Commemorations of 1943 events in Volyn: perspective of Ukrainians in Poland (06/08/03)

Commemorations of 1943 events in Volyn: perspective of Ukrainians in Poland

by Oksana Zakydalsky
Special to The Ukrainian Weekly

TORONTO - The commemorations of the 60th anniversary of the so-called 1943 events in Volyn, during which the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) is accused of destroying Polish settlements and murdering from 30,000 to 60,000 Poles (see Taras Kuzio's article: "How Poland is commemorating the Volyn events of 1943 the wrong way," The Ukrainian Weekly, May 25) which are scheduled to take place in July of this year, are of great concern to Ukrainians living today in Poland.

As Dr. Kuzio wrote, the friendly relations since independence between Poland and Ukraine are coming under increasing stress, with the commemoration plans bringing to the fore issues that have not been adequately dealt with by either Poland or Ukraine. Petro Tyma, secretary of the Organization of Ukrainians in Poland (OUP) was in Toronto recently to explain the political context of the commemorations and outline their consequences both for Ukraine and Ukrainians in Poland.

Ukrainians in Poland not only believe that the consequences of the commemorations will weigh heavily on their community, but that they will have a long term impact on the image of Ukraine in Europe.

"Few Ukrainians outside Poland understand how important for Poles, for their image of Ukrainians and Ukraine today, have been the events which took place during the war and immediate post-war period on the territories in which both Poles and Ukrainians lived. These events, which are passed on from generation to generation, have, apart from historical memory, a political context (or even several political contexts)," Mr. Tyma said.

For Poles, the question of victims of Volyn is an important one, both for the elite and the general consciousness, Mr. Tyma said. And is not limited to a few engaged individuals. It is not organizations that are behind the July commemorations, but the president, the ministers and the public media, which ensures that it will have wide publicity.

During the years of Communist Poland, there was censorship of, not only the crimes of the Soviet or Polish Communists, but also the Ukrainian-Polish conflict on territories that after 1944 became part of the USSR. Yet one could always condemn Ukrainian bourgeois nationalists or the Ukrainian resistance which had been active in Zakerzonnia (ethnic Ukrainian lands that are part of Poland); there was no censorship on portraying the bestiality of Ukrainians in countless films and books. After the elimination of censorship in Poland in 1989, previously repressed memories flooded the market - stories of 500,000 victims of Ukrainian terror and a Polish genocide began to circulate.

The leading role in perpetuating the negative stereotype of Ukrainians has been played by Poles who were resettled from the eastern borderlands, called Kresy by the Poles. There is a whole milieu in Poland - organizations, families, testimonies, publications - which wants to foist its interpretation on others. The wide network of Kresy organizations became even more active after the fall of communism, and the Kresy organizations are powerful in Poland and can put on the pressure, Mr. Tyma explained. Their version of events during the war in Volyn is selective and many issues don't get included: pre-war Polish politics versus the Ukrainian population, German occupation policies, NKVD provocations, the participation of Poles in repressive actions against Ukrainians organized by the Germans and the subsequent revenge actions by Ukrainians.

The characteristics of the German occupation of Volyn were different from those in Halychyna. Volyn was in the Reichskomissariat, and there was no Ukrainian Central Committee influence. It was a more unstable region - it was in western Volyn that the UPA arose. After the creation of the UPA in 1942, Ukrainians who served in the local German administration joined the partisans en masse - about 5,000 Ukrainian policemen left their positions for the UPA. The Germans then formed police divisions from local Poles. Thus, when the Germans began their pacification after the defeat at Stalingrad, it was mostly Poles who were in the administration.

Volyn was the region where both Ukrainian and Polish partisans (the Armia Krajowa, or AK) were very active. The behavior of the Polish underground towards the Ukrainian population was provocative and insulting (e.g., "go back to where you belong - east of the Zbruch river"). Both sides pursued policies that were mutually exclusive and fought over the same territory. By 1942 the AK was anticipating a war with Ukrainians over territory and the sizeable Polish partisan presence in Volyn could not but remind Ukrainians of Polish territorial claims.

Although there are scholarly publications in Poland that deal more objectively with Polish-Ukrainian relations, they come out in small editions and do not get to the general public, whereas popular literature, with its negative images of Ukrainians, is widely circulated - even through kiosks in churches. That is the literature that is used by parliamentarians and recommended in schools, Mr. Tyma related.

Why has the 60th anniversary of the Volyn events been given such a high profile and not the more significant 50th anniversary in 1993? Mr. Tyma gave some possible immediate reasons.

The first is the issue of Jedwabne, a town in northeast Poland, where Prof. Jan T. Gross, in his book "Sasiedzi" (published in English by the Princeton University Press in 2001 as "Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland"), charged that Poles murdered Jews in 1941.

In his review of the book for the Times Literary Supplement, Adam Brumberg wrote: "Gross's scrupulously documented study challenges another cherished myth: the noble attempts of most Poles to save Jews." This was a big shock for all Poles because it showed that Poles were not only victims of Nazi terror but, even without the inspiration of the Germans, had perpetrated their own atrocities against the Jews, and not Jews who had been brought into Poland from Germany, but Jews with whom they had lived side by side.

For this, Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski apologized in the name of the nation, but some politicians, and even the head of the Polish Catholic Church, Cardinal Jozef Glemp, claim that it never happened, that it was the Germans who murdered the Jews, that Poles had nothing to do with it.

Another recent sore point is the issue of the Lychakiv Cemetery in Lviv, where the official dedication in May 2002 of the Polish section of the cemetery was to have taken place with the participation of the presidents of Poland and Ukraine but was called off when the Lviv City Council balked at the wording of the commemorative plaque and refused permission to have it installed. It was a personal embarrassment for President Kwasniewski, who is considered the most pro-Ukrainian among political leaders in Poland. Hence, when the people who promote the negative image of Ukrainians began to be aggressive about the Volyn commemorations, there was no reaction from presidential circles, Mr. Tyma explained. Several months after the Lychakiv debacle, representatives of the Kresy organizations began meeting with government ministers to plan the Volyn commemorations. Could Volyn be "revenge" for Lychakiv? There could also be some rational psychological issues involved, Mr. Tyma said, as, for example, the fact that the family of the president's wife is from Volyn.

Among Ukrainians in Poland there is concern about how Ukraine will react to Polish pressure to force an "apology" and make the Ukrainian president acknowledge Ukrainian responsibility for the killings in Volyn. There is a serious imbalance in the preparedness and understanding of the importance of this supposedly two-way question. On the Ukrainian side there is no official policy with respect to events of World War II, and the Soviet version of the war is still widely accepted. On the other hand, the Polish side has a focused aim: to prove that there was genocide against the Polish inhabitants of Volyn, organized and directed by the UPA. The Poles have been working long and have dedicated a lot of resources to researching the issue, to finding documents, gathering testimonies and publishing their work, according to Mr. Tyma.

Although Ukrainian historians (such as Prof. Yaroslav Isaievych) claim that the Polish side is ignorant of the facts and lets stereotypes rule, Mr. Tyma believes that Ukrainian historians often reject Polish research blankly without having the facts to back this up. Their main position is the dismissal of collective responsibility of the Ukrainian nation for both "real and imagined crimes" in Volyn perpetrated by the few. They maintain that only separate UPA units took part in the destruction of Polish settlements in Volyn and it is they who are responsible, not the UPA as a whole.

But this is a problematic position, as the status of the UPA has not been settled in Ukraine and the rehabilitation of the UPA has not been completed. Bearing in mind the politicization in Ukraine of the acknowledgement of the UPA as a national liberation force, any UPA implication in the killings will be bad for Our Ukraine leader Viktor Yushchenko, as it can be used to discredit him in the parts of Ukraine where the Soviet version of World War II is still the dominant one - something that has probably not escaped the notice of the "hardball players" in the presidential administration.

Mr. Tyma concluded that what will happen with the commemorations will depend on several factors: on the one hand, the actions and behavior of President Kwasniewski and the leading politicians in the ruling coalition in the Polish Sejm and, from the Ukrainian side, on the personalities involved and their agendas. This issue brings to the fore the fact that, in the process of national consolidation and nation-building, there are unsolved questions regarding internal Ukrainian (East-West) as well as external (with other nations) relations in Ukraine.

The continuation of the negative stereotyping of Ukrainians and the further dissemination of one-sided evaluations of the Volyn events is of particular concern to Ukrainians in Poland. As Mr. Tyma said, "Living dispersed among the Polish population we will continuously have to explain: who killed whom, why, that these were not our parents who were not born in Volyn." The fact that officially Poland has promised many things to redress the wrongs of World War II - compensation for those interned at the concentration camp at Jaworzno in 1947-1949, restitution of confiscated property seized during Akcja Wisla, no interference with the commemoration of UPA burial sites in Poland - but delivered little, shows there is a reluctance on the part of the Poles to acknowledge other views and others' needs.

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Note: Issue No. 28 of the magazine Yi [ï] contains a comprehensive collection of articles on the topic Volyn 1943 in Ukrainian. The issue can be found on the Internet at: http://www.ji-magazine.lviv.ua.

Yi, which bill itself as an independent culturological publication, is published in Lviv. Its editor is Taras Wozniak. The magazine usually publishes issues on one main topic; the one devoted to Volyn 1943 has articles by Taras Hunczak, Yaroslav Isaievych, Natalia Yakovenko and others.

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