotaged the massacres by hiding Polish escapees.[3]
The ethnic cleansing was a Ukrainian attempt to prevent the post-war Polish state from asserting its sovereignty over Ukrainian-majority areas that had been part of the pre-war Polish state.[13][14][3] The decision to force the Polish population to leave the areas considered by the Banderite faction of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN-B) to be Ukrainian took place at a meeting of military referents in the autumn of 1942, and it was planned to liquidate the leaders of the Polish community and those who would resist.[15] Local UPA commanders in Volhynia, joining the armed uprising against the Germans, began attacking the Polish population, carrying out massacres in many villages.[16] Encountering resistance, UPA commander in Volhynia Dmytro Klyachkivsky "Klym Savur" issued an order in June 1943 for the "general physical liquidation of the entire Polish population".[17] The largest wave of attacks took place in July and August 1943, the assaults in Volhynia continued until the spring of 1944, when the Red Army arrived in Volhynia and the Polish underground, which had hitherto organised self-defences, formed the 27th AK Infantry Division.[18] Approximately 50,000–60,000 Poles died as a result of the massacres in Volhynia, while up to 2,000–3,000 Ukrainians died as a result of Polish retaliatory actions.[19][20][21]
At the 3rd OUN Congress in August 1943, Mykola Lebed criticised the Ukrainian Insurgent Army's actions in Volhynia as "bandit". However, the majority of delegates opposed his assessment and the congress decided to carry the anti-Polish action into Galicia.[22] However, it took a different course; by the end of 1943, it was limited to killing the leaders of the Polish community and exhorting Poles to flee to the west under the threat of looming genocide.[23] In March 1944, the UPA command, headed by Roman Shuchevych, issued an order to drive Poles out of Eastern Galicia, first by warning and then by raiding villages, murdering men and burning buildings.[24] A similar order was issued by the UPA commander in Eastern Galicia, Vasyl Sydor "Shelest".[25] This order was often not obeyed and entire villages were slaughtered.[26] In Eastern Galicia between 1943 and 1946, the OUN-B and the UPA killed 20,000–25,000 Poles.[27] 1,000–2,000 Ukrainians were killed by the Polish underground.[28]
Some Ukrainian religious authorities, institutions and leaders protested against the slayings of Polish civilians but without achieving much.[29] In 2008, the Polish Parliament adopted a resolution defining the UPA's crimes against Poles as "crimes bearing the hallmarks of genocide". In 2013, it passed a resolution calling it "ethnic cleansing with the hallmarks of genocide". On 22 July 2016, the Sejm established 11 July as National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists against the citizens of the Second Polish Republic.[30] This classification is disputed by Ukraine and some non-Polish historians, who characterise it as ethnic cleansing.[31]
Reconciliation
The question of official acknowledgment of the ethnic cleansing remains a matter of discussion between Polish and Ukrainian historians and political leaders. Efforts are ongoing to bring about reconciliation between Poles and Ukrainians regarding the events. The Polish side has made steps towards reconciliation; in 2002 President Aleksander Kwaśniewski expressed regret over the resettlement program, known as Operation Vistula: "The infamous Operation Vistula is a symbol of the abominable deeds perpetrated by the communist authorities against Polish citizens of Ukrainian origin." He stated that the argument that "Operation Vistula was the revenge for the slaughter of Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army" in 1943–1944 to be "fallacious and ethically inadmissible" by invoking "the principle of collective guilt".[199] The Ukrainian government has not yet issued an apology.[200][201]
On 11 July 2003, Presidents Aleksander Kwaśniewski and Leonid Kuchma attended a ceremony held in the Volhynian village of Pavlivka (previously known as Poryck),[202] where they unveiled a monument to the reconciliation. The Polish president said that it is unjust to blame the entire Ukrainian nation for these acts of terror: "The Ukrainian nation cannot be blamed for the massacre perpetrated on the Polish population. There are no nations that are guilty.... It is always specific people who bear the responsibility for crimes".[203]
Between 2015 and 2018 a Forum of Polish and Ukrainian Historians was jointly researching archival documents, including new archives declassified by Ukrainian government. Another joint effort resulted in publishing multi-volume book "Poland and Ukraine in the 1930s-1940s: Unknown documents from the secret service archives"[204] first volume of which was published in 1998 and 10th in 2020. The cooperation is led on government level by Institute of National Remembrance (Poland) and Sectoral State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (HDA SBU).[205]
In 2016 Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko visited Warsaw and paid tribute to the victims at the Volhynia monument.[206]
In 2017, Ukrainian politicians banned the exhumation of the remains of Polish victims in Ukraine killed by the UPA in revenge for Polish demolition of the illegal UPA monument in the village of Hruszowice.[207][208]
In 2018, Polish president Andrzej Duda refused to participate in a joint ceremony commemorating the 75th anniversary of the massacres with the Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko and instead travelled to Lutsk to hold a separate event.[209]
In May 2023, Ukraine's Rada chairman Ruslan Stefanchuk spoke in front of the Polish Sejm, where he expressed sympathy to the victims of the massacre, their families and descendants and called for reconciliation. Stefanchuk promised continued joint work on explaining the details of the tragedy. The speech was described as Polish minister of foreign affairs Zbigniew Rau as "promising".[210]
In June 2023 archeological excavations started in a former village of Puzhniki in Volhynia by a group of Polish scientists to identify possible mass graves of the massacre victims.[211]
In July 2023, Polish president Andrzej Duda and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky jointly paid tribute to the victims in Lutsk, administrative capital of the Volhynia region, attended a mass in local church on the 80th anniversary of the tragedy.[212] A joint declaration on the need of reconciliation was also signed by heads of Roman Catholic Church in Poland, archbishop Stanisław Gądecki, and Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Sviatoslav Shevchuk.[213] Polish Sejm adopted a resolution commemorating the victims, blaming OUN and UPA, praising rescue offered to the Poles by some Ukrainian individuals, calling for reconciliation recognizing guilt of the perpetrators and highlighting the need for exhumations.[214]
Classification as genocide
Scholarly consensus
UCLA historian Jared McBride, an expert in the region and in the Holocaust, writing in Slavic Review in 2016, said there is a "scholarly consensus that this was a case of ethnic cleansing as opposed to genocide".[31]
Writing in 2004, historian Antony Polonsky, an expert on the Holocaust and Polish Jewish history, said that the "[massacres'] goal was not so much genocide as it was to force the local Polish population to leave."[215]: 290
Historian Per Anders Rudling wrote in 2006 that the goal of the OUN-UPA was not the extermination of Poles but ethnic cleansing of the region to attain an ethnically homogeneous state. The goal was thus to prevent a repeat of 1918–20, when Poland crushed Ukrainian independence, as the Polish Home Army was attempting to restore the Polish Republic in its pre-1939 borders.[33]
According to a 2010 conference paper by Ivan Katchanovski, the mass killings of Poles in Volhynia by the UPA cannot be classified as a genocide because there is no evidence that the UPA intended to annihilate entire or significant parts of the Polish nation, the UPA action was mostly limited to a relatively small area and the number of Poles killed was quite a small fraction of the prewar Polish population in both the territories in which the UPA operated and of the entire Polish population in Poland and Ukraine.[173]
In 2016, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, author of a scholarly biography of Bandera, argued that the killings were ethnic cleansing rather than genocide. Rossoliński-Liebe sees "genocide", in this context, as a word that is sometimes used in political attacks on Ukraine.[216]
However, historian Grzegorz Motyka, an expert on Polish-Ukrainian issues, argued in 2021 that "although the anti-Polish action was an ethnic cleansing, it also meets the definition of genocide".[217]
In popular culture
In 2009, a Polish historical documentary film Było sobie miasteczko... was produced by Adam Kruk for Telewizja Polska which tells the story of the Kisielin massacre.[227]
The massacre of Poles in Volhynia was depicted in the 2016 movie Volhynia, which was directed by the Polish screenwriter and film director Wojciech Smarzowski.