Ukrainians and Poles finalize draft joint statement on massacres in Volyn

[Zbyszek]

Originally posted by yurilev0
Thanks again for your helpfulness. Will we be seeing you for a while yet?

Y

Today, in the eve of the Volyn meeting of Polish and Ukrainian presidents, I think that a lot has already been done for the PL-UA reconciliation in Ukraine. A lot of Poles do not realize (also because the Polish media do not provide enough information and they are more absorbed with promoting a free sex!?) that a lot of Ukrainians learnt for the first time that the Volhynian butcheries really took place. In many burying grounds, the commemorative tables have been put for the FIRST TIME in Ukraine.
I remember how shocked I was when I learnt about Jedwabne for the first time. Could my countrymen do such a heinous crime? I could not believe it, I resisted the truth in the beginning. Then, gradually I had to accept it and feel a pity for the innocent victims.
Much has already been done in Ukraine and we Poles should not demand too much even if we do not feel well with it.
Honest Ukrainian people like Pan Oleg Szymonowicz from Ivanichi, 20 km east away the PL-UA border, who contributed to honouring the graves of the Polish civilians in Poryck/Pavlivka, Volyn show us all the way.
Poles also have things to be ashamed of. Throughout ages, they often thwarted the Ukrainian dreams for independence. Being unbending freedom fighters, they should have respected the patriotic Ukrainian feelings.



17.45, last minute information:
Verkhovna Rada accepted the common statement of Polish and Ukrainian parliaments (with only one extra voice .i.e. 227 PM's voted yes while the whole Ukrainian PM number is 437).

The head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church Lubomyr Huzar issued a conciliatory statement in Lviv directed to the Polish and Ukrainian people, encouraging for common meetings and prayers in the spirit of mutual forgiveness.

[Edited by Zbyszek on 10th July 2003 at 17:58]

[candle]

I think that your post Zbyszek is really good one. We need to know the history in order to never repeat it.

These bloody events destroyed my family too. My grandparents where Ukrainians from Poland who had to live all possessions, land, house and go to Ukraine under a gunpoint. The most shocking was that the gunman was my grandmother▓s brother in law, her sister have being married to a polish man.

What is interesting that the family used to live in total harmony. Some have being married to Polish, some to Ukrainians, they where celebrating first Polish Christmas all together, then Ukrainian. They had respect for each other and their religions. Till one day when the world was turned upside down and one of the family member begin shooting at my grandparents.

I knew about this from first hands and not only from my grandmother but many other people who witnessed these events with their own eyes. I knew an older lady who managed to survive a massacre of a Polish village in Ukraine. According to what she said a Ukrainian family hid her. I do not know the extend of this bloody events but it wasn▓t just one village for sure.

For what happened I blame only the Stalin regime. It takes a little match to start a big fire. To my knowledge KGB was a specialist of make families turning on each other.

But the time passed and the wounds healed and the family is all back together. Despite living on both sites of the border, speaking different languages and calling selves Polish or Ukrainians the family is regularly visiting each other and maintaining something deeper than just friendship, at the end we▓re all blood related.

[Zbyszek]

Originally posted by candle
I think that your post Zbyszek is really good one. We need to know the history in order to never repeat it.
....
But the time passed and the wounds healed and the family is all back together. Despite living on both sites of the border, speaking different languages and calling selves Polish or Ukrainians the family is regularly visiting each other and maintaining something deeper than just friendship, at the end we▓re all blood related.

Hi Candle, thank you for your opinion. Yes, Poles and Ukrainians have been living side by side for centuries and mixed marriages were a routine. Religion differences were not a big problem for ordinary people. I am more optimistic about good Polish-Ukrainian future after reading your post. Old wounds will surely heal but we in this forum can also make them heal faster. The displacement of Ukrainian people from the Polish Carpathians is surely to be blamed and there is no excuse.(the same applies to resttement of Polish people from Western Ukraine but I realize that sending people living in Poland for centuries to the USSR appeared as much more negative than giving another people a chance of leaving the Soviet "heaven" forever).
The fact is also, that if UPA fighters pressed by the Soviets would not have entered the "Zakierzonskij Kray" (Western Galicia), a lot of blood and tears could have been spared(although, again I realized that it would have not changed anything concerning the issue of the resettlements).
The resettlements started in 1945 and they were originally declared as voluntary. Soon it turned out that it it was meant to be a brutal Soviet-style action, unknown previously in Poland but well known in the Soviet Union.
Candle, I am glad reading your optimistic message.
Regards, Zbyszek

[Edited by Zbyszek on 14th July 2003 at 12:57]

[candle]

There are so many people around that remember these times; I really expect more information to be revealed in near future. It has to be done now till these people are alive and could tell their stories first hand.

[Freedom1]

Sorry, it was a shot at the sheep herder I thought better of. Carry on ....

[Zbyszek]

I wanted to close my ears, shut my eyes and give a halt to all information flowing in my direction at one moment...

I went to the University with my son on Sunday. He just wanted to earn a few cents collecting paper scrap which is now offered in large amounts.
We accidentially met someone whose account I will not forget so easily.
Prof. O heard that my son continues his Ukrainian studies. He offered him a book in Ukrainian, printed in Toronto.
Very quickly we shifted our talk to history. Prof O. was eight years old kid in 1943 when the apogeum of UPA criminal actions took place in Volyn. He lived somewhere between Dubna and Rivne/RСwne.
I remember his face from a very interesting symposium held in Warsaw two years ago. Dr Polishchuk coming from Toronto was one of the speakers. You can read my short report from this symposium above.
Prof. O. first cleared something which many Ukrainians do not realize or do not want to take into account. Polish population of Volhynia was never as strong and wealthy as in Galicia. When the Soviets occupied this territory in 1939, they sent better educated and and wealthier people to Siberia, not so much because they were Poles but because of their crazy "scientific" theory on parasite upper social classes.
Remaining Poles were typically poor farmers with many children and surely not "oppressive Polish lords on white horses" [Ukrainians were fed with such image of Poles by the Soviet propaganda]. Additionally, national composition of many little places in western Ukraine was quite interesting: Ukrainians, Belarussians, Poles, Czechs, Germans, Slovaks.
Poles were told many times before the war that there would be throat-slitting when Ukrainains bring end to Polish occupation. Noone took those ominous "jokes" seriously.
O. was reared in a big family of eight children living with parents. Quickly after the Bolsheviks invaded in 1939, terror was on steady increase, but the worst time came when the Nazis started their Barbarossa plan and entered Western Ukraine so easily. Poles were terribly scared because many Ukrainias showed unusual hospitality to Germans. They only took a breathe when it became clear that the Nazis do not want Ukrainians as their allies. [I still can not fully understand how stupid Hitler was at this moment].
In the spring 1943 first terrible but still rather isolated cases of murders [not just killings] took place in the surroundings of Rivne. German tactics was divide et impera policy of course. Morover they gradually lost ground under their feet after lost Stalingrad battle.
The murderers were better and better organized and in the beginnings they tried to murder under someone else's names. Then, it became clear that the UPA and particularly its "bespyeka" stands behind it.
Poor people hearing about cruel murders abandoned their households for months and hid in the wood or later in the growing grain. Many of them thought about it like about the upcoming end of the world. The repertoire of maiming people was rich and the bullets were not much in use. Hatchets, knives, nails, wire or everything coming at hand was useful. The rage was directed at children or babies of course who were murdered or terribly maimed without mercy. Prof. O passed areas where the kids were thrust alive into fence poles, where women without breasts and tongueless crawled along dust roads.
He saw people being "invited" into barns with hatchets and burnt alive...
I could hardly listen to him.
He and his parents managed to escape to Rivne and then, when "Istriebiutielnye Batalyony" appeared in the surroundings, he illegally crossed the leaking new Polish-Soviet border.
There is one thing I really can't understand. He feels a kind of compulsion of going back to the surroundings of his childhood. He can speak Ukrainian almost like Polish of course. He meets people around and he even gives donation to famous Kremenec high school.
He can show precisely many places where human bones lie right under the ground. When plowing the field, they appear sometimes. He complains that Ukrainians do near to nothing to give respect to human remains.
He also points out that destruction applied to virually everything Polish. Even little Our Lady's (monuments) chapels standing by dirt roads were levelled. Ukraine had to be purely Ukrainian.
At the same time he can drink vodka with local people.
Prof. O. lives in Warsaw. Prof. O. is a respectable University professor and there is no single reason to question his testimony.

[benda]

Zbyszek, I congratulate you on such a historical event.
I've heard of 70,000 killed Poles but that doesn't matter a fact of acknowledgement.

We're waiting a similar step from your parliament (how is it spelled - "Seim"?).