Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (41 page)

Unsurprisingly, some Ukrainians and Łemkos turned to the UPA for protection against deportation. The UPA in Polish Galicia was not nearly so indiscriminately brutal as it was across the border in Ukraine, but was still not above murder, torture and the mutilation of its enemies. One former Polish soldier from this time, Henryk Jan Mielcarek, writes passionately about fellow soldiers who were beaten to death by UPA partisans, had their eyes and tongues cut out, or were tied to trees and left to die.
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But, given that nobody else was willing to help them, many Ukrainians saw no alternative to joining such partisan groups, or at least to providing them with support. This increasing popularity of the UPA in Galicia only inflamed the situation: it gave the army and the authorities even more justification for their policy of expelling these communities.

The Polish ‘repatriation’ campaign in 1945 – 6, brutal as it was, ended up being fairly successful. It did, however, encounter a major problem: towards the end of 1945 some of those Ukrainians who had already left Poland voluntarily started to come back. Many of these people had discovered that life in Ukraine was far worse than it was in the areas they had left, even factoring in Polish harassment. Not only was Ukraine much less well developed than south-east Poland, but the way it had repeatedly changed hands during the war had left it desolate. To make things even worse, the Soviets were not allowing many Polish Ukrainians to settle in the very country they were supposed to be ‘returning’ to: in order to prevent the OUN/UPA problem escalating, more than 75 per cent of Polish Ukrainians were settled in other parts of the USSR. As a consequence, thousands of Ukrainians returned to Poland in 1945 and 1946 to warn their fellow villagers not to go. This goes part of the way towards explaining why so many Ukrainians resisted deportation even in the face of increasingly violent racist attacks against them.
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At the end of 1946 time finally ran out for the Polish authorities who wished to expel Ukrainian speakers from the country in their entirety. To bring the repatriations to an end, the Soviets closed the border between Ukraine and Poland. This did not suit the Polish authorities at all, since they estimated that there were still some 74,000 Ukrainians in the country who had evaded repatriation. In fact the numbers were much higher – about 200,000 in total. The Polish government petitioned the Soviets to allow the process to continue a little while longer, but to no avail.
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Given the impossibility of expelling any more Ukrainians, it is conceivable that the matter might have ended there. Perhaps if the terrorist activities of the UPA had stopped, the Polish government would have felt confident enough to leave the remaining Ukrainians and Łemkos alone. Plans to continue the displacements on an internal basis, which already existed at the beginning of 1947, might have been dropped, and centuries of Ukrainian culture in Galicia might have been allowed to remain. Perhaps.

Such speculation is moot, however, because tensions between the Poles and their Ukrainian-speaking minorities did not relax – indeed they escalated. The tipping point came on 28 March 1947, when the Polish Deputy Minister of Defence, General Karol Swierczewski, was assassinated by the UPA. This killing proved to be a disaster for Poland’s Ukrainians, and was used as justification for a whole range of repressive measures against them. The following day, Polish officers began to speak openly of ‘the complete extermination of the remnants of the Ukrainian population in the southeastern border region of Poland’.
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The Polish administration immediately launched another sweep of the region to root out all the remaining Ukrainian speakers.

The operation was to be called Akcja Wisla – Operation Vistula. Its objectives were not only to destroy the UPA in Poland, but to bring about what its architects called, rather chillingly, a ‘final solution’ to the Ukrainian problem.
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Forced Assimilation

Operation Vistula began at the end of April 1947 and continued through to the late summer. Its intention was not only to ‘destroy the UPA bands’ but to work with the State Office of Repatriation to conduct ‘an evacuation of all persons of Ukrainian nationality from the region to the northwestern territories, resettling them there with a dispersion as sparse as possible’. Historians who claim that the only purpose of the operation was to remove support for the UPA are ignoring these clear statements, issued by the Office of State Security itself, declaring ethnic cleansing of the country as an overt, and separate, objective.
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The operation was intended to root out all the remaining Ukrainian speakers in the country to the last man, woman and child, and was to include even mixed Polish-Ukrainian families. These people were to be given a few hours to pack their things, and then taken to transit hubs to be registered. From here they were to be transported to diverse locations throughout the areas in the west and north that had once been German, but which were now part of Polish territory. In theory, families were to be transported together, but in practice all deportees were given a number and were displaced along with those who registered at the same time. In this way, family members who registered separately were often sent to towns and villages miles apart unless they could convince (or bribe) officials to let them stay together. Families were also supposed to be allowed to take clothes and valuables with them, and even a certain amount of livestock, in order to sustain themselves in their new homes. In reality they were rarely given enough time to pack properly, and were often forced to abandon important items at home to be looted by their Polish neighbours. Many also complain of being robbed by unscrupulous guards or gangs of local people during their journey.

There was nothing especially unique about the rounding up of entire villages and their displacement to another part of the continent – the war had made this practice commonplace, and by 1947 the specific displacement of Ukrainians had already been going on for more than two years. Nor was the scale of it unique – indeed, it was a relatively minor event compared to the continent-wide expulsion of Germans that I shall describe in the next chapter. What made this particular displacement different from all the others was its purpose: the Polish authorities did not merely want to eject this ethnic group, but to compel it to give up all claims to a separate nationality. They were to be forced to change the way they spoke, the way they dressed, the way they worshipped and the way they were educated. The authorities would no longer allow them to be Ukrainians or Łemkos – ‘Because they wanted us all to become Poles.’
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The whole process was deeply distressing, as interviews with Ukrainian-speaking Poles in recent times clearly show. For Anna Klimasz and Rozalia Najduch, Łemkos who were deported from their village of Bednarka in Galicia, the most distressing event was the expulsion itself, and especially the behaviour of their Polish neighbours. Far from supporting or helping them, local Poles seemed only too keen to be rid of them, and looted their homes and property enthusiastically even before they had left. Fellow villagers who refused to allow looters into their homes were beaten, while others had to stand by and watch while their houses were ransacked before their eyes. Some even had things stolen from the carts they were loading up to take with them, with the words, ‘Don’t take this, don’t take that. You won’t need this any longer …’
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For others, the most stressful time was the period of uncertainty that came after they had left their villages and were forced to wait in shabby transit camps to see where they would be displaced to. This period could last anything from a few days to several weeks. Olga Zdanowicz, a Ukrainian from Gr
ziowa in Galicia, had to sleep in the open at the transit camp in Trzcianiec for three weeks.
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The villagers from Bednarka were forced to stay in a camp at Zagórzany for two weeks, also without shelter, and with little food to eat but that which they had brought with them. Rozalia Najduch was reduced to stealing fodder from local peasants to feed her animals. Anna Szewczyk and Mikolaj Sokacz remember sleeping underneath their carts alongside the livestock as the only way of escaping the elements.
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During this time all deportees were questioned by Polish officials, the implication being that their very ethnicity made them potential UPA terrorists.

It was at the transit camps that those who were most suspected of partisan involvement were arrested. For these people the stress of displacement now became a nightmare. They were sent to prisons and internment camps, the most infamous of which was Jaworzno, an ex-Nazi prison camp that had been taken over by the Polish authorities. Here they were beaten, robbed and subjected to a regimen of poor food, poor sanitation and poor treatment. One of the several commandants of the camp was the infamous Salomon Morel, who was transferred here after his time in charge of the camp for Germans at Zgoda (see Chapter 12). As at Zgoda, prisoners were tortured by sadistic prison guards, who hung them from pipes, pierced them with pins, force-fed them various liquids and beat them with metal bars, electric cables, rifle butts and a variety of other implements. In the Ukrainian sub-camp at Jaworzno 161 prisoners died as a direct result of malnutrition, five from typhus, and two women committed suicide.
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For the majority of Ukrainians, meanwhile, the next stage was their journey to their new homes. Friends and acquaintances were split up and loaded onto trains along with their livestock – four families and their animals to each boxcar – and transported to the former German provinces of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia on the opposite side of Poland. While the journey was nothing like as terrifying as the ordeal awaiting those who were sent to Jaworzno, there was a brief moment of panic when the trains passed within a few kilometres of Auschwitz. The journey could take anything up to two weeks, during which time the deportees became filthy and covered in lice.
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For all the uncertainty and discomfort of the journey it was sometimes not nearly so unpleasant as their arrival in a new and unknown land. The way the system was supposed to work was as follows: each family would be given a destination, and would be expected to report to the local State Office of Repatriation when they got there. They would be allocated a property to live in, or sometimes they would be awarded this property in a lottery. Having been abandoned by their former German owners, these properties were supposed to be furnished – the idea was that the furniture that the displaced Ukrainians and Łemkos had had to leave behind would be replaced by furniture in their new homes. In reality, however, anything of use or value had long since been looted, or confiscated by corrupt officials. By 1947 all the best properties had been taken by displaced Poles, leaving only derelict buildings, ransacked apartments or broken-down farms with desperately poor soil. Families who arrived here often abandoned the places they had been allocated and roamed the countryside looking for something better.
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Their welcome was usually far from warm. Since the purpose of removing these people from their communities was to disperse them, families from the same village were not supposed to be housed in the same area. Indeed, often only nuclear families were allowed to stay together – extended families were to be split up in the same way as the whole community was. In most cases, therefore, families found themselves completely isolated, without any of the community they had grown up with to support them. Worse than this, they regularly found themselves surrounded by hostile people who actively despised them. Many of the Poles who had recently been deported from Volhynia and other parts of Soviet Ukraine had also been relocated in these areas. Having survived the savage civil war in their own homelands, the last people these Poles wanted as neighbours were more Ukrainians. Some of those deported in Operation Vistula speak of being beaten by Poles in the towns where they were rehoused, others were merely shunned – almost all found it difficult to find work or make friends.

Anti-Ukrainian prejudice was everywhere. Mikołaj Sokacz remembers being arrested and beaten by militiamen who were convinced that he was a member of the UPA. He had no choice but to take it in his stride for, as he explains, ‘Łemkos were beaten a lot.’ Those who were sent to Jaworzno remember having stones thrown at them and being spat at by local people, because they were supposedly the ones responsible for the assassination of General
wierczewski.
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Teodor Szewczyk remembers overhearing a Polish smallholder he worked for claiming, ‘I won’t pay those f … ing Ukrainians! They can work for food.’
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And so on.