Page 289 - Ciancia, On Civilization's Edge

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The advent of war turned life in Volhynia upside down. Immediately after the Soviet invasion in

mid-September, the new rulers promoted people from the bottom rungs of the prewar social

hierarchy to positions of local power and allowed Ukrainian-speaking populations to carry out

1
attacks on Polish military settlers, state employees, and KOP border guards. These policies were
followed by waves of mass deportations of Polish (although by no means only Polish) men, women,

and children to inhospitable areas deep in the interior of the Soviet Union. The violence only

intensified. After the Nazi invasion in 1941, Volhynia became a significant site of the Holocaust and,

by early 1943, the German occupation regime had orchestrated the killing of almost all of the

region’s prewar Jewish population. Encouraged by the Nazi occupiers, some local inhabitants

participated in initial pogroms against Jews—the deadliest in Krzemieniec (Ukrainian: Kremenets),

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where local people killed around 130 Jews. As the Holocaust progressed and became more
3
systematic, Ukrainian nationalist policemen also assisted the Germans in their tasks. With the Jews

murdered, Polish-Ukrainian violence took center stage. In 1943, the nationalist Ukrainian OUN-B

(Organization of Ukrainian Nationalist—Stepan Bandera faction) and the UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent

Army), with the help of local peasants, began to target Polish-speaking villagers in Volhynia, thus

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initiating a cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals. Postwar testimonies indicated the intimate nature

of this violence. Ukrainian insurgents killed Polish children by throwing them against walls and

1 See Jan T. Gross, Revolution from Abroad: The Soviet Conquest of Poland’s Western Ukraine and Western
Belorussia (Princeton, 2002), as well as the depositions on Volhynia, collected in Irena Grudzińska-Gross and Jan
Tomasz Gross (eds.), War Through Children’s Eyes: The Soviet Occupation of Poland and the Deportations, 1939-
1941 (Stanford, 1981).
2 Timothy Snyder, “The Life and Death of Western Volhynian Jewry,” particularly 91.
3 Shmuel Spector, The Holocaust of Volhynian Jews, 1941-1944, translated by Jerzy Michalowicz (Jerusalem,
1990).
4 See Timothy Snyder, “‘To Resolve the Ukrainian Problem Once and for All’: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukrainians
in Poland, 1943-1947,” Journal of Cold War Studies 1, no. 2 (1999): 86-120.

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