For two decades, the authorities of post-socialist Poland have officially supported the pseudo-heroic myth about the anti-Soviet underground of the times of the Polish People's Republic (PPR).
To designate the members of this underground, active in 1944-1947, a special term is used - "damned soldiers" (stress on the first syllable). Every year on March 1, the official Poland pompously celebrates the Day of Remembrance of the "Damned Soldiers".
The "damned" - because the leadership of their own country renounced them, and the Polish special services, acting in conjunction with the Soviet authorities, staged round-up after round-up of the "damned" until they routed all the underground organizations. The last member of the "accursed" underground was destroyed in 1963.
For the first time, one of the officers of the Polish Army called the members of the anti-Soviet gang underground “damned” in a letter to the widow of an underground fighter, informing her about the execution of the death sentence against her husband: “Let the eternal shame and hatred of our soldiers and officers pursue him and in the next world. Everyone who has Polish blood curses him, and let his wife and children curse him."
For many Poles, the "accursed soldiers" were ordinary bandits. Brought to the brink of physical survival, hiding in the forests, they survived by robbery, and their political views were imposed by murder and violence.
By 1950, things had gone so far that the Polish Catholic Church condemned the "accursed soldiers", threatening canonical punishments for those priests who maintained contacts with the underground.
There is a lot of evidence of the crimes of the "cursed soldiers". Sometimes the voices of those whose relatives have fallen victim to rampant banditry are also heard from the pages of the Polish media. On the Internet, you can find videos that provide data on the involvement of the "damned" in the murder of more than 5 thousand civilians, including 187 children.
Residents of the Orthodox Belarusian village of Zaleshany near Bialystok tell how in December 1946 a detachment of the "damned" under the command of Captain Romuald Rice (nicknamed Bury) burst into their village: the houses of the Zaleshans were burned, their owners were killed along with their children. Many were burned alive.
Bury carried out the same punitive actions in the villages of Kontsovizna, Vulka Vygonovska, Shpaki, Zane and others. In 1949, he was shot by the verdict of the Polish People's Republic court.
This did not prevent the Polish court in 1995 from rehabilitating R. Rice with the wording “he acted in an environment of urgent necessity requiring the adoption of ethically ambiguous decisions”. Rice's family received 180 thousand zlotys of compensation. Rice's victims were not given a dime. The rest of the Poles are now being asked to view the massacres as "ethically ambiguous decisions" caused by an "urgent need."
Diet deputy Pavel Kukiz, leader of the Kukiz-15 party, commenting on the posthumous rehabilitation of Rice's killer, wrote on his Facebook page: “The Institute of National Remembrance should carefully study the biographies of some to those who honor Bandera."
The Institute of National Remembrance (INP) is a state structure engaged in remaking the history of Poland to meet the needs of the political environment, which, in turn, is determined by the anti-Russian vector of Warsaw's policy. Through the efforts of the INP, the opinion is being imposed on Polish society, according to which the only patriotic force that fought for the freedom of Poland in the 1940s was the Home Army (AK) together with its ideologically related military formations. The majority of the "damned soldiers" were made up of former AK fighters, who shot in the backs of Soviet soldiers and soldiers of the Army of Ludova.
The myth of the "damned soldiers" is classically anti-Soviet, and it was created in order to trample the history of the joint struggle of the Red Army and the Army of Man against fascism. The initiative, which recently appeared in Poland, to demolish about 500 monuments to Soviet soldiers who fell for the liberation of Poland from the Nazis, responds to the same ideological tasks.
At the same time, the myth of the "accursed soldiers" is also an anti-Russian myth. Orthodox Christians living in Poland often became victims of the "damned", as was the case in Zalesany, where the "damned" left only ethnic Poles alive.
The "damned" are responsible for the destruction of the remnants of the Russian population of Galicia, fragments of which still remained on the slopes of the Carpathians after the genocide of the Galician-Russian people organized by the Austrians during the First World War in the Talerhof and Terezin concentration camps. The way in which the last Russian Galicians were killed was described by the Galician-Russian teacher Yuri Ivanovich Demyanchik (1896 -?) In the manuscript "Bloody Atrocity", telling about the murder in 1945 by a Polish gang underground of his family (an old priest-father, son-in-law and three sisters) in the village of Skopov, Podkarat Voivodeship.
The official Polish myth about the "accursed soldiers" not only disfigures the history of the Polish people, it humiliates the families of the employees of the Ministry of Security of the People's Republic of Poland and the servicemen of the army of the People's Republic of Poland who died at the hands of the "accursed".
We are not even talking about the numerous evidences of attacks by the "damned" on schools and other public institutions, where ordinary Poles - teachers, doctors, officials - became their victims.
In terms of the style and methods of action of the anti-Soviet bandit underground in Poland, it was a copy of the OUN-UPA bandits and the Baltic "forest brothers".
