Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (40 page)

These are just a handful of examples that must stand for the hundreds of Polish villages affected by ethnic violence in 1943 and 1944. According to not only Polish sources but German and Soviet ones, Ukrainian partisans indulged in beheading, crucifying, dismembering and disembowelling their victims, and often displayed bodies in a conscious attempt to strike terror into the remaining Polish community. They burned homes and churches, razed villages and looted whatever they could lay their hands on. This took place throughout eastern Poland/western Ukraine. Any Ukrainians who attempted to shelter their Polish neighbours were also killed.
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Even UPA reports themselves confirm that they set out to exterminate Poles as thoroughly as the Jews had already been exterminated, and in many areas succeeded. One of UPA’s commanders-in-chief, Dmytro Kliachkivs‘kyi, advised his commanders to ‘liquidate the entire male [Polish] population between 16 and 60 years’, and ordered that ‘villages in the forests and villages adjacent to forests should be razed to the ground’. The local commander of the Zavykhost region, Iurii Stel’mashchuk, admitted that he had been given an order for ‘the total physical extermination of the Polish population in all western provinces of Ukraine. Fulfilling this order of the OUN leaders, a formation consisting of several UPA bands slaughtered more than 15,000 Poles in August 1943.’
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In reaction to such events, some local Poles began to set up their own militias for the purpose of self-defence. The Polish underground also diverted resources away from resisting the occupation in order to protect Polish communities from the UPA. Some Volhynian Poles turned to the Germans for jobs as policemen so that they might have opportunities for revenge. (The Germans certainly appeared happy to recruit them, and a new wave of collaboration was born – ironically in the name of controlling
former
collaborators who were now running amok.) When the Soviets arrived in 1944, many Poles joined the Red Army or the NKVD – again, with the purpose of exacting revenge for all they had suffered. Ukrainian villages were burned, and thousands of Ukrainian peasants killed, in both official and unofficial reprisals for the actions of UPA.
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These reprisals, naturally, were used by Ukrainian partisans as further justification for their targeting of Poles and Polish villages. And so the situation degenerated into a vicious cycle. During the final year of the war, and in its immediate aftermath, the entire region was engulfed in what was effectively a civil war. What began in Volhynia spread to Galicia and central Poland. Poles and Ukrainians slaughtered one another and burned each other’s villages with an enthusiasm that far exceeded any of their actions against the German or Soviet occupiers. Waldemar Lotnik, a Polish partisan at the time, put this conflict in stark terms:

They had killed seven men two nights previously; that night we killed sixteen of theirs … A week later the Ukrainians responded by wiping out an entire Polish colony, setting fire to the houses, killing those inhabitants unable to flee and raping the women who fell into their hands … We retaliated by attacking an even bigger Ukrainian village and this time two or three men in our unit killed women and children … The Ukrainians in turn took their revenge by destroying a village of 500 Poles and torturing and killing all who fell into their hands. We responded by destroying two of their larger villages … This was how the fighting escalated. Each time more people were killed, more houses burnt, more women raped. Men become desensitised very quickly and kill as if they know nothing else.
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It is in this context that we must see the massacre at Zawadka Morochowska that I described at the beginning of this chapter. When viewed in isolation, it would be easy to come to the conclusion that it was a cold-blooded, purely Polish crime, committed in the name of ethnic cleansing. When one widens the time-frame slightly, and discovers that the units involved in the massacre had suffered casualties during an attack by UPA partisans only the day before, it no longer seems quite so cold-blooded.
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And when one widens the time-frame still further, and discovers that some of those involved in the massacre were veterans of the civil war between Poles and Ukrainians in Volhynia, revenge begins to look like a much stronger motive.
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This context in no way justifies what occurred at Zawadka Morochowska, or indeed the attacks on any of the other Ukrainian villages in south-east Poland in 1946 – but it does go part of the way towards explaining it.

Even the most conservative estimates suggest that around 50,000 Polish civilians were killed by Ukrainian partisans in Volhynia, and a further 20,000 to 30,000 in Galicia. In total it is thought that up to 90,000 Poles were killed throughout the borderland areas during the civil conflict. Ukrainian deaths also number in the thousands, but since the Poles did not enter the conflict with an explicit plan to commit genocide, the Ukrainian faction lost far fewer people than they killed – perhaps 20,000 in all.
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As with so many other areas of wartime European history, these numbers are controversial, and subject to an ongoing argument between Polish and Ukrainian historians over who owns the rights to victimhood. In one sense, the absolute numbers do not really matter – it is enough to register that a violent civil war took place and that thousands died on both sides. But in another sense the numbers are desperately important, especially in a climate where nationalism is on the rise once more across Europe. Ukrainians, naturally, are reluctant to admit to the role of the OUN and UPA in starting the cycle of violence, and in their attempts to minimize the numbers of Polish dead occasionally distort the figures. Some Poles, on the other hand, wield statistics like a weapon in a historiographic rerun of the civil war itself.
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In such a highly charged atmosphere, it is unlikely that any agreement over figures will be reached - the ones I have given above are the most impartial estimates available.

The Soviet Solution

When the Soviets reinvaded Ukraine and Poland in 1944 and discovered the extent of the ethnic conflict there, they were alarmed. They certainly could not allow such chaos to disrupt their supply lines while the war was still going on – and since the UPA had also begun to attack Soviet formations, something had to be done to stabilize the situation.

Their solution was simple: if the different nationalities could not be made to live together peacefully on the same territory, then they should be separated. This separation was to be done on a state-wide scale: the Poles should live in Poland, and the Ukrainians should live in a Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The demarcation line between the two would not be the old Polish border from the 1930s: it would be moved westwards, so that most of what Ukrainians regarded as ‘Western Ukraine’ would be reunited with ‘Eastern Ukraine’. This would not only extend Soviet territory, but would steal the thunder of the OUN/UPA by giving Ukrainians the very thing they had been fighting for. Any Poles living on the wrong side of this border would be expelled into Poland; and likewise, Ukrainians on the other side of the border would be ‘repatriated’.

To say this was a controversial solution at the time would be a gross understatement. For the Polish government in exile in London the idea of changing the Ukrainian/Polish border so far westwards was virtually unthinkable. The border that the Soviets proposed was the so-called Curzon Line, which would see an area the combined size of all three Baltic States – Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania – severed from eastern Poland. The Polish city of Lwów would be awarded to Ukraine, Brest-Litovsk given to Belarus, and Wilno (modern-day Vilnius) handed over to Lithuania. To agree to such a border would be effectively to endorse the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939.

On the face of it the Western Allies were also opposed to such a solution. Both Churchill and Roosevelt had previously expressed outrage at any suggestion that the Soviets should be allowed to hold on to this territory.
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And yet both politicians were realists, and knew that it would be virtually impossible to oppose Soviet plans now that they already occupied the whole region. The price of challenging Stalin over the issue was not one that either premier was willing to contemplate. ‘Do you want me to go to war with Russia?’ said Roosevelt sharply when his ambassador to Poland suggested that America should stand firm on the subject.
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As early as November 1943, when Churchill and Roosevelt met Stalin for the first time at Tehran, they both indicated to him that they would not oppose his plans to incorporate the eastern borderlands of Poland into the Soviet Union. Churchill made no secret of this, and tried soon after to convince the Polish Prime Minister, Stanislaw Mikolajczyk, to accept this as a fait accompli – something that Mikolajczyk steadfastly refused to do. Roosevelt was more calculating, however, and did not make his position clear until after he was re-elected the following year, because he was relying on the support of millions of Polish-American voters. The final blow to Polish hopes on the subject came at the next meeting of the Big Three at Yalta in February 1945, when they jointly and formally declared that the eastern frontier of Poland should follow the Curzon Line.
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The tragic thing about this process is that it was pushed through without any reference to the wishes of the Polish people themselves. Not even their elected representatives were consulted until after the deal had been struck in Tehran. For Poles the world over this was nothing short of an Anglo-American betrayal. When Churchill and Roosevelt had signed the Atlantic Charter in 1941 they had promised never to endorse any territorial changes ‘that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned’; by agreeing to Soviet demands at Tehran and Yalta they had explicitly broken that promise. There were many within the British and American establishment who shared these feelings. Arthur Bliss Lane, the US ambassador to Poland, openly called it a ‘capitulation’ to Stalin, a policy of ‘appeasement’ that was similar to the appeasement of Hitler before the war, and a ‘betrayal’ of America’s Polish allies.
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In Britain, the Labour MP John Rhys Davies stated bitterly in the House of Commons, ‘We started this war with great motives and high ideals. We published the Atlantic Charter and then spat on it, stomped on it and burnt it, as it were, at the stake, and now nothing is left of it.’
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Forced ‘Repatriation’

Very little thought was given at Yalta to just what this change of borders would mean for the population of the region: it was regarded as Stalin’s own business, and not something that the Western Allies could realistically influence. In fact, the Soviets had already started to arrest and deport people according to their usual methods almost as soon as they had arrived in the area. But Stalin remained cautious, and the wholesale deportation of Poles did not begin in earnest until the Yalta Agreement was signed.

This was something quite new, as far as the Soviets were concerned. The Soviets were well acquainted with deporting whole populations from one region to another for reasons of nationality. Throughout the 1920s and 30s entire communities in the Soviet Union had been moved like pieces on a chessboard.
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The most recent such move had been the deportation of the Tatars from the Crimea (which at the time was not a part of Ukraine) in May 1944.
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However, until now such deportations had always been carried out for political or military rather than purely ethnic reasons. Moreover, they had only ever been conducted within Soviet territory – the Soviets had never before
expelled
an ethnic minority from their territory into another country. The population exchange that was to take place between Ukraine and Poland therefore reflected a marked change in Soviet policy.
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Between 1944 and 1946 some 782,582 Poles were removed from Soviet Ukraine and resettled in Poland. A further 231,152 were expelled from Belarus, and 169,244 from Lithuania – giving a total of almost 1.2 million.
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Many of these people were harassed into leaving by the authorities. But many were also encouraged to leave of their own accord in order to escape the continuing ethnic violence which raged throughout 1945 and even into 1946. In a peculiar way the Soviets and the UPA seemed to be working in tandem to achieve their common goal. Maria Józefowska and her family, for example, were forced out of their home village of Czerwonogród when the UPA burned it down in July 1945. Immediately after the attack, the Soviet authorities laid on a special train to transport them out of Ukraine to Jaroslaw in Polish Galicia, almost as if the opportunity were too good to miss.
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With the blessing of the Soviets, the Poles replied in kind by ‘repatriating’ over 482,000 Ukrainians, mostly from Galicia in the south-east of the country.
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The massacre at Zawadka Morochowska was part of this process, and shows how brutally it was carried out. Once again, the official actions of the Polish government were accompanied by unofficial actions by nationalist groups and members of the underground Armia Krajowa (‘Home Army’). Atrocities were carried out on innocent civilians, and even people who did not consider themselves Ukrainian at all. The Łemkos, for example, were an ethnic group belonging to the Beskidy ranges of the Carpathian Mountains who had no historical interest in Ukraine or any other kind of nationalism, and wanted only to keep their own lands intact. Yet they were targeted and deported along with other Ukrainian speakers. Attempts by local leaders to explain the difference between Ukrainians and Łemkos fell on deaf ears.