Volhynia-1943 as a 'ticket' to the EU: will history become a condition for Ukraine's accession?

How many years have you been researching Ukrainian-Polish relations, including the topic of the Volhynia tragedy?

It's a long story. In 1998, my Polish colleagues and I made the film 'Heavy Brotherhood' about the Piłsudski Union and Petliura. The question we did not resolve: why they failed to restore Ukraine's independence in 1920. The director, Jerzy Lubach, also a historian, said: 'Bogusz, write an introduction to the problem.' In 2000, my first little book, 'Ukrainians – Poles: Who Is to Blame?', came out. Since then I have been working on the genesis of the events of 1920, but I brought the research up to the mid-20th century, because I realized everything is connected.

I refer to Daniel Beauvois, whose disciple I consider myself: the roots of the Volhynia tragedy should be sought in the terrible living conditions of the serfdom-based village in Right-Bank Ukraine in the first half of the 19th century. I tested this thesis, and much really hinges on it. This story stretches from the mid-19th century and ends with what we call the Volhynia tragedy, the Volhynian slaughter; in the Polish version I use 'Volhynian massacres'. The book is a summary of research: four essays reveal the logic of development on the Right Bank, including in Volhynia, and explain why such events happened in the 1940s.

In simple terms, about the social dimension: Ukrainians were poorer and had no land?

It is about the 'struggle for land,' Beauvois's formula, in two dimensions. As OUN members wrote in the 1940s, for a Volhynian peasant an independent Ukraine meant a piece of better land closer to the village. For nationalists it was the territory of the future Ukrainian state.

For Poles, it was about maintaining the Polish state of possession: from the second half of the 19th century, after the defeat of the January Uprising, until the demise of the landlords' Arcadia on the Right Bank, when peasants destroyed everything associated with the masters, the Lyakhs. And the interwar period, when the number of Polish settler-colonists in Volhynia grew and they were given better lands. Peasants saw the Polish state as a gentry state, and identified as 'gentry' the landowners, the colonists, and ordinary Polish peasants who supported the state.

The specificity of Volhynia was, unlike eastern Galicia, a very low national consciousness among the Ukrainian Orthodox population. In 1915, Centurion Dmytro Vitovsky came to agitate for the Legion of Ukrainian Sich Riflemen and heard words that may sound shocking now: 'It would be better if Russia returned. Then maybe there would be more land and vodka would be cheaper.'

Therefore, at the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox Church and the Union of the Russian People, known as the 'Black Hundred', had an all-encompassing influence in Volhynia. The center of Muscovophilism both then and now was the Pochaiv Lavra; the Black Hundred movement was led by its archimandrite Vitaly Maksymenko. So it is hard to speak of a Ukrainian movement in Volhynia before the outbreak of World War II.

Do Polish researchers take this into account?

Very rarely. There is Włodzimierz Mędrzecki, and Timothy Snyder, author of 'Bloodlands', but he is not a Polish historian. Snyder emphasized that the main problem of the Polish authorities in Volhynia in the interwar period was not Ukrainian nationalism, but communism and Bolshevik influences.

Mędrzecki wrote that Ukrainian peasants lumped all Poles, both masters and peasants, into the 'world of the masters', because they supported the Polish state. When the chance to end it came in 1943, the peasants killed everyone, both masters and neighbors, because they wanted to end a world where they were oppressed for their language and faith and deprived of land. Mędrzecki, in my view, rightly says: in 1943 they wanted to finish what they had begun in 1917–1918, destroying the nests of Polish aristocrats. Hence the hatred, rage, and cruelty toward Polish neighbors.

Polish Colonization and Revindication of Volhynia

Where did the Poles there come from?

These were territories of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; Poles had lived there for a long time, but compared with other governorates of the Russian Empire there were rather few of them. In 1921 the Volhynian Voivodeship was formed, and the local population did not want to be part of Poland; they informed Warsaw of this. The Volhynian peasant dreamed of the return of tsarist Russia, however paradoxical this may sound (this is a documented fact).

In the interwar period the Polish state carried out active colonization: officials, gendarmes, policemen, and military settlers came from central Poland, along with veterans of the Polish army, who were granted the better pieces of land, and civilian colonists who had priority in buying land. The Polish population doubled.

To this end a policy of revindication was pursued, the conversion of Orthodox to Roman Catholicism, often in brutal ways. In the village of Hrynky, the Border Protection Corps forced all peasants to convert to Roman Catholicism, from which they very quickly retreated, but a negative aftertaste remained. Once the Baptism of Rus' was spoken of as 'by fire and sword'; here neophytes were baptized at gunpoint and under the whips of Polish 'kopists'. As Maria Dąbrowska, companion of Stanisław Stempowski, a minister in Petliura's government, wrote, Poland would still pay a terrible price for this policy. This is what happened during World War II.

Could Ukrainians register as Poles for profit? 

Certainly. To obtain anything, even to break stones on the road, one had to transfer the birth record from the church to the Catholic church. I don't think this was widespread. Plus, there were descendants of the 'zagroda' gentry, who in the 19th century were turned into single-homestead peasants and were also pressed to convert to Roman Catholicism. Something succeeded, something did not, but the formal number of Poles in Volhynia doubled. This is evidence of bribery, not by the best methods.

Books in Polish: a dialogue that did not take place

Your books are also published in Polish. Why, who reads them, and where can one buy them in Poland?

'Published in Polish' is putting it mildly. My main books, the monograph 'Ukrainians and Poles in Dnipro Ukraine, Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in the 19th – First Half of the 20th Century' and 'From the Union of Lublin to the Volhynian Massacres', were written in Polish and then translated into Ukrainian. So I am doing the opposite.

Do you have Polish roots?

My father is from near Yaroslaw. In 1946 they were resettled from Nadsiannia; he settled near Berezhany. Before the resettlement he practically did not know Polish, but then he learned it so well that he corresponded with the priest in the village where he had once been a teacher and school principal, and with the former owner of the estate, a Polish count living in Sweden. The count wrote to him: 'Ma pan bardzo dobry styl.' But when my friend, Polish lawyer Jan Widacki, came with us, my father could not converse with him due to lack of practice.

I learned Polish at 40 on a scholarship in Warsaw: within two weeks I spoke it almost freely at a everyday level. In 1998 I had the first program 'Persona' on TVP3 Katowice.

But I write in Polish not for that reason. I thought: 'I will write in Polish so that Polish scholars and ordinary readers better understand the Ukrainian approach to this problem.' In 2013 the monograph came out, then two more editions and 'From the Union of Lublin to the Volhynian Massacres'. To my great surprise, Polish historians very often understand not only Ukrainian but also Polish poorly. What I try to convey to them they either ignore or pretend...

So there is no review from them, no dialogue?

A disgusting review appeared in the style of throwing mud at a fan. Now I'm writing a reply: it was written by an ignoramus who, in my impression, did not read the books and probably got an assignment. They accuse me of things I don't write. For example, that I invented the thesis of a spontaneous peasant uprising. But I write about the mass participation of Volhynian peasants in the anti-Polish action of the OUN-UPA, where the UPA, as the organizing force, played the leading role, but there were also numerous spontaneous peasant uprisings.

A Polish combatant of the 27th Volhynian AK Division writes about hundreds of thousands of peasants in anti-Polish actions, while Grzegorz Motyka claims there were 40-50 thousand (on what basis, he does not specify). How could the UPA, with 6-8 thousand fighters, carry out mass ethnic cleansing, when there were 7 thousand pro-communist Polish partisans and 20-30 thousand Soviet ones? So they could not stop it? This requires further research, above all discussion with Polish scholars, because you say one thing to them and they say another.

It is inspiring that my books sold in print runs of several thousand, above all in Poland, in Polish. A colleague from the Polish Academy of Sciences said: in their case books come out in runs of 250-300, because the rest don't sell, so several thousand, and moreover by a Ukrainian author, is a success. You can buy them at the Prus central bookshop in Warsaw on Krakowskie Przedmieście and at online bookshops.

For Ukrainians I held presentations, including at the Ukrainian House in Warsaw: the hall was packed, the books sold out. The most interesting event was in Wrocław, at the forum “Svoi” for and about Ukrainians abroad, organized by Ms. Khrystyna Podolian from Kherson. From morning till evening there were three hundred people, and among the speakers were me and Zhadan. Ms. Khrystyna said: “You haven't even started speaking, and a few dozen of your books have already been snapped up.” Mostly these were Ukrainian women and girls: they took them for themselves in Ukrainian, and for the men, Poles, in Polish.

How many books in Polish and how many presentations would I need to write and hold for them to hear the Ukrainian position?

Many people work at the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, and they have been researching the topic for 10 years longer. The figures for the dead change, but it is not historians who determine this number but politicians. When the Sejm adopted a resolution on genocide, citing 120,000, try going beyond these limits with Polish historians. And they say the problems are ours, because we are being controlled. This is not true.

The presence of Ukrainian literature on the Polish market is extremely meager. Poles immediately smeared Volodymyr Viatrovych's book “The Second Polish-Ukrainian War. 1942–1947” across the floor: five to seven devastating reviews, and they pushed it aside, because he is a “propagandist, not a historian but a politician.” My books are present there, but even several thousand sold does not guarantee success. Promotions, especially “Ukrainians and Poles,” added optimism. Now this optimism is gone.

Do you mean success in reconciliation?

No, I mean the Poles' understanding of our position and knowledge of historical truth. When they read the genesis: that in Volhynia before the outbreak of war there were practically no nationalist influences, that the UPA was not all-powerful, that there were very strong Soviet influences, what Kuznetsov did and why the Poles supported him in terrorist activity, no one tells them this. They have one concept: an all-powerful UPA and a defenseless Polish population. And how many Ukrainians were killed before the Bloody Sunday of 11 July 1943? They are not interested in the fact that there were attacks on Ukrainian villages, provocations by the Poles, that they were warned: “Don't do this,” and they kept doing it anyway.

Then they were polonizing not only Volhynia but also the Lviv region.

Here the processes were less intense, because the Polish population was quite large. Recall the war of 1918–1919 and the West Ukrainian People's Republic: in some counties Poles predominated. But in Volhynia there were few of them, so the policy of increase, revindication, and destruction of Ukrainian churches had one goal: strengthening the Polish position of possession. The question was how to change the national character of the Kresy so that the Polish population would decide the fate of these lands. These were not spontaneous colonization or migration, but a purposeful state policy.

“Who is to blame?”: an enchanted circle, the Soviet trace, and peasant cruelty

Do you assume at all that one can answer the question “who is to blame”?

A Polish poet wrote: “Moja wojna, twoja wojna, nasza, bracie, wielka wojna” (? this is a text by Agnieszka Osiecka from the song for the series “Four Tank-Men and a Dog”). Tadeusz Konwicki recalls the theory of the enchanted circle: first we were guilty, then a little they, then again we. The circle turns and provokes reverse reactions.

I am not a supporter of the view that the Poles were guilty and we were blameless. Not by chance, Yaroslav Dashkevych already wrote in 1994 that what happened in Volhynia in 1943 requires an unambiguous and severe condemnation from the Ukrainian side, despite all the causes, such as the anti-Ukrainian policy of the interwar governments. And since the 19th century the Black Hundreds, and later the Bolsheviks, deliberately fueled anti-Polish sentiment among the Orthodox of Volhynia. I refer to Zofia Kossak-Szczucka's book “Pożoga. Wspomnienie z Wołynia 1917–1919,” which interprets the mental characteristics of Volhynians. But the Poles are not without fault.

There is the concept of prewencyjno-odwetowe actions, that is, preventive retaliatory actions: no retaliation had yet occurred, but a preventive action already had, namely attacks on Ukrainian villages. This is recorded by Polish historians, but no one wants to talk about it. The position is unambiguous: everything was planned, organized and carried out by Ukrainian nationalists; the participation of the peasantry is rejected.

Documents sometimes provoke ironic laughter. Yurii Stelmashchuk “Rudyi,” under NKVD interrogation, signed with broken fingers a confession that with an 800-strong detachment, in three days in five districts, he had destroyed 15,000 Poles. At trial he said he had slandered himself: only 5,000. Polish historians willingly use this: “we are using SBU archives.” But these documents are not from the SBU, but from the NKVD.

Soviet influences in 1943–1944 were very serious. Maria Savchyn (“Marichka”) wrote about their scale. In 1944, as the front approached, the Polish underground noticed a split in the UPA: the pro-Soviet part went over to the Soviets, and the nationalists withdrew to the west.

Why were the Soviets interested? Because of the conflict with the Polish government in London from the winter of 1943: it declared that it would cooperate with the Soviets only if the borders of 1 September 1939 were recognized. The Kremlin replied: the Poles are imperialists, they do not allow Ukrainians and Belarusians to live in their states, we will defend them. And in August 1943 the Polish underground wrote in a report: the Soviets are most interested in the destruction of the Poles, because if there are no Poles, there will be no grounds to raise the question of borders.

Everything here is tangled: politics, the struggle for land, social questions. In 1943 Klym Savur signed a decree on land (as Lenin had signed one in 1917): all the land of Polish landowners, settlers, and colonists was transferred to the peasants. The social factor played a significant role. In Eastern Galicia, where national consciousness was much higher, this did not happen and such massacres did not occur, despite the accusations against the nationalists. Polish contemporaries assessed the Volhynian events as a result of the lack of Ukrainian influences: “Wołyń nieprzeorany ukraińską pracą polityczną zawsze był skłonny do anarchii.” As Polish historians write: no one kills more terribly than a peasant who holds nothing but a stick and sees a neighbor he hates.

Polish publicists write that one must resort to demonology to understand Volhynia. Good people, peasant cruelty is not an invention of 1943. Let us recall 1846, the “Rabacja,” the peasant uprising led by Jakub Szela in Western Galicia, provoked by the Austrian government against Polish noble revolutionaries. The peasants did not consider themselves Poles, but they regarded the insurgents as such. Jacek Kuroń recalls his grandfather's account of how in 1846 peasants placed a lord between two logs and slowly sawed him in half, because he was “good.” Goya painted how Spanish guerrillas flayed French soldiers and castrated them. Or the Balkans of the 1990s, Srebrenica. Peasant cruelty is a supranational, supratemporal phenomenon.

What should communication look like? Some historians propose condemning those who took part; the Poles say that the entire OUN-UPA are criminals.

There is a presumption of innocence. The Polish Institute of National Remembrance has hundreds of prosecutors. If you know that Colonel Vasyl Levkovych did this in Uhly, there is an evidence base – collect it; you should already have full files, and let the court convict. Accusing one another and generalizing is a road to nowhere; we will not reach mutual understanding.

Even Polish publicists from the right flank understand this: Ukrainians cannot renounce the OUN-UPA, because it is a symbol of the struggle for statehood. Ryszard Torzecki wrote: "I have held hundreds of conversations with combatants of the Home Army. And for them the UPA was not an army created to kill Poles. But to fight for an independent Ukrainian state."

Aren't we generalizing?

There are quite a lot of individual examples, hundreds and thousands of people who took part in the murders of civilians; a legal basis should be established for this, not generalizing.

Evidence, exhumations and unequal resources

Are you talking about Poles who should work on the topic this way?

If members of the UPA are accused of war crimes, evidence should be collected and they should be brought to court, even posthumously. But it's like in Uhly: Ms. Romanovska claims the grave exists, "two hours of excavator work"; they have been searching for a week and finding nothing. Maybe they will find it, I do not deny it. Likewise in Puzhnyky: they looked for a second burial and did not find it. Her testimony that in May 1943 there was such a frost that the swamps froze and the Poles fled, and that a child survived a week sucking the breasts of its dead mother, evokes an ironic smile: what frosts in mid-May? Ms. Romanovska strives to honor the memory of relatives, but these are memories without confirmation. These are emotions for the sake of sympathy and, worst of all, for the sake of political capital.

Are there names of whom Polish prosecutors propose to convict?

I don't remember how many; a few have been referred, but no case, it seems, has been brought to its conclusion, in particular because there is no cooperation between the national remembrance institutes. At present this is a competition over who shouts louder, as Vice-Marshal Zgorzelski from PSL says: Ukrainians torpedo exhumations; several have been carried out, but there are over 1000 requests, and it will be so for a hundred years. But we are giving permits for some 20-odd exhumations: how many years will you study them with limited capabilities?

How does this work – Poles work here, and we there?

We also have an interest. Poles have carried out, it seems, more than five exhumations in Ukraine: soldiers of 1939, Puzhnyky 1945, Volya Ostrowiecka and Ostrivky 1943, Huta Peniatska 1944, Uhly 1943, where they found nothing. We managed to search for the grave of UPA soldiers in Yurechkova. After many months we received permission for Laskiv: this autumn "Dolia" by Sviatoslav Sheremeta was supposed to study how many Ukrainian civilians are there. This is Zakerzonnia, retaliatory actions. It is hard to understand their meaning if it was not connected with Volhynia 1943.

By the way, two members of my family on my father's side died in spring 1945: they spent the whole war in forced labor in Wrocław, and they were killed on the approach to the village of Makovysko. My father, unlike many Poles, had a very Christian approach: "What claims can I have against contemporary Poles for events of 60–70 years ago?" Every nation is divided into good and evil people. It would be good if Poles realized this.

Ukrainians know little about the places where Ukrainians were destroyed. Sahryn is not heard of so often. Why?

Sahryn, Pavlokoma, Laskiv… You know what level of historical education we have. In Poland, in any kiosk there is a mass of historical literature, every week materials about Volhynia with horrifying pictures, and from the school bench this is hammered into Poles' heads.

Now many Ukrainian children attend Polish schools.

They are forced to see this, and what the reaction will be is unknown. And here, a dozen or so years ago, the minister of education wanted to eliminate the teaching of Ukrainian history in higher education institutions, and only protests stopped the reform. We have the journal "Local History"; I know of no other more popular publications on these pages.

Poles have far greater financial capabilities. When Viatrovych was director of the Ukrainian institute of national remembrance, he told me that he had 11 million hryvnias for all events, while the budget of the Polish one is over 2 billion.

The current President of Poland comes from their institute of national remembrance.

And the Ukrainian one still has no specialist on Poland. I called: "A group of Poles is going to Volhynia to consecrate an obelisk that is in fact illegal, and in a Polish village they will open a monument to a child killed on pitchforks, as a symbol of the Ukrainian coat of arms." They replied that they did not know. I asked: "Is there a specialist on Poland?" – "No." The Polish institute publishes more and more materials and already speaks of the polskość of the Kresy, that is, that these lands were not merely territory but Polish, settled by Poles.

In us there is practically no counter-propaganda, only the efforts of individual historians, very limited financially. I fear we are losing this information war and, as we are used to, are going in the wake of Polish historical politics.

Conditions before EU accession, the dispute over Motyka and the current escalation

Those who follow this topic understand that before joining the EU there will be a challenge: forget Bandera and Shukhevych, remove the red-and-black flags, do not name regiments after these names, renounce them.

The greatest misfortune is that not only Polish politicians pose the question this way. Grzegorz Motyka, the greatest authority on the study of Volhynia-43, said in his latest interview that Ukrainians must already be given a condition: that they accept the Polish version of the genesis and character of the events of 1943.

The Polish president has already openly said that Poland will seek compensation for the occupation, destruction, and extermination of the population during the war years. At present this is directed at Germany, where the sums are fantastic. But if the Ukrainian side agrees to the definition "people-murder" (liudovbyvstvo), that is, genocide in Volhynia, then the crime has no statute of limitations, and victims or descendants are entitled to compensation. This will entail not only moral but also material responsibility. There is a suspicion that this may happen, given the constant emphasis on the genocidal character of the events.

Ukrainians name the victims by name, not only those who died at the hands of the Home Army. Mr. Ihor Halahida rightly asked: why are the Ukrainians who could also have died in Volhynia not counted, if it was the Polish Commonwealth?

Yes, they were citizens of the Second Polish Republic; it was a conflict between citizens. Stepan Andriyovych [Bandera] and Shukhevych were also its citizens.

In Shukhevych's certificate there was a dash instead of Polish language. It is interesting how he managed not to hand it in.

A person who worked in business in Lviv had to know Polish. This was a demonstration of defiance against the anti-Ukrainian policy of the Polish government in schooling.

By the way, as a result of the Volhynian policy of voivode Józefski, by the end of the 1930s only six primary schools with Ukrainian as the language of instruction remained in Volhynia, although at first there were several hundred. The paradox: children were taught in Polish when they had no foundations of literacy in their native language. Children did not learn Polish, and Polish children, feeling their superiority, did not learn Ukrainian. Many Poles say they understand Ukrainian, but when you start speaking, it turns out they do not; they rather confuse it with Russian, which was taught during the Polish People's Republic.

Józefski's policy did not resolve the Ukrainian question, because it was aimed at Petliurist emigrants: Volhynia was to become the center of an anti-Soviet movement for the revival of an independent Ukraine, but without Volhynia, which was to remain in Poland.

The Soviet Union had its own plans. In 1925 the communists worked out a plan for a proletarian revolution, under which, if it succeeded, Volhynia was to be annexed to Soviet Ukraine, with the extermination of Polish settlements and their inhabitants. Rhetorical question: who drew up plans for the extermination of Poles in Volhynia, the communists or the nationalists?

It is a pity that the project of Halahida from the UCU, which records the dead, was started late.

For several decades we have been contending with Polish historians individually. On the Polish side there is a consolidated state policy; on the Ukrainian side there are scattered efforts, where one pulls toward the forest, another toward the firewood, a third toward the water, like the swan, the crayfish and the pike. This was evident at the Ukrainian-Polish historians' forum.

The Polish historians and their recognized leader would proclaim something, and everyone would nod in agreement. And then: Hud on one thing, Viatrovych on another, Iliushyn on a third, Zashkilniak on a fourth, Shapoval on a fifth. We had no developed position and sufficient knowledge to resist the accusations. I was then engaged in social issues. Now I have grown wiser and understand that Motyka's concept of a "planned, organized and carried out" operation is in many places stitched with white thread. He alters facts, if not outright falsifies them; he is easy to catch on this. That is why in recent years he avoids discussion with me, remembering 2013 and 2016, when I simply put him in a mess. That is why we see this in the media space.

What was your strongest argument?

In the 2013 discussion at the Royal Castle we argued about who exterminated more Poles in Volhynia: the UPA or the peasantry. I was supported by the future Polish ambassador to Ukraine, Jan Piekło, and the director of the Ossolineum, Adolf Juzwenko. They knew about neighborly killings from life: Juzwenko came from Ternopil region, and Piekło, as a military correspondent in the Balkans, remembered how neighbors there slaughtered neighbors. We showed Motyka that this political version does not withstand criticism, that various factors must be taken into account. I effectively came out the winner, as in 2016.

The Polish side to a large extent does not rely on documents. It looks for reasons to argue that the documents of the Home Army and the delegation of the Polish government do not correspond to events. Everything rests on memoirs. Andrzej Leon Sowa wrote well: memoirs recorded immediately after the war have value, because at that time there was not yet a political need for the required memoirs.

The Polish president's "gift" to ours, two volumes of "Documents of the Volhynian Crime": I examined them in detail; there Banderites and the UPA are mentioned only in a few places, while hundreds of testimonies say that it was done by Ukrainians from the same or a neighboring village. Neighborly killings, village against village, were everywhere.

I always say: "Let's sit down at a round table, Motyka," document against document. Not one and a half hours for everything, as at the last discussion at BookForum, when one speaks one thing, another something else, one does not hear the other, and there is no time for questions. This is a media show that has nothing in common with science.

A Polish historian openly expressed his opinion, and nothing happened to him. Everything was civilized.

And people write to me: "When will you come to speak?" I answer: "Send an invitation." And they immediately fall silent, because no one will invite a Ukrainian historian now. Or they will invite someone who will go along with it, inclining toward the version advantageous to the Polish side. I was at the 2013 conference in the Presidential Palace, where Ms. Ewa Siemaszko spoke, who with her parents produced a two-volume work on Polish victims.

Did 120,000 come from them?

She said less, and then said both 120,000 and 130,000, although she conducted no further research.

Let us name 30,000, which the historians from the UCU name.

These are Ukrainian victims, and we are talking about Polish ones. 120,000–130,000 and 500,000 Polish children in Volhynia, this is from the Polish side. Ms. Ewa, Szczepan Sikorka spoke with this, flinging mud at Ukraine. And our historians sit with heads bowed and remain silent. I will not name names, because they are serious historians. Viatrovych was not there. I was in the hall, but not as a participant; I was not invited. This gave me much to think about.

Is the worsening of relations now perhaps greater than ever? There have never been so many Ukrainians in Poland, and we have never heard so much about attacks, though perhaps this is exaggerated in the media.

The situation has indeed worsened. When I published my first books, the presentations in Warsaw, Bielsko-Biała, Wrocław and Lubacz were the best: goodwill, idiots and shouters were practically absent, although I feared the last two cities most (borderland, resettlers from Volhynia and from Lviv). The Poles said: "They want to set us against each other, but we want to live in friendship with Ukrainians."

I have deep doubts whether such presentations would be possible now. On the streets and in buses in Poland nothing bothers me, but what we read on social media is striking, and it is used to stir things up. Sociological polls show that moods have changed. In my circle I do not see aggression. But even sensible people who admired my book say: "And why did you slaughter us in Volhynia?" I say: "And did you not slaughter us? I never slaughtered anyone, so who killed my loved ones?" Then they fall silent.

This shows that we are far from a Christian approach. John Paul II said that Ukrainians and Poles must look at each other with a gaze of reconciliation, that there is no future without forgiveness; "we forgive and ask for forgiveness" is the formula of the Polish and German bishops. Despite the enormous number of his monuments, few remember these words, especially those in the Sejm, pious for the camera, while in reality they say something else. The more we talk about Giedroyc's concept, the less attention politicians pay to it.

Few pay attention to the social dimension. In Lviv Polish is now massively popular as a second foreign language.

I have already posted on the internet for Poles notices from the university doors about the state language exam in Polish, so that those who talk about oppression might see them. Nothing surprising: there were never so many Ukrainians in Poland, but that is because of the war.

Kipiani and Halahida said that the authorities understand little about historical issues. Was it a surprise that Zelensky named a regiment after the heroes of the UPA? Is there a state policy?

First: I learned about the naming from Polish social media. Second: I tried to reach the present authorities, explaining that Poland is something more than a neighbor. I also tried the previous one, meeting with the closest adviser of the previous president; in response I heard that they know everything and are the best in this regard. How that ended is well known.

I think the problem is greatly inflated by Polish politicians and social media, as earlier with Zelensky's speech at the UN or Ukrainian grain that supposedly floods Poland. Propaganda and historical politics work skillfully. We are dealing with them, not with history. Historians like Motyka become their creators, in order to set a condition before accession to the EU.

Regarding the name of the heroes of the UPA: in Lviv there is a street of the Heroes of the UPA; this was kept silent about, but it was a terrible blow to the vulnerability of Poles, because for them the UPA is something frightening. I have never heard about Ukrainian vulnerability, although I myself apologized several times: in 2003 I signed an appeal by 44 Lviv intellectuals headed by Taras Voznyak. But no matter how much I speak about the victimhood of my family, I never heard: "We apologize that people killed your loved ones." Once at a conference Czesław Partacz and Lucyna Kulińska replied: "But it was only two people who killed." Was it necessary for the whole family, 20–30 people, to perish?

And Zelensky? I think he does not understand what the UPA is, so someone advises him. These people should be asked: did they anticipate Poland's reaction, or is this the position of "our heroes, no one will dictate to us"? At BookForum Volodymyr Birchak said that this is the position of the fighters and the appeal comes from below, while the president signs. But responsibility lies with the one who signs and should have foreseen whether there would be a reaction, or whether it was artificially inflated. With us it passed almost unnoticed until the scandal began on the Polish side.

Should we react? We could, and yet we must: we are in an existential war, Poland as an ally and logistics hub is of enormous importance, as is the fate of refugees. These are extremely complex questions.

Simply to say: "We will write state policy."

It's bad with her. There is no one at the Institute of National Memory who deals with Poland. Poland has the Center for Eastern Studies with powerful analysts, and we don't have anything like it. I've asked many times to create an analytical center on Poland. Right now we're doing it slowly, on a volunteer basis.

We don't have money or political will?

There is no understanding of what Ukrainian history is or why it matters for future politics. The Poles understand this, and it consolidates their nation. But we still lack unity, and for decades there has been no state policy aimed at building the Ukrainian nation.

Finally, about books. Several presentations of the Ukrainian-language edition of “From the Lublin Union to the Volhynia Massacres” have taken place. Interest is enormous, and the book is selling out. I don't remember appearing on television and YouTube channels as much as I have over the past year. If you are interested in the history of our relations from 1569 to the end of the Second World War, contact the Lviv Photo Museum at 17 Kopernyka Street, and ask for Mr. Roman Metelskyi. In the near future he will have several hundred copies, which can be obtained for a donation, because the museum is printing parts for drones.

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