The neglected field, there are rachitic crops everywhere, many weeds in it. It's hard to believe there was a vibrant village here a fewer decades ago. They lived, worked, made love, and sometimes hated average people like us. They lived alongside their Ukrainian neighbors erstwhile more and erstwhile little in agreement. But usually normal, just like neighbors..
They were murdered. 145 men, 125 women and 204 children. frequently small children. They were murdered with the top cruelty. With an axe, a fork and a club. No mercy. No mercy.
The invaders of abroad lands did not do this. The Germans and the Russians didn't do it. The neighbors did it. Ukrainians. The same, whose grandchildren have sleazyly sown grain increasing nameless graves today.
On July 7, this year, the Prime Minister of Poland arrived. Well-styled, surrounded by a bunch of reporters and PR people. Among the increasing bones of Polish children, he placed a cross composed of sticks. After that, he gave respective communes, so steeped in cynical hypocrisy, that in his own way for all this unpleasant celebration appropriate. Then he went back to his business. And the bones remained unburied. And unremarkable.
If you would like to light a candle and say a prayer for the souls of the murdered, you will not find a place in Ukraine where you would be allowed I'll do it to you. For there is no request to look for monuments of the victims. However, it is easy to find execution statues.
All the more important, in spite of those who put their peculiar interests ahead of the interests of the nation, we remember. So we can get names erased from the maps of the village. To remember the names of the murderers. And they claimed justice. If we are to keep our memory, we should scope for books. Both those who bear witness and those who make papers.
In fresh days, the latest book by Mark A. Koprowski “Mord on Volyn fell into my hands. The silenced genocide in Poles". This is another position of this well-known communicative popularizer referring straight to the genocide that the Ukrainians committed in hatred at the Polish east ends in the 1940s. But this time Koprowski alternatively of focusing on a narrow section of past draws a broader image for us. No half-truth, no silence. In spite of the fashionable relativization today.
Koprowski writes things that until late were obvious, but present they are again silenced or distorted. He clearly states that the Volyn massacre was not a spontaneous but carefully planned action, performed with “Asian even cruelty”. Thus, not a spontaneous speech, not "local incidents", as Ukrainian past counterfeiters compose and Polish "servants" obey them, but a planned mass murder. Furthermore, Koprowski is dedicated to the revelations of the said "history" by a separate chapter, effectively exposing their manipulations.
Unexpected for the author himself, most likely fragments of the book relating to the martyrdom of the Polish clergy in Volyn were taken up. According to the author, 18 priests were murdered there, 34 churches and 19 rectory were destroyed from 1 January 1943 to 1 January 1944. Banderov's degenerates didn't even punish the cemeteries. All traces of Polish history, culture and spirituality were to be erased forever from these lands.
In the face of the facts, numbers and memories cited above, the “forgive and reconcile” especially appears to us by the hierarchy of the Polish Church. Recently, we saw carefully prepared pictures from the signing of an empty declaration between Bishop Stanislaw Gądecki and Archbishop Świętosław Szewczuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church. The same Greek Catholic church, whose clergy called 80 years ago for “the Lachans” to celebrate forklifts and hatchets for killing children. Who are beginning the execution memorials tonight. This is dialogue, this is reconciliation.
In the face of cynical falsification of history, in the face of relativization of fact and equalization of perpetrators and victims, it is all the more worth equipping yourself with the weapons of knowledge. ‘Mord on Volyn. The silenced genocide on Poles" Marek A. Koprowski is an excellent compendium here. This extended but transparent position can equally become an interesting guide to the reader who is not acquainted with the subject, as well as an interesting complement to cognition for people who are a bit more curious in the subject.
Przemysław Piasta
Marek A. Koprowski, "Mord on Volyn. Silent genocide in Poles”, Replica 2023
Think Poland, No. 39-40 (16-23.07.2023)
