Poland Remembers

Poland may be among the staunchest allies of Ukraine today as the latter fends off Russia – but the country cannot shake off the past and yesterday, it held an observance of the National Day of Remembrance of Victims of Genocide. 

This was to commemorate the wartime massacres of Poles by Ukrainians – a wanton act of ethnic cleansing – between 1942 and 1945. Historians say that more than 100,000 Poles, including women and even the smallest children, perished at the hands of their Ukrainian neighbors in a nationalist drive in areas that were then in south-eastern Poland and are mostly in Ukraine now. 

It is dedicated to the memory of the victims in Volhynia, Polesia, Lublin region and Eastern Galicia by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) during the Second World War. Most of the victims were tortured before being killed; some of the methods included rape, dismemberment or immolation. It was also claimed that the victims had included Jews, Russians, Czechs, Georgians, and even Ukrainians who were part of Polish families. 

Ukraine, however, insists they were independence fighters. In fact, Ukraine’s identity as a sovereign state was allegedly built around the OUN. 

And so, it is hardly surprising that Vladimir Putin has cast Ukraine as a country in need of de-Nazifying, and which is one of the stated aims of Russia’s “special military operation”.

You may be interested to know that Poland also commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 dedicated to the memory of the six million Jewish victims of the Holocaust. The Germans had called this “the final solution to the Jewish question”. 

The genocide that the world refers to as the Holocaust was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and killing of European Jews during World War II. Although Jews were the primary victims of the Nazis’ evil, many other groups were targeted based on both racial and political grounds. Those singled out included LGBTQ individuals, the physically and mentally disabled, Roma (gypsies), Poles and other Slavic peoples, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and members of political opposition groups. 

[Note: However tragic, these non-Jewish victims are typically not considered victims of the Holocaust. According to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial Museum in Jerusalem, “By the 1950s, the English term Holocaust came to be employed as the term for the murder of the Jews in Europe by the Nazis. Although the term is sometimes used with reference to the murder of other groups by the Nazis, strictly speaking, those groups do not belong under the heading of the Holocaust, nor are they included in the generally accepted statistic of six million victims of the Holocaust”. 

Of the non-Jewish victims, historian Yehuda Bauer estimates, they number no more than half a million].