VOLHYNIA GENOCIDE

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Somosierra
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VOLHYNIA GENOCIDE

Post by Somosierra »

VOLHYNIA GENOCIDE

From Booklist:

After the German and Soviet invasions of Poland during World War II, the Polish Christian residents of the province of Wolyn were subjected to a policy of systemic genocide by Ukrainian Nationalists. Piotrowski, a native of Wolyn, lived under both the Soviet and the German occupation of Poland's eastern territories until August 1943; his family's home was burned to the ground and his relatives were killed. Each of the book's chapters represents one of the counties in Wolyn province. In interviews, survivors tell of the brutal torture and murder of thousands of Poles. Polish wives and their "half-Polish" children were murdered by their Ukrainian husbands and fathers. Some Ukrainian clergymen not only actively supported the Nationalists, they also participated in the atrocities. Yet some Ukrainians risked their lives to help save the Poles. These accounts, relatively free of rancor and bitterness, vividly document a terrifying episode in history.

George Cohen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
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http://www.polartcenter.com/cgi-bin/sho ... y.htm#WWII
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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/ ... 27-2604656

Book Description:

After the 1939 Soviet and 1941 Nazi invasions, the people of Southeast Poland underwent a third and even more terrible ordeal when they were subjected to mass genocide by the Ukrainian Nationalists. Tens of thousands of Poles were tortured and murdered, not by foreign invaders, but by their fellow citizens, who sometimes turned out ot be their neighbors, relatives, and former friends. Other Ukrainians took terrible risks to protect Poles from the slaughter, and often paid for their compassion with their lives.

The children who survived them vividly remember these atrocities and now, many decades later, tell their tragic tales. These accounts, never before published in English, describe the brutal murders these children witnessed, their own miraculous survival, and the heroic rescues that saved them. Demographic and other statistical information on the area is provided. Also included are appendices listing the Ukrainian victims and providing additional stories from other provinces, as well as ample Ukrainian, Polish, Soviet, German, and Jewish documentation and a comprehensive chronology. An index and bibliography are also included.

About the Author:

A native of Wolyn, Tadeusz Piotrowski and his family lived under both the Soviet and the German occupations of Poland's eastern territories until August 1943. He is a professor of sociology at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester, where he received the Outstanding Associate Professor Award for 1996-1997. He is also the author of Poland's Holocaust (1998) and Vengeance of the Swallows (1995). Piotrowski won the 1998 Literary Award from the Polish Socio-Cultural Centre of the Polish Library in London and the 1995 Cultural Achievement Award from the American Council for Polish Culture.

see also:
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http://www.genocide-pl.prv.pl
APOCALYPSIS IOANNIS 21, 8:
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Timidis autem et incredulis et exsecratis et homicidis et fornicatoribus et veneficis et idololatris et omnibus mendacibus, pars illorum erit in stagno ardenti igne et sulphure, quod est mors secunda.
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Post by Benoit Douville »

Somosierra,

This books seems really interesting. I will try to find it. I didn't know that the UPA was so brutal against the Poles until a few months.

Regards
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Post by Somosierra »

Unfortunately very few people know the truth about UPA.

After WWII the Soviets wanted all Slavs to be “brothers”, so it was forbidden to write or speak what some Slavs did…

Besides the Soviet Union took Volhynia from Poland – so, how there was a chance to have Polish inhabitants there…
APOCALYPSIS IOANNIS 21, 8:
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Timidis autem et incredulis et exsecratis et homicidis et fornicatoribus et veneficis et idololatris et omnibus mendacibus, pars illorum erit in stagno ardenti igne et sulphure, quod est mors secunda.
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J.P. Slovjanski
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Post by J.P. Slovjanski »

Actually the Soviet Union did want all Slavs to be brothers under Communism, so they slandered Slavic nationalists of all nationalities. The history of the UPA on both sides is often slanted. One could argue that the fact that it fought the Soviets up into the mid 50's is quite a credit, but I would say that this prolonged fight would never have had to occur had the UPA taken a definite stand with the Third Reich. Instead it took on a selfish separatist nature(like the original Galician "Republic" during the Russian civil war) which once again led to Slavic nation's being enslaved under Communism.

Most Polish people(include important leaders such as General Wladislaw Anders) knew that the crimes alleged against the Russian and Ukrainian volunteer units and organizations were nothing more than Communist propagand designed to convince Poland that the Soviets were their friends. That is why Anders and the Polish government in exile took steps to prevent Russian and Ukrainian volunteers from falling into Soviet hands after the war. Anders was able to save the Ukrainian volunteers of the Galicia division, but he had no control over the fate of the Russian Liberation Army, who was outside of Poland's sphere of influence at the time(Prague to be exact).

Since the war, most Polish people knew exactly which side they should have supported, just like several other Slavic people who made the mistake of trusting England.
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Post by Wurger »

Although I haven't read this particular book, I did read Tadeusz Piotrowski's "Poland's Holocaust", and I wasn't particularly impressed with it. A lot of his claims are based upon heresay and lack any solid facts to back them up. I found that he was "fast and loose" with facts when he did provide them to back up his claims - many of which were just generalizations.

One should keep in mind that survivor testimonies often are not the most objective sources of history. I found Piotrowski's book to be largely an emotional work rather than a solid history. If this current work is anything like the one I read, take what he says with a grain of salt.

Regards,

Wurger
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Post by Somosierra »

Wurger wrote: (...) One should keep in mind that survivor testimonies often are not the most objective sources of history. (...)
So, the most objective sources of history are…historians (some of them).
APOCALYPSIS IOANNIS 21, 8:
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Timidis autem et incredulis et exsecratis et homicidis et fornicatoribus et veneficis et idololatris et omnibus mendacibus, pars illorum erit in stagno ardenti igne et sulphure, quod est mors secunda.
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Post by J.P. Slovjanski »

Yes, historians are people who start by actually reading the documentation that says what units were where at one time. For example, if a particular unit is said to have committed a massacre in a particular city, it helps to see if that unit was located anywhere near that city at the time of the alleged massacre. That's called historical research.
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Post by Somosierra »

I wonder what historians know on just one day – July 11, 1943 when Ukrainian nationalists simultaneously attacked and murdered in barbaric way inhabitants of 167 Polish towns and villages in Volhynia. There was no difference – man, woman or child – all for ethnically free Ukraine…
APOCALYPSIS IOANNIS 21, 8:
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Timidis autem et incredulis et exsecratis et homicidis et fornicatoribus et veneficis et idololatris et omnibus mendacibus, pars illorum erit in stagno ardenti igne et sulphure, quod est mors secunda.
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Post by J.P. Slovjanski »

I think we have already established the credibility of rehashed Soviet propaganda. I have yet to speak to a single Polish person that believes any of these claims. Only whiny professional victims partake of such nonsense.
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Post by Somosierra »

Who knows - will know. Who wants to know - will know. And who just do not want to know – will not know, never.

People can read the book and have their own opinion.
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That is all on the book; go and play somewhere else, historian…

Full Stop.
APOCALYPSIS IOANNIS 21, 8:
--
Timidis autem et incredulis et exsecratis et homicidis et fornicatoribus et veneficis et idololatris et omnibus mendacibus, pars illorum erit in stagno ardenti igne et sulphure, quod est mors secunda.
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Post by Wurger »

Somosierra,

I'm not sure if you realize that this is a historical forum, and not one devoted to political discussion. Historians are welcome here, propagandists are not. Perhaps it is you who should find another site in which to vent your anti-Ukrainian sentiments.

Wurger
heinz kling

Poles commited war crimes too

Post by heinz kling »

Polish man accused of 'war crimes' against the Germans

By Justin Sparks
in Prague



THE trial of a 78-year-old Pole accused of killing thousands of German civilians in the aftermath of the Second World War is set to become the first of a series of court cases in which Germans are seen as the victims instead of the perpetrators of Nazi-related crimes.

The trial, scheduled to begin early next year in the Polish city of Opole, has created a furore over a part of Poland's recent history which it would like to ignore. Czeslaw Geborski, the accused, is said to have systematically raped, tortured and murdered German civilians while serving as commandant at the Lambinowice concentration camp in Silesia, where Germans living in the region were interned after the war.

Frantiszek Lewandowski, one of the prosecutors in the case, said:

"The main charge we are bringing against him is that he ordered a building in the camp to be burned down, killing 48 people. As people tried to escape the flames, he personally shot them or had them flung back inside."
The concentration camp was initially built by the Nazis to house Allied PoWs. For most Poles it is inextricably associated with wartime atrocities committed by the Germans.

The trial is set to reverse those roles and portray a Pole as the villain, something simply unacceptable to many who lived through the German occupation and the death of an estimated three million civilian Polish Jews and three million non-Jewish Poles through bombings and in concentration camps. Piotr Radziwinowicz, a 72-year-old pensioner whose father was killed during the occupation said:

"The trial should be stopped. In view of what the Nazis did on Polish soil it was inevitable that some German civilians would be killed in revenge. It was chaos at the end of the war, but we never did anything like the Nazis. They killed millions of Poles."
A museum at the Lambinowice concentration camp commemorates the many Poles and Allied PoWs who died there at the hands of the Nazis, but makes scant mention of the thousands of Germans who subsequently suffered the same fate.

In the decades following the Allied victory, the communists erased such events from their history, and young Poles today know little or nothing of the acts of retribution meted out to German civilians in Silesia and the former East Prussia. Dr Maruska Svasek, a Central European specialist at Queen's University, Belfast, said:

"Hundreds of thousands of German civilians across Central Europe were raped, tortured, killed, or died due to terrible conditions after the war, but communist historiography was simply anti-Nazi and pro-communist, and disregarded the truth about postwar anti-German crimes."
Werner Scholz, a German Silesian who was sent to the camp aged only eight, along with his grandmother and sister, neither of whom survived, believes real reconciliation can never take place between Germans and their Central European neighbours until the "criminals" are brought to justice. He said:

"Everywhere you looked in the camp there were people dead or dying. If a person wasn't beaten to death, then he simply died of typhus, dysentery or starvation. A cold would be enough to finish him off. These were crimes, like Nazi crimes, and they should be treated in the same way and perpetrators brought to justice."
The recollections of German camp survivors bear witness to the harshness of the camp regime. In one instance a man was sealed in a barrel in which nails had been hammered through the side. The barrel was then rolled around the camp until he bled to death. Another survivor claims people were forced to lie on top of each other forming a huge pyramid, until those at the bottom were crushed. Lambinowice was just one of hundreds of Nazi concentration camps throughout Central Europe which exchanged its Jewish and Allied PoWs for German soldiers and civilians once the war had ended.

In all, around 10 million Germans were expelled from their homes in the region, and it is estimated that in Poland alone, between 400,000 and 1.2 million were killed in revenge attacks, during forced labour, transportation, or in concentration camps.

Konrad Badenhauer of the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft said:

"The case of Lambinowice is just one of many. There were hundreds of people like Geborskis. In the Czech Republic, for example, we have the names and addresses of many such criminals whose crimes are well documented and who are still at liberty."
The prospect of Lambinowice creating a precedent for the prosecution of postwar acts of retribution has provoked widespread unease. Witold Kulesza, of the Central Commission for the Prosecution of Crimes against the Polish Nation, said seven more trials are being prepared in Poland. Crimes against German civilians were not limited to hard core "communist" criminals, but were widespread.

In many cases German farms were taken over by Poles and previous owners were either killed or kept on as slave labour. Inevitably, all such cases are a fight against time as those involved are now nearing the end of their lives. Czeslaw Geborski's trial which involves 40 volumes of evidence and more than 300 witnesses is likely to last up to a year, and it may well be that the opportunity for such prosecutions has already been missed.

Last edited by heinz kling on Mon Mar 10, 2003 6:50 am; edited 2 times in total





Polish Church Apologizes for 1941 Massacre
of Jews


By Rob Strybel


WARSAW (Reuters) -- Poland's Roman Catholic Church was taking an important step to improve relations with the Jewish community Sunday by apologizing for the Poles who took part in a massacre of up to 1,600 Jews during World War Two.

The 1941 massacre in the town of Jedwabne came to prominence last year with the publication of "Neighbors," a book by émigré scholar Jan Gross, who alleged that Poles, not occupying Nazi Germans, had brutally murdered Jews and taken their possessions.

"We wish to apologize above all to God, but also to the wronged, on behalf of those Polish citizens who committed evil against citizens of the Mosaic faith," Polish Primate Jozef Glemp said in an interview in the Catholic weekly Niedziela.

An expiation service being held in Warsaw's biggest church, near the site of the former Jewish Ghetto, was to include a prayer by Polish-born Pope John Paul, a champion of Christian-Jewish reconciliation.

But the service was unlikely to succeed in bringing Catholics and Jews together since it coincided with the Shavout, a major Jewish holiday.


The American-born rabbi of Warsaw and Lodz, Michael Schudrich, said in a letter to Glemp he could not attend the service because "I cannot be in two temples at once."

Gross's book ignited one of the country's biggest national debates since the 1989 collapse of communism in Poland, a staunchly Roman Catholic country.

Jewish circles expressed satisfaction that the blame was finally being placed where it belonged. But many Poles, accustomed to viewing themselves as war victims and heroes, resent being regarded as co-perpetrators of the Holocaust.

"Neighbors" describes how the Jedwabne Jews were bludgeoned, beaten and stabbed to death by their Polish neighbors, and how most were herded into a barn and burned alive, but many details of the case remain unclear.

MOTIVES FOR PROGROM


Historians and journalists have questioned whether the Jedwabne Poles had acted on their own, as Gross maintains, or were forced to cooperate at gunpoint by the Germans.

Jewish collaboration with the Soviets, who had occupied the Jedwabne area for nearly two years prior to Germany's invasion, has also been cited as a possible motive for the pogrom, a point repeatedly raised by the Church.


"Shouldn't Jews also admit their guilt for collaborating with the Bolsheviks in sending Poles to Siberia or prison ... or for the leading role played (in post-war Poland) by the Communist secret police of Jewish ancestry?" Cardinal Glemp asked in the Niedziela interview.

Poland's National Remembrance Institute (IPN) has started an investigation into the massacre and promised to bring those responsible to justice. Half a century ago, 23 Poles were sentenced for complicity in the massacre.

The IPN, a state body probing war crimes, is now supervising the exhumation of the mass grave in Jedwabne to determine the exact number of victims and how they died.

The Church has often been at loggerheads with Jews over a variety of issues in Poland, including a Catholic nunnery and religious symbols at the Auschwitz death camp, where 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, were killed by the Nazis during the war.

In the mid-1990s, Pope John Paul had to intervene to remove the nunnery from the vicinity of the Auschwitz camp, viewed by the Jews as their biggest burial ground in the world.
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Post by Somosierra »

I wonder where the moderator is…

I posted info on the book on genocide of Volhynia, because it is one of the most little know genocides ever committed. And now a funny guy from Memel (I wonder is he sad of today’s history of the spot) writes totally off-topic.

If you Mr. heinz kling have something on Volhynia genocide, please go ahead. If not - just do not trash the forum.

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APOCALYPSIS IOANNIS 21, 8:
--
Timidis autem et incredulis et exsecratis et homicidis et fornicatoribus et veneficis et idololatris et omnibus mendacibus, pars illorum erit in stagno ardenti igne et sulphure, quod est mors secunda.
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Post by J.P. Slovjanski »

Nobody what's to hear about events that are wildly exagerrated or in some cases entirely fabricated.
heinz kling

Did I hit a raw nerve here?

Post by heinz kling »

[quote="Somosierra"]I wonder where the moderator is…

I posted info on the book on genocide of Volhynia, because it is one of the most little know genocides ever committed. And now a funny guy from Memel (I wonder is he sad of today’s history of the spot) writes totally off-topic.

If you Mr. heinz kling have something on Volhynia genocide, please go ahead. If not - just do not trash the forum.

Or you still intend to say that Poles were only victims in the war, and that they never had any pogroms on the jews? I am posting the articles here to even out the score. Every nation at war will and have commited war crimes. It's only the losers who stood trial.
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