Ukraine honours Polish victims of massacre, shows path of reconciliation
National Post, 16 July 2023
Poles and Ukrainians are both daughters of the bloodlands
KRAKOW, Poland — The history of the Slavs, like the history of all peoples, has its share of sorrows. Vladimir Putin, in his “justification” for the invasion of Ukraine, has selectively summoned up some of those shadows, speaking deceitfully about “de-Nazifying” Ukraine.
Putin conjures the grim ghosts of the Second World War. His predecessor, Josef Stalin, sent the Red Army through Ukraine and into Poland. When Hitler later turned on Stalin and marched toward Moscow, some Ukrainians saw in the Nazis an opportunity to be freed from Stalin. It’s a complicated history that does not justify today’s aggression, but the wounds of history are real and can be exploited.
Prior to the NATO summit in Vilnius, some wounds between the western Slavs and eastern Slavs were healed in a moment of hope.
The occasion was the 80th anniversary of the 1943 Volhynia (Volyn) massacre. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Polish President Andrzej Duda met in the western Ukrainian city of Lutsk. Gathered in a Catholic cathedral, both Catholic and Orthodox prelates led prayers for reconciliation and then both presidents lit candles to honour the victims of the massacre. That the ceremony was held in a church was already something of a gracious gesture from Zelenskyy, who is Jewish.
The presidents jointly posted on Twitter: “Together we pay tribute to all the innocent victims of Volhynia! Memory unites us! Together we are stronger.” On his own website, Zelenskyy added: “We value every life, remember history, and defend freedom together.”
The Volhynia massacre was the work of Ukrainian nationalists, who saw in Hitler’s turn against Stalin the potential for Ukrainian independence from Moscow. They operated in Nazi-occupied Poland after 1941, cooperating with Nazi forces. In 1943 they launched a lethal attack against Polish villages. Poland puts the death toll as high as 100,000 and the atrocity remains a point of friction between Poland and Ukraine. There were reprisals by Poles against Ukrainians, with some 2,000 being killed.
Poland has been Ukraine’s most stalwart ally since the full-scale Russian invasion last year, providing military and humanitarian aid, as well as receiving millions of refugees into their own homes, all without recourse to refugee camps. It is all the more remarkable given that a century ago, in the aftermath of the Great War and the return of Polish independence, Ukrainians and Poles were at war, another shadow in Slavic history.
These are the Bloodlands, as historian Timothy Snyder called them in his 2010 book. From 1930 to 1945, Ukraine was the most lethal place on earth. Between Stalin’s terror famine, the war and the Holocaust, the likelihood of being killed in Ukraine was greater than anywhere else.
During those years, Snyder estimates that in Poland, Ukraine, Byelorussia (Belarus) and the Baltic countries there were some 14 million noncombatant deaths, two-thirds the responsibility of Nazi Germany, the remaining third that of the Soviet Union.
The blood flooded over the land, from wounds that take a long time to close. Even now Putin tries to re-open those wounds, even to cut anew into them. Yet in Lutsk there was a determination to heal.
Poland and Ukraine, daughters of the bloodlands, are not inclined to think of themselves as aggressors, and the balance of their history bears that out. But history also includes episodes of aggression; even if the wounds are less deep, they too leave scars.
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