The Transfer of Populations between Poland and Ukraine

The forced exchange of populations between Ukraine and Poland after the war, which followed a decree issued on 9 September 1944, has been the sub­ject of numerous writings and narratives in Ukraine.

One of the most detailed of the academic articles to appear in Ukraine to date about the population transfers appeared in the main historical journal under the authorship of S. A. Makarchuk, though his focus is limited to the resettlement of Poles from Western Ukraine. Nevertheless, as an introductory article, it does illuminate some basic details of the mutual evacuations— particularly the relationship of this massive undertaking to wartime opera­tions, and describes the expectations of the Poles for the restoration of the pre-September 1939 borders between their country and the Soviet Union/ Ukraine. He states that at first glance the theme has been thoroughly re­searched and certain facts are well-known. The decision on mutual resettle­ment took place in fulfillment of the agreement between the government of the Soviet Union and the Polish Committee of National Liberation, signed in Lublin on 9 September 1944. The agreement was signed by N. S. Khrushchev on behalf of the USSR and Edward Osubka-Morawski for the Poles. It stipu­lated that the mutual resettlement had to be carried out in a very brief period of time, namely from 15 October 1944 to 1 February 1945. The resettlement officially was stipulated as “voluntary.” The Agreement specified that settlers who were moved into their countries of birth should receive the sum of R5,000 or the equivalent in Polish zloty. Each evacuee would be permitted to take food, agricultural equipment, up to two tons of property and up to R1,000, and peasants could also take along their livestock. In theory they were also to be offered compensation for the loss of their residential and farm build­ings. In the Polish-inhabited regions of Ukraine a register was made of the Pol­ish population that had to be evacuated, as well as a list of those who had “vol­unteered” to move.

Makarchuk states that the most serious problem encountered in removing the Poles was the time factor. By the end of 1944 it was already clear that the completion of the resettlement by 1 February 1945 was impossible. By the start of the New Year, the removals were just beginning. Therefore the dead­line was extended to 1 May 1945. When this deadline was also deemed unre­alistic, Khrushchev turned to Osubka-Morawski, the designated Prime Minis­ter of the Provisional Government of Poland, with a proposal to change the date to 15 January 1946, and the agreement was officially fulfilled only in July 1946. Makarchuk cites figures from several sources—Jerzy Kochanowski on the Polish side; Serhii Tkachov and Volodymyr Serhiichuk on the Ukrain­ian—to provide a total of between 787,524 and 789,982 Poles evacuated from Western Ukraine to Poland in 1944-46, with the largest numbers moved from Ternopil' (233,617) and L'viv (218,711). Though the vast majority of these residents were ethnic Poles, researchers also concur that their numbers in­cluded more than 30,000 Jews. For the purposes of this study, the key issues are the political expectations of the Polish authorities for the future of the ter­ritory of Western Ukraine, and the attitudes of the Soviet government and Ukrainian activists. Makarchuk remarks that the Poles of this region were heavily influenced by broadcasts from the London government, which led them to believe that after the defeat of the Axis powers, the Polish state would be restored according to its pre-September 1939 borders. In response, the Pol­ish underground movement in L'viv planned to establish its authority once the Germans retreated and before the arrival of the Red Army.

The situation did not become clearer for some time, Makarchuk explains. Representatives of the London government continued to feed the rumors that Poland would regain Western Ukraine so that Polish officials had a negative attitude toward the enforced evacuation of Polish citizens. Many residents had lived in the region for generations and considered it their native land so there was also a powerful psychological tie. Poles daubed slogans such as “Long live Poland!” and “Death to the Bolsheviks!” on buildings, and in Janu­ary 1945 hundreds were arrested. With each day Poles became more pessimis­tic about their situation. Archives contain information and memoirs of those arrested during the evacuation, with accounts that in the summer of 1945 they were not permitted to collect the harvest grown in their fields and were forced to travel to Poland without adequate food supplies for the journey. Overall, however, the conditions for the population moving to Poland were better than for Ukrainians coming in the opposite direction. The latter were subjected to bandit attacks, theft and murder.²³ Whereas the Poles of Western Ukraine were hoping for the return of Polish rule, and tried to mount a preemptive fait accompli, the situation in the regions across the Polish border was even more complex. The issue was exacerbated by the presence of the forces of the UPA, and the Soviet and Polish governments were in agreement that the insurgents needed to be eliminated during the operation to remove the Ukrainian inhabi­tants.

An account in the militantly nationalist newspaper Za vil’nu Ukrainu from 1994 interviews Omelya Lyshchyshyna, a former resident of the village Tysovo near Przemysl. The UPA bases were located nearby. In August 1945 a Polish army unit entered the village, armed with machine guns and some field guns. They carried out registration of the villagers for deportation to “Stalin's paradise.” The UPA discovered these plans and attacked the Polish garrison on 1 September. Over 250 houses were burned during a battle that lasted throughout the night. In the morning UPA troops and the villagers began re­treating to the forest. The Poles loaded up five trucks with the dead and wounded, while the UPA retreated to its bases. Lyshchyshyna's family hid in the forest but was discovered by three Polish soldiers at 10am. The family was beaten, after which the Poles decided to shoot them and take their goods. They were saved by a Polish major who supplied them with travel documents to the town where the assembly point was located.²⁴ Another article examines the tragedy of the Ukrainians in the region of the San River. The author de­scribes the events as a deliberate act of genocide against them.

In 1999, the same newspaper featured a lengthy article by Oleksandra Potichna about the Polish destruction of the Ukrainian village Pavlokoma in the spring of 1945. The village is located on the San River and there were a number of Polish settlements nearby. The author states that the antagonism between Ukrainians and Poles in this area went back to the end of the First World War, when a local Polish aristocrat was forced to distribute his estates among peasants of neighboring villages. Most of this land went to Polish farmers. During the war, writes Potichna, organized Polish military units as­sassinated leaders of the Ukrainian community in Pavlokoma. On 14 October, Poles killed the director of the Ukrainian school, Mykola Levyts'kyi. In 1943­44, they accounted for the deaths of several other prominent community members. Potichna, like the previous writers, again brings up the concept of genocide to explain such actions. After the retreat of the Germans, Polish bands, supported by the organs of authority, could carry out the genocide of entire communities, and such was the fate of Pavlokoma in March 1945. Once the Germans had retreated, Poles took command of community life in the village. They began encroaching on the rights of Ukrainians, who were, for example, forbidden to bury their dead at a newly constructed cemetery. Polish vigilantes began to harass Ukrainians for any manifestations of nationalist sentiment, which might include keeping portraits of Hetman Bohdan Khmel­nytsky or the national bard Taras Shevchenko. These attacks spread from the neighboring Polish villages into the isolated Ukrainian settlement. As long as the Soviet garrison was stationed at Pavlokoma, the Polish bands refrained from making an all-out attack. At one point in early 1945, Potichna writes, a military unit composed of sixty men in Soviet uniforms, who had evidently arrived to replace the previous garrison, arrested a number of Polish residents. The Poles disseminated a rumor that these military troops were in reality dis­guised members of the UPA, who had executed the arrested Poles in the nearby forests. The mothers of the victims arrived in Pavlokoma a few days later, demanding that the Ukrainian priest hand over the bodies of the dead Poles. The Ukrainians had no knowledge of the location of the corpses.²⁶

Following this incident, Potichna continues, the Poles formed bands from the villages of Syliongowa, Bartkowka, Silnykja, Bacjoz, and others, and at­tacked Pavlokoma. Some Ukrainians managed to hide, but others were mur­dered. The narrative makes it evident that the victims were well-known to the attackers. One woman managed to remain alive, along with her grandson, by bribing the band members. A month later, in March 1945, the bands returned and drove the Ukrainians into the church while beating them in the process. Once inside the church, they divided the victims: pregnant women and chil­dren under four were left inside, while others were taken to the cemetery, shot, and dumped in a pit. The priest was included among the victims. Potichna, the author, managed to hide in the stable under the hay. Her four sons who were hiding at their grandmother’s house were caught and killed at the cemetery. The Poles threatened to burn the stable and so they were forced to reveal their hiding place. The Poles buried the dead and then cleaned blood from the church. She cites several individual Poles as notorious for their cru­elty and concludes by stating that the survivors of this massacre were de­ported to Western Poland, and from there Potichna immigrated to Canada in 1950.²⁷ The story is significant in that it contains the basic ingredients of all narratives in this conflict: historical roots for the hatred usually dating back to the interwar period when Ukrainians fell under Polish rule; wanton and sense­less killing of innocent people with an unusual degree of cruelty; and accusa­tions of genocide—the more rational explanation of “ethnic cleansing” only appears in later narratives. There is very little difference incidentally between Polish descriptions of the Volhynia massacres, and Ukrainian accounts of maltreatment at the hands of the Poles as the war came to an end. The third element in the prewar equation—the Jewish population that made up a large portion, if not a majority, in many of the towns and cities in interwar Po­land—was no longer present in large numbers having fallen victim to the war­time occupation regime.

The situation that developed by 1947 has been analyzed by two Ukrainian historians, who manage to provide a broader context for these events. V. Danylenko and V. Baran point out that in this year the CC CPU made the decision to introduce destruction battalions of up to 35,000 people to deal with the nationalist insurgents. At the beginning of 1947, this conflict came under the exclusive competence of the security organs, and almost 2,000 bat­talions were placed under the command of the Ukrainian MGB. This restruc­turing occurred while the UPA operated in the border regions—Lem- kivshchyna, Nadysannya, and Kholmshchyna. The governments of the Soviet Union and Poland carried out the policy of resettlement by force and it re­sulted in numerous deaths. On the territory of Poland, almost 126,000 Ukrainian families were included on the register, and 122,500 (482,109 peo­ple) were actually removed or 96.8% of the designated population. They were deported to different parts of Ukraine, with a majority—322,868—dispatched to the western regions. At the time of this resettlement, in several areas of Pol­ish territory, including Liskiv, Peremyszl, Yaroslav, Lyubachiv, Tomashiv, and Hrubeshiv districts, formations of the Polish Home Army operated actively against the UPA. As a result of its attacks, over 4,600 Ukrainians were killed, over 2,200 families suffered, and several hundred villages were burned, write the authors, adding that the suffering also encompassed the Polish population. The period April-July 1947 marked the concluding stage of the mutual depor­tations, which was given the name “Vistula.” During these three months there occurred the removal of Ukrainians and members of mixed Ukrainian-Polish families from the lands of south-eastern Poland. They were resettled in the western and northern regions of Poland because the motivation behind this operation was to destroy the UPA groups. The authors cite I. Bilas that the chief goal of the Polish side was the “liquidation” of the Ukrainian minority and the assimilation of the migrants into Polish society. About 140,600 peo­ple were resettled in this action. Simultaneously, the Poles were moved out of the western regions of Ukraine, including the vast majority of the 797,907 people (256,428 families) who were listed on the official register on 1 Octo­ber 1945.²⁸

During these tumultuous upheavals, Danylenko and Baran point out, the Stalin regime also carried out a mass deportation of Ukrainians from Western Ukraine. Tens of thousands of “OUNites” were included in a special resettle­ment, and 75% of those removed were women and children. The Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Ukrainian SSR established its operational headquarters in L'viv, and the largest number of people were deported from L'viv, Dro­hobych, and Ternopil' oblasts, with their property transferred to the state or­gans. Altogether, the authors report, 26,300 families with 77,791 people were moved out of the western regions. The militia also blockaded an extended re­gion in which the armed underground operated. Both the NKVD and MVD of Ukraine created several joint-operation groups for the elimination of the OUN Central Provid and regional leaders. Four divisions of the MVD were directed against the insurgents in 1948-49 under the leadership of Ukrainian Minister for State Security, M. Koval'chuk. During these operations, which reportedly ended with the death of UPA leader Shukhevych in the spring of 1950, some 171,500 members of the OUN were deported in special operations, with re­pressive measures taken against their family members. Those resettled ended up in various regions of Siberia and autonomous republics of Russia, as well as Kazakhstan.²⁹ The two authors offer a more polished and academic account of the events surrounding the mass exchange of populations, and they do not lean particularly to the view that crimes were carried out by one side over the other. Rather they suggest that the most severe measures were conducted by the Soviet authorities, with Ukrainians and Poles essentially in the role of vic­tims. Another more recent account adopts this same viewpoint, namely that the repercussions of the fratricidal war between Poles and Ukrainians was of benefit only to the Russians and the Germans. This account suggests that some Ukrainians actually solicited Soviet help for relocation from Poland be­cause of a constant fear of Polish attacks, and that Ukrainian life in this cor­ner of Poland, despite a long 500-year history, had already entered a stage of marked decline, with destroyed churches and dilapidated cemeteries. It cites one source that there were up to 12,000 Ukrainian victims in Eastern Poland during this period, and up to 90,000 Polish victims in the Ukrainian-Polish conflict overall.³⁰