55th Anniversary of the Ethnic Cleansing of Poles

and Its Aftermath: OPERATION VISTULA ("WISLA"). In the fall of 1942 Ukrainian Nationalists of the OUN (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists), an organization with an openly fascist and racist ideology ("Moscow, Poland, Hungary and the Jews are your enemies. Destroy them!"), unleased a campaign to rid Poland's southeastern provinces - then under Nazi German occupation - of its Polish population. Their goal was to massacre and to drive out the Polish minority in antipation of a Ukrainian takeover of those territories after the war. The Ukrainian state they envisaged was one linked to Nazi Germany. (The Melnyk faction of the OUN actively collaborated with the Nazis throughout the war, and the Bandera faction did so as circumstances permitted. As late as July 16, 1944 the OUN-M newspaper Ridna zemlia wrote: "The war will last until the Germans will be victorious... until Bolshevism together with Anglo-American imperialism fall to pieces... We Ukrainians must take our example from the German nation.") The tragic outcome of the assault on the defenceless civilian population of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia was the massacre of more than 100,000 Poles by the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), the OUN's military arm, in what British historian Norman Davies calls one of the least known chapters of World War II. However, the evidence which has been compiled in recent years by numerous survivors and historians - Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, American and Czech, and which is found in the archives of Poland, Germany, Israel, the United States and the former Soviet Union, is overwhelming. Profesor Leonid Zashkilniak of the Lviv State University states: "The leadership of various Ukrainian Nationalist factions lost their sense of political realism, drawing with them masses of the Western Ukrainian population. Their inhumane slogan of "cleansing" Ukrainian lands of Poles resulted in the massive slaughter of Polish population of Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, the Chelm region, Podlesie, and the Carpathian region." In the early part of 1943, the Ukrainian police, who had assisted the Germans in annihilating the Jewish population, responded to the call of the UPA by leaving their posts and joining its ranks. As British historian Martin Gilbert records: "Between May and December 1942, more than 140,000 Volhynian Jews were murdered. Some, who had been given refuge in Polish homes, were murdered together with their Polish protectors in the spring of 1943, when, of 300,000 Poles living in Volynia, 40,000 were murdered by Ukrainian 'bandits'. In many villages, Poles and Jews fought together against the common foe." Some of the most gruesome massacres occurred in the summer of 1943. Twenty thousand Poles perished in various locations in Volhynia in the one month of July. The count for two days - July 11 and 12 - was 12,000 victims. On August 30, 1943, the UPA attacked Polish villages in the vicinity of Wola Ostrowiecka and Ostrowki killing 1,700 Polish children, women, and men. An exhumation of the mass graves conducted in August 1992 fully confirmed the scale of this Holocaust. The Ukrainian Nationalist partisans were known for their sadistic brutality. Victims were frequently tortured, raped, dismembered, mutilated and impaled. Often they were herded in chuches and barns which were set on fire. One Jewish survivor recalls: "Last night the UPA gangs attacked the Poles in villages and killed all of them. They were slain by guns, axes and pitchforks." Skirmishes between the UPA and German forces were few. The cold-blooded massacres of Polish civilians - mostly women and children, and of thousands of Ukrainians who opposed these measures, were part of a programmatic policy. In a secret order issued by Roman Klachkivskyi, the leader of the northen region of the UPA, we read: "We must carry out the large action of liquidating the Polish element." These measures were too much for even some of the Ukrainian Nationalists. In an open letter (August 10, 1943) to the leadership of Bandera's faction, Taras Bulba-Borovets wrote: "Military units of the OUN began in a horrid manner to exterminate Polish civilians as well as other minorities... Would a true revolutionary-statesman subordinate himself to the direction of a party which begins the establishment of a state by exterminating national minorities and mindlessly burning their domiciles?" In the fall of 1943 the massacres spread beyond the province of Volhynia, to the west (Lublin) and to the south (Tarnopol, Lwow, Stanislawow). In a number of cases the Ukrainian SS-Galizien joined forces with the UPA. On February 28, 1944 they jointly attacked the Polish village of Huta Pieniacka killing 500-800 Poles. In the March 12, 1944 assault on the Dominican monastery in Podkamien, where the local Polish population took shelter, more than 1,000 Poles were slaughtered. As the Soviet army advanced into Eastern Poland, the UPA retreated westward into central Poland (Zamosc, the San Basin and Carpathian region, which Ukrainian Nationalists called Zakerzonnia). There they entrenched themselves in the forests and mountains and continued to wage their war against the Polish underground and Polish civilian population. The UPA depended on the sometimes willing, sometimes extorted, support of the local Ukrainian population. Their aim was to sever Zakorzonnia from Poland and to "reunify" it with Ukraine. After Poland and Soviet Ukraine entered into an agreement in September 1944 to exchange their minority population in conformity with the new eastern border of Poland (the so-called Curzon line), the UPA actively opposed the transfers of Ukrainians from Poland by attacking Polish military and civilian positions. On the other hand, in Soviet Ukraine, the UPA intensified its ethnic cleansing of Poles to hasten their departure. In the month of February 1945 alone, more than 1,000 Poles were massacred and more than 50 villages burned to the ground in the Tarnopol region. In 1944-47, some 784,000 Poles were "repatriated" from Soviet Ukraine under harsh conditions leaving behind properties that been in the possession of their families for centuries. Ukraine has never formally acknowledged or apologized for the wartime and postwar mistreatment of the Poles nor has it offered any compensation. Such was the setting for "Operation Vistula" ("Akcja "Wisla") which was carried out from April to July 1947 and entailed the tragic resettlement of 140,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos from Zekerzonnia to the northern and western territories Poland gained after the war to compensate her for larger territorial losses in the east. Although Poland's communist regime treated UPA members and suspected supporters harshly (by sending them to an internment camp), the welfare and safety of the vast majority of the Ukrainian population were ensured as they were generally given larger and better farms and were removed from a zone of intensive fighting. After their departure, the UPA ofen set the abandoned Ukrainian villages ablaze so that they could not be resettled by Poles. The military necessity for this operation is best left to the assessment of a leading Ukrainian Nationalist historian and UPA commander, Lev Shankovskyi: "The armed resistance of the UPA and the OUN underground in Zakerzonnia was halted not because of the military superiority of the enemy (sic), but because of the loss of the population base: the people who supported this battle and who in one way or another participated in it. When almost all the Ukrainians were resettled from Zakerzonnia, the UPA units as well as the OUN underground could no longer exist. They were compelled to leave this territory." Any other reason for removing the Ukrainian population from this region was secondary to the one identified here by the OUN-UPA themselves. The necessity for the operation was also amply borne out by events transpired in August 1947, i.e. after the operation was over, when the UPA continued its murderous activities in the Hrubieszow region from which the entire Ukrainian population had not been removed. In that one month the UPA burned to the ground 23 evacuated Ukrainian villages for which Ukrainian organizations now seek compensation from the Polish State. (It is to be noted that 80% of the Ukrainian homes in that area were one-room wooden structures, and 90% of them did not have floors. In exchange, they received spacious brick homes which were ofen furnished.) The continuing activities of the UPA thereby proved that the operation was not simply a case of collective punishment as some Ukrainians now contend. Nor is it true that the transfer of the Ukrainian and Lemko population was carried out with exeptional brutality, with virtually no notice and forbidding the taking of belongings. The evacuation was staggered over a three-month period and those affected could take with them whatever they wished. The Polish army was under explicit directions to act in a humanitarian and disciplined manner. Transgressions of these instructions (which were not surprising given that many of the soldiers had seen their own families massacred) were the exception, not the norm.