My Mother and Her Ukrainian Neighbors
Tens of thousands of Poles in Eastern Poland were killed between 1943 and 1944 by Ukrainian Nationalists working with the Germans. July 11 was the day of the worst killing, a day when the Ukrainian Nationalists attacked 100 or so villages. That was seventy-six years ago.
Much of my mother’s family was killed during this period by her Ukrainian neighbors. Her mother was murdered, her sister was raped and killed, her sister's baby kicked to death. My mother, a girl of 19 at the time, was able to survive by breaking through a window and running into a forest to hide. She was found a couple days later by German soldiers. They put my mother and a lot of the surviving Poles from her village in boxcars and shipped them to slave labor camps in Germany. She spent the next 2 years in those camps. After the war she was afraid to go back to her village.
She was afraid that what happened to her brother who survived the war would happen to her. When the war ended, he went back on a United Nations sponsored train to that section of Poland that had been taken over by the Russians and made a part of the Ukraine, and when he got off the train, there were Russian soldiers there who arrested him and put him on another train and sent him to a prison camp in Siberia. He died there.
My mom and my dad made a trip to Poland in 1988. They went back to her village to see if they could find the graves of her mom and sister and the sister's baby. There were no graves. The men who did the killing didn't take the time to dig graves and put up crosses or markers. They probably just threw the Polish dead into a pit and shoveled dirt over them
During that trip, my mom actually made it to her old house, the one where the killing took place. She knocked on the door and when someone answered her knocking, she introduced herself and told them that she had lived in this house when she was a girl, before the killings.
The person who answered the door, a Ukrainian fellow about my mom's age, said that he had been living in the house all his life and he didn't know her and didn't know what she was talking about.
My mom left and never went back.
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This is my latest column for the Dziennik Zwiazkowy, the oldest Polish newspaper in America.
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