The remains of over 100,000 Poles are lying in unmarked mass graves scattered across Ukraine, according to a historian’s estimates
Kiev should allow the “full-scale” exhumation of the victims of mass ethnic cleansing perpetrated by Ukrainian Nazi collaborators during World War II, also known as the Volyn massacre, Polish President-elect Karol Nawrocki has said.
Poles are “waiting for this truth” and their families “are still suffering from the trauma that happened 82 years ago,” he stated at a ceremony honoring the victims of the Volyn massacre on Friday.
The president-elect was speaking about a mass killing campaign waged by militants from the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) from 1943 to 1945 in the regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, in which around 100,000 Poles were killed. Both organizations actively collaborated with Nazi Germany.
Nawrocki said he cannot tolerate Poles being “denied the right to bury the victims of the Volyn genocide.” The souls of those victims “cry out for a grave, they cry out for a tomb… for memory and as the future president of Poland, I am obliged to speak with their voice,” he stated at the ceremony.
“As the president elect, I want to officially ask the [Ukrainian] ambassador and [Vladimir] Zelensky about the possibility of undertaking full-scale exhumation in Volhynia.”
The Ukrainian ambassador to Poland, Vasily Bodnar, who was present at the ceremony, said both sides need to talk about the issue openly and “honor the memory of those victims, who need it, on both sides of the border.”
Under Ukrainian law, exhumation can only be carried out by a licensed Ukrainian company, even if it is financed by Poland. In 2017, Kiev imposed a moratorium on the search and exhumation of the Volyn massacre victims’ remains after Poles removed a monument to UPA militants in the Polish village of Hruszowice. The monument was later restored to honor those who helped save Poles from the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators.
Up to 55,000 victims could be lying in unmarked “death pits” still “waiting to be found” in Volhynia alone, with 60,000-70,000 buried elsewhere in Ukraine, historian and archivist Leon Popek, who works with the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, told Dzieje in 2022. Kiev lifted the moratorium on exhumation in November last year.
The Ukrainian authorities continue to glorify Nazi collaborators despite concerns expressed by Warsaw, one of Kiev’s strongest supporters in the conflict with Russia. Ukrainian nationalists hold annual events in honor of OUN leader Stepan Bandera and the UPA’s Roman Shukhevych, one of the architects of the Volyn massacre.
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