Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (39 page)

As a result of this process, however, the areas of Europe where the Jews had once lived were irrevocably changed. Poland in particular was almost unrecognizable from the cultural and ethnic melting pot it had been before the war. To a lesser extent, the same was true of the whole of eastern Europe.

By 1948 much of the region had become, even more than in Hitler’s time,
Judenfrei.

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The Ethnic Cleansing of Ukraine and Poland

The Jews were not the only people to be chased out of their home towns in the aftermath of the war. Nor were they the only ones to suffer violence from mobs, policemen and armed militias. If the survivors of the Holocaust were correct to insist that they had been singled out during the war, this was no longer the case after the war was over. Jews were certainly mistreated, as I have shown, but after the liberation the true focus of nationalist violence now fell on other minorities.

One need only compare the events at Kielce with what happened in other parts of Poland that same year. At the end of January 1946, soldiers from the Polish 34th Infantry Regiment under Colonel Stanislav Pluto surrounded the village of Zawadka Morochowska (or ‘Zavadka Morochivska’ in Ukrainian), near Sanok in south-east Poland. The village was inhabited entirely by ethnic Ukrainians, and it was their ethnicity that was the sole reason for the events that took place there. According to eyewitnesses, the arrival of the army heralded a massacre that was every bit as bloody as anything that had happened during the war:

They came to the village at dawn. All the men began to run to the woods, and those who remained attempted to hide in the attics and cellars but to no avail. The Polish soldiers were looking everywhere so that not a single place was left unsearched. Whenever they captured a man, he was killed instantly; where they could not find a man, they beat the women and children … My father was hidden in the attic and the Poles ordered my mother to climb up the ladder to search for him. These orders were accompanied by severe rifle-butt blows. When mother started to climb, the ladder suddenly broke and she fell down, breaking her elbow. Five Poles began to beat her again with rifle-butts and when she could not lift herself, they kicked her with their heavy boots. I ran to her with my four-year-old daughter and wanted to shield her, but the soldiers began to beat me and my child. I soon fell unconscious and awoke to find my mother and child killed and the entire village afire!
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When Ukrainian partisans arrived in the area the next day they discovered a scene of utter devastation: ‘nothing but smouldering ruins and a few moving shadows that looked more like ghosts than human beings’.
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Apart from looting the village comprehensively, and stealing most of the livestock, Polish soldiers had killed dozens of the villagers, most of them women and children. Worse than the fact of their murders was the manner in which they were committed. Many were beaten to death, disembowelled, or set on fire. Some women had their breasts sliced off while others had their eyes gouged out or their noses and tongues removed. According to one of the Polish soldiers who took part in the massacre, ‘there were some among us who were enjoying this butchery’.
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Most of the historical sources for this massacre come from the Ukrainian side, which had a vested interest in portraying Polish brutality, but even allowing for a certain degree of embellishment it was an undeniably horrific event. Neither did it end there. Two months later the army returned to Zawadka Morochowska and instructed all the surviving inhabitants of the village to gather their things and cross the border into Soviet Ukraine. All the remaining buildings apart from the school and the church were torched and, as a warning of what awaited the villagers if they stayed, a group of eleven men were shot. Finally, in April, after several more villagers had been killed, the church and the school were also destroyed, and the entire population was rounded up and forcibly expelled from the country. During the course of these operations some fifty-six people had been murdered, and many others horribly wounded. The village was all but wiped from the map.
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The difference between the massacres at Zawadka Morochowska and the pogrom in Kielce is that the former were carried out by the army, rather than by an unruly mob. The harassment and murder of Jews in Poland was a popular phenomenon inspired by widespread anti-Semitism. It was a consequence not of government action, but of government inaction: anti-Semites felt free to attack Jews because they were confident that they would not be punished for doing so. In the event, several of the perpetrators of the Kielce pogrom were tried and even executed for their crimes. The massacre of Ukrainian speakers at Zawadka Morochowska, by contrast, followed on directly from official government policy. The army had been sent to south-east Poland specifically to get rid of the Ukrainian population there. Unlike the Jews, who were merely ‘encouraged’ to flee, Ukrainians were deliberately chased out – and when they refused to go, were killed or forcibly removed. If, as at Zawadka Morochowska, the army was somewhat over-zealous in its actions, it was not, generally speaking, sanctioned for them. The most important thing, from the government’s point of view, was that they were successful.

Zawadka Morochowska was just one event in thousands. The persecution and expulsion of ethnic minorities occurred throughout Europe, especially in central and eastern parts of the continent. But events in Poland were particularly important – partly because this was the country where the most comprehensive ethnic cleansing took place, but also because the Polish/Ukrainian problem had such huge consequences for the rest of Europe. It was the nationalist tensions unleashed here that finally brought the Soviets round to the idea of harnessing nationalism for their own ends – not only in Poland but in the whole of the Eastern Bloc. And it was the mutual expulsion of Poles and Ukrainians that would provide the template for ethnic cleansing throughout the continent.
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However, before one can truly understand events in villages like Zawadka Morochowska, it is necessary to go right back to the beginning. As many historians have pointed out, the ethnic cleansing of Poland did not occur in isolation, but in the aftermath of the greatest war of all time. Poles did not remove Ukrainians simply for the sake of it: it was only the huge events of the war that made such a radical move either desirable or possible.
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The Origins of Polish/Ukrainian Ethnic Violence

The borderlands of eastern Poland were invaded not once, but three times during the war: first by the Soviets, then by the Nazis, and finally by the Soviets again. The different ethnic communities that lived in this richly diverse area reacted to each invasion in different ways. Most of the Polish population resisted the Nazis and the Soviets alike, in the hope that Poland might somehow be able to return to its prewar status quo. The Ukrainian population, by contrast, was more divided. Almost all of them feared and hated the Russians because of the brutal way that they had ruled the Soviet part of Ukraine during the 1930s; but many welcomed the Germans, at least at first, as liberators. The Jews, meanwhile, did not know where to place their faith. Many hoped that the Soviet invasion might deliver them from Polish and Ukrainian anti-Semitism; later, some seemed to hope that the German invasion would save them from Soviet persecution. By the time the region was invaded for a third time at the end of 1943, the handful of Jews who still survived had lost faith in all outsiders, whatever their nationality.

Both the Soviets and the Nazis played these different ethnic groups off against one other. The Nazis especially sought to harness the nationalist sentiments of the Ukrainians, in order to suppress the rest of the population. Even before the invasion they had made contacts with Ukrainian far-right political groups, particularly the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). This was an illegal ultra-nationalist movement, akin to the Ustashas in Croatia or the Iron Guard in Romania, which embraced the use of violence to achieve its aims. The Nazis dangled the promise of Ukrainian independence before them in return for their collaboration. While the most powerful factions of this shady organization never trusted German intentions, other factions enthusiastically allowed themselves to be exploited – partly because they thought the Nazis would give them what they wanted, but also because they shared some of the Nazis’ darker intentions.
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The most shameful collaboration between the OUN and the Nazis was the way in which they worked together to eradicate the Jews. The OUN had for years been speaking of ethnic purity, of a ‘Ukraine for Ukrainians’, and of the benefits of revolutionary terror. The implementation of the Final Solution, particularly in the region of Volhynia, showed followers of the OUN that the slogans were not mere rhetoric. These massacres, which occurred in full view of the general population, would provide the template for all future ethnic cleansing in the region. What once would have been unthinkable now became eminently possible.

During the course of 1941 and 1942, about 12,000 Ukrainian policemen became intimately acquainted with the tactics the Nazis used to kill over 200,000 Volhynian Jews. As collaborators, they were involved in the planning of operations. They gave assurances to local populations in order to lull them into a false sense of security. They were employed in the sudden encirclement of Jewish villages and settlements, and even took part in some of the killing itself. The slaughter of the Jews was the perfect apprenticeship for what would come later.
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At the end of 1942, when it first became obvious that German power was waning, these same Ukrainian policemen deserted their posts en masse. They took their weapons and went to join the OUN’s new, armed partisan group, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrains‘ka Povstans’ka Armiia, or UPA). They used the skills they had learned under the Nazis to continue their campaign against their ethnic enemies – not only the region’s few remaining Jews, but this time also its large Polish population.

The massacre of Poles began in the same areas where Ukrainian policemen had been most intimately connected to the massacre of Jews: Volhynia. There were many reasons why the ethnic cleansing began here – the area contained extensive forests and marshes, and so was particularly suited to partisan activity, and the isolated Polish communities were much less well defended than in other areas – but the previous actions against the Jews certainly played their part. The taboos had already been broken: young Ukrainian men here had become both trained to kill, and inured to mass killing. When they embarked on their cleansing of the region at the end of 1942 they were therefore relatively free of both external and personal constraints.

In the frenzied massacres that were to take place over the next few years, Polish communities were murdered in their entirety, from old men and women right down to newborn babies. The village of Oleksi
ta, for example, was torched during the Easter of 1943 in an operation deliberately designed to create terror amongst the Polish population.
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In Wysocko Wyzne thirteen children were locked in a Catholic church which was then set on fire.
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In Wola Ostrowiecka the entire Polish community was rounded up in the local schoolyard. While the men were taken off five at a time to be hacked to death in a nearby barn, the women and children were driven into the school, which was blown up with hand grenades and then set on fire.
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In the village of Podkamie
a campaign of night-time raids on remote farmsteads and outlying hamlets drove the villagers out of their homes. At first they took to sleeping in the fields in order to avoid surprise attacks, but eventually they sought sanctuary in the local monastery. On 12 March 1944, however, the monastery itself was besieged by UPA troops. Apart from a few people who managed to escape by jumping out of windows, the entire community – including the monks – was slaughtered. Their bodies were hung by the legs around the monastery as a warning to the rest of the Polish community of what lay in store for them if they stayed in the region.
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