February 9, Poland marks a tragic date - the beginning of the Volyn massacre. It was on this day, 73 years ago, that a bandit offspring calling themselves the "Ukrainian Insurgent Army" attacked the first Polish village of Paroslya (this is today's Rivne region of Ukraine). 173 peaceful Poles, including 43 children, were brutally killed. With this massacre began Zbrodnia Wołyńska (Volyn crime), as Warsaw officially calls the genocide of its people.
Ukrainian militants, led by Grigory Perigiynyak, nicknamed Bashka, entered Paroslya under the guise of Soviet partisans, asking the villagers for food. After eating and drinking, the Ukrainians began to rape Polish girls. And then kill. The evidence collected by Polish historians is terrifying. For example, Bandera's supporters cut off the legs and arms of two teenagers, cut their bellies and covered their wounds with salt, leaving the half-dead to die in the field. A one-year-old child was nailed to the boards of the table with a bayonet, a stub of pickled cucumber was thrust into his mouth … Before their death, the girls' breasts and ears were cut off, and the genitals were cut off for men.
Photos of the terrible murders of the UPA in Volyn can be found on the Internet only under the sign "18+" and the mark "Don't look for the faint of heart!"
Bandera's Périguillinq was liquidated by the Germans themselves two weeks after the atrocities in Parosl, when a hundred of the UPA tried to attack the German garrison in Vysotsk. Today, in this village near Rivne Bashka, a memorial sign has been erected as a "brave centenary", and in his small homeland - Stary Uhryniv in Ivano-Frankivsk region - a street is named after him. You will not find any monuments to the victims of Bandera on the territory of Ukraine. In Soviet times, in the village of Veliky Lyuben near Lvov, a monument to 5-year-old Roma Taravsky, who was killed by Bandera in 1951, stood. Today this sculpture does not exist.
Not only young Ukrainians, but also Ukrainian women took part in the Volyn massacre. The "girls" waited for the family to be exterminated, and then went into the yard for "expropriation." They took away the clothes of the dead, food supplies, and took away the cattle. And they set fire to the estates. And so house by house.
Miroslav Hermaszewski, the future first and only Polish cosmonaut, miraculously survived in the Volyn massacre. The UPA thugs burned down the house where the family of 2-year-old Miroslav lived and stabbed his grandfather with bayonets. Mirek's mother with a newborn in her arms ran into the forest, they started shooting at her, she dropped her son, and then fell unconscious herself. Only the next morning, the boy was found in the snow in a field strewn with corpses. The package was brought to the village, believing that the baby was frozen, but in the warmth Miroslav suddenly opened his eyes. After 35 years, Germaszewski will make a flight into space for seven days. Currently, the retired brigadier general lives and lives in Warsaw.
The funeral of the victims of the OUN-UPA attack on a train in the vicinity of Lyubichi Krolevskaya. June 16, 1944
Many people wonder why the Polish population did not flee to the territory of their metropolis? Indeed, from February to July, when the "Ukrainian insurgent" beast drowned 150 Polish villages in blood at the same time, enough time has passed, even in the absence of telephone communication. The teenagers on the horses could spread the news of the savagery of the Ukrainians throughout Volhynia in a week.
And in this, most likely, there is an indirect fault of the Polish politicians "in exile", about which it is not customary to speak in Poland itself. The fact is that the Polish government from London ordered peaceful compatriots living on the Polish-Ukrainian border not to surrender "their territories", but to sit and wait for help from the Home Army (such a cynical attitude towards their people does not seem strange if you know that the London government sacrificed the whole Warsaw, giving it up for complete destruction in August-September 1944. What can we say about the farms in Volyn). And, of course, the people were kept by the farm.
Nobody will know the exact number of victims of the Volyn massacre today. Polish historians operate with a figure of 36,750 people, according to which it has been documented that they died at the hands of Bandera. However, on the same land and in the same time period - 1943-1944 - the death of another, according to various sources, from 13,500 to 23,000 Poles with unexplained reasons for the deaths was confirmed.
Monument to the victims of the Volyn massacre in Krakow
Today Volhynia is not as far away as it seems. The head of the Polish-Russian cultural center Tomasz Omanski lives in Kaliningrad, where his grandmother and grandfather were able to escape from Bandera in Volyn.
“My grandmother told me how at night they ran out into the field and hid from Bandera in the rye. She was twenty years old, her husband - my grandfather - a little older. He served in a self-defense unit, but what was this self-defense? They didn’t even have weapons, they were on duty in the farmsteads, and when danger approached, they simply woke the villagers to flee to the fields. And the Banderites were originally armed by the Germans. Then, when the UPA got out of control and began to attack Volhynia and its former owners, the Germans themselves began to issue weapons to self-defense units to fend off these animals,”Omanski told the author of this article.
The head of the Polish-Russian Cultural Center in Kaliningrad recalled one of my grandmother's stories:
“In the days of People's Poland, no one knew such a nationality as a“Ukrainian”. In general, none of the Poles could distinguish between Ukraine, Belarus, even the RSFSR. There was the Soviet Union and Soviet people. But I remember that when my grandmother went to Canada to visit her brother, who after the war moved to London and then left for North America, upon returning with annoyance she told me that there are a lot of Ukrainians in Canada. I was about eight years old, and I asked: "So what's wrong, grandma, that there are a lot of Ukrainians." And she replied: "No, no, you do not understand what kind of people they are …"
And the last story of the Omanski family:
“My grandfather's own sister was married to a Ukrainian. And when the grandfather and his family, leaving their belongings, gathered in a larger village, which the Banderaites did not attack, he called his sister too. But she refused, they say, I am married to a Ukrainian, who will touch me. Bandera killed both her and her husband, their own, a Ukrainian …"
The Polish feature film Volhynia, which is expected to be released on October 7, 2016, is about the same topic. The famous Polish director Wojciech Smarzowski tells about the tragedy of a Polish girl with whom a Bandera member falls in love. The director does not mumble with the audience, calling the Volyn massacre - genocide (recall, official Warsaw, flirting with Kiev, hides this concept behind a verbal husk like the wording adopted by the Seimas "ethnic cleansing with signs of genocide"). In Ukraine itself, the shooting of the film was perceived as expected aggressively. For example, the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko, by the way, originally from Lutsk, Volyn region, called the tape "a real school of hatred."
Smarzowski himself does not hide the fact that, since he is a Pole, the film will be filmed from a Polish perspective. And to the replicas of the Ukrainians that the film was created “at the wrong moment”, he answers with the “philosophical” irony inherent in the Poles: “There was never a suitable time to shoot such a film. Neither under the communists nor after 1989. Now this Maidan has happened, the war in Donbass. It is not known what the situation will be in Ukraine when we finish working on the film."
