My Great Grandfather

He was on his knees, my great grandfather, when they shot him. It was the Autumn of 1943, early in the morning. He was in the kitchen of his watermill (in Andruszówka,Volhynia), on the floor saying his prayers.

Antoszka, an eleven-year old Ukrainian girl, had just finished milking the cow. She put the milk jug on the table and was turning to leave, when three men entered. They were Ukrainians from the neighbouring village of Sadki. They were polite and inquired after my great grandfather’s health. Then they asked him who the little girl was. Just a neighbour’s daughter who has come to bring the milk, he informed them. The strangers told the little girl to run off home. They would pay her father a visit later, they added.

And so she skipped away. She had barely left the house when she heard three distinct gun shots. And knew immediately what had happened.

Antoszka Cymbaluk

Watching from a safe distance, she saw the men take everything of value they could carry out of the house: tables, chairs, pictures, cushions etc., and load it all onto a waiting horse cart. They even took the cow. One of them laughed as he tried on a woman's fur coat he had found among the booty. Then they drove away out of the village.

The three men were members of the OUN-UPA, a Ukrainian Nationalist organization whose members are today considered heroes in Ukraine. In major cities you will find statues and monuments to them, all of them festooned with flowers and hung with flags. These three particular heroes had helped "liberate" the Ukraine by shooting an eighty-year-old man at his prayers together with his middle-aged disabled niece (whose name was Dominka). For the simple reason that they were Poles. And these men were Ukrainians.

A local blacksmith’s son, Andrei, later recovered the two bodies and carried them to the cemetery where he erected a wooden cross to their memory. It is still there today, among the long grass. A rough, simple thing at the edge of the graveyard covered in lichen and riddled with woodworm. Over this cross I shed many, many tears.

The same three Ukrainian heroes returned later that day to little Antoszka’s house and hanged her father, Joachim Cymbaluk. He was Ukrainian. But they hanged him all the same.

Andrei

Today, Antoszka and Andrei both continue to live in the village. They are old and fragile but are still able to remember the events of those terrible years and give details about the shooting of my great grandfather. He was a good man, they kept repeating to me, a good man who should not have been killed. Antoszka  related stories about how he had shared everything he had with his neighbours. A religious man whom everyone in the village had liked.

There are no Poles in Andruszówka today. All the inhabitants are Ukrainian. And the rich, fertile land of Volhynia, together with the graves of millions of its Poles, is part of  the Ukraine. Just as the three men from Sadki had intended it.

Note: 

According to historians, hundreds of thousands of Poles were murdered in the province of Volhynia during the years 1943-44 as a result of the operations of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army [UPA]. The ethnic cleansing took place in the rural countryside against unarmed Polish citizens: mostly old men, women and children. The victims' bodies were often cruelly mutilated and openly displayed in order to encourage remaining Poles to flee. Norman Davies in "No Simple Victory" gives a short, but shocking description of the massacres.

 "The Jews of the region had already been killed by the Nazis. So in 1943-44 the wrath of the UPA fell on the helpless Poles (...) Villages were torched. Roman Catholic priests were axed or crucified. Churches were burned with all their parishioners. Isolated farms were attacked by gangs carrying pitchforks and kitchen knives. Throats were cut. Pregnant women were bayoneted. Children were cut in two. Men were ambushed in the field and led away. The perpetrators could not determine the province's future. But at least they could determine that it would be a future without Poles. They killed any number between 200,000 and half a million".

To this day, no-one has ever been brought to justice for these crimes.

© Ryszard Antolak