Ukraine to begin search and exhumation in Poland at suspected mass grave of WWII soldiers

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Poland has granted Ukraine permission to next week begin search and exhumation work at the suspected site of a mass grave of members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), a partisan formation that fought during and after World War Two.

The development is the latest product of a diplomatic breakthrough announced early this year that saw Ukraine end a ban on the exhumation on its territory of ethnic Poles massacred by the UPA during the war. The historical episode has long caused tension between two otherwise close allies.

At a press conference in Kyiv this week, Ukrainian deputy culture minister Andrii Nadzhos announced that a Ukrainian research team would on 30 September begin work in the village of Jureczkowa in southeast Poland (pictured above), around 3 kilometres (1.9 miles) from the border with Ukraine.

“This is a significant step closer to one another for two friendly countries that have a common border and a common goal in this war – victory over the aggressor state,” said Nadzhos, referring to his country’s ongoing war with Russia.

“Ukrainians who have been in Polish soil for a long time also need respect and reburial,” he added, noting that Poland had until now been refusing to issue permits for such exhumations to take place.

But last year’s agreement between the two countries to mutually allow exhumations marks a “new stage of Ukrainian-Polish relations in the field of historical memory”, said the deputy minister.

Nadzhos noted that Poland had supplied Ukraine with 13 potential sites for exhumation work on Ukrainian territory, and that Kyiv has already given permission for digs to take place at two of them.

One is the former village of Puzhnyky, or Puźniki in Polish, whose inhabitants were massacred in 1945 by Ukrainian nationalists; the other is a site in Lviv where, in 1939, when the city was known as Lwów and was part of Poland, Polish soldiers died while defending it from the Nazi German and Soviet invasions.

In Puzhnyky, the remains of at least 42 people have already been found. Earlier this month, they were reburied in a funeral ceremony attended by the Polish and Ukrainian culture ministers.

The expedition to Jureczkowa, which will be funded by Ukraine, is now the first time Poland has granted permission for exhumations under the recent agreement. 

Oleksandr Alfiorov, the head of the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory (UINM), speaking alongside Nadzhos, said that the village likely contains a mass grave of UPA fighters who were killed resisting the forced deportation of Ukrainians from the area at the end of World War Two.

In 1947, Poland’s newly installed communist authorities, in cooperation with the Soviets, forcibly resettled around 140,000 civilians – mostly Ukrainians – living in southeast Poland. They were moved to former German territories in the north and west that had been granted to Poland at the end of the war.

The action, known as Operation Vistula, was part of efforts to suppress the UPA, which had been fighting against the Soviet authorities. At the same time as the communist government carried out its operation in Poland, the Soviets conducted similar deportations in western Ukraine.

Nadzhos says that Ukraine has identified a section of land in a forest in Jureczkowa as the possible location of the grave, which they believe contains the remains of around 20 UPA soldiers. 

The site is marked with an old stone cross, but “it is unclear whether a mass grave is located there”, said the minister, quoted by the Polish Press Agency (PAP).

Given the UPA’s role in the massacre of ethnic Poles during the war, burial sites linked to the group in Poland have often drawn controversy. Earlier this year, Poland and Ukraine jointly condemned the vandalism of a memorial in Poland to UPA soldiers who died fighting the Soviets.

During the so-called Volhynia massacres, which took place between 1943 and 1945, the UPA and its supporters killed around 100,000 ethnic Poles, mostly women and children. Among the victims were an estimated 14 people in Jureczkowa itself.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Main image credit: Henryk Bielamowicz/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY-SA 4.0)

Daniel Tilles

Daniel Tilles is editor-in-chief of Notes from Poland. He has written on Polish affairs for a wide range of publications, including Foreign Policy, POLITICO Europe, EUobserver and Dziennik Gazeta Prawna.