More than half a century ago, people would not even walk by that grave at the Mylianovychi cemetery, lest the powers that be suspect them of sympathizing with the Ukrainian insurgents who had found the last repose under a small stone column (the huge oak cross had been cut by a stray shell during World War II). As Ukraine entered its eleventh year of independence, a woman appeared at the village and headed for the cemetery. There she tidied up the grave. Now people are free to talk about what happened, what was known in Poland as the massacre of Poles in Volyn, and in Ukraine as the “national liberation struggle.” In fact, no one had asked them to talk about this previously.
Semen Martyniuk, born 1936, was a kid at the time.
“I don’t know why but I can remember well what happened so many years ago and I can’t remember what happened yesterday. I think back and see everything as clearly as though I were watching a movie.”
In that movie only one scene is missing, the outbreak of the war.
“I don’t know how it began, there were no Germans in our village, no air raids, no shooting. The front bypassed us, for the highway [i.e., the one from Warsaw to Kyiv] wasn’t there, either. Old timers said a couple of motorcyclists appeared, probably German scouts, and then we didn’t see the Germans till 1942. There was a gendarmerie in Lukiv and another one in Liuboml and they would visit the village now and then, but there was no occupation.”
Martyniuk saw the war for the first time when he was 6.
“Mother came running, saying we were going to see Soviet prisoners of war. Their column would be herded by the Germans through the village. Mother grabbed a jug of milk and a loaf... What we saw was exactly like they show in the movies. A column, six in a row, people covered in coagulated blood, wearing dirty bandages, with Germans riding horses and walking with police dogs on the sides. They didn’t mind villagers approaching the column and giving POWs some food, but the prisoners were not exactly hungry, they were fed like that in every village they passed. The column was a very long one, we stood watching it for an hour...”
In 1943, a Ukrainian self-defense unit was organized at the village. Young fellows would patrol the place at night, because, apart from the Germans, hostilities were starting with the Poles.
* * *
Passed down by generations of villagers, legend has it that the place’s name comes from Bona, the Polish queen and Neapolitan princess. That she owned the land and once, spending the night at her estate (of which only the rampart and the name Pidzamchysko are left), she said she enjoyed sleeping there; she had never slept that well anywhere else. Obviously, she did not rule with an iron hand in Mylianovychi (it had township status and was subject to the law of Magdeburg [i.e., Hanseatic League]) , or bitter memories had vanished with time, but the old timers still proudly say that their grandparents were “royal burghers.” The rich forest and the thickest black topsoil (“you could spread it on a piece of bread like butter”) once again attracted Polish colonists in the 1920s. Few Poles settled in Mylianovychi (“they were so poor they looked blue in the face”), among them “Stach from Paris” that never made a fortune in France. In contrast, Rozhyn, a village seven kilometers from Mylianovychi, turned into a Polish colony.
“In 1943 — toward the end of the summer or maybe in early September — word spread that the Poles had destroyed a Banderite squad. Although we didn’t call them Banderites, but insurgents. There were seven of them, led by Sotnyk [Captain] Khmara. They stopped for the night in a barn and were surrounded by Poles of the Armia Krajowa [Home Army]... You know what kind of weapons the insurgents had at the beginning? Rifles without butts, some were with butts but with only a couple of rounds each... The Poles were well equipped. I heard old people say that there was a Polish division stationed in Volyn and that they had weapons dropped by British planes,” Semen Martyniuk continues leafing through his memories.
“Those were horrible times, God forbid they ever happen again. People kept fighting and we couldn’t figure out who was fighting who. Poles, Ukrainians, Jews used to live peacefully. Then they turned into enemies, someone must’ve sicked them on each other...”
Yevheniya Zavadska was 14 in 1943, older than Semen Martyniuk, of course. She clearly remembers that the Poles were the first to attack and that no one understood what happened afterward. She also remembers people appearing in Mylianovychi, fleeing the Poles from Kliusk, Kleveletsk, Dovhonosy, Klychkovychy. “Our barns were packed with fugitives.” She and her parents drove past two large graves near Tylychev and they told her, “The Poles killed many Ukrainians there.” She knows nothing about mass Polish burials in the neighborhood.
* * *
Yevheniya Zavadska recalls that the Ukrainians killed by Poles were buried on a “crisp sunny day.”
“People said the coffins would be placed by the church. We the kids would run over to see if the coffins had been brought till lunchtime... Everybody in Mylianovychi and the neighboring villages took part in the funeral procession.”
How did the authorities respond?
“The authorities were our people, there were no Germans around. They had appointed the village elder and he and the local police force took orders from the insurgents. A large pit was dug in the graveyard. I squeezed through the crowd to the edge of the grave. What I saw made my hair stand on end.” Semen Martyniuk’s memories from childhood are vivid and accurate. “There were Sotnyk Khmara’s men in the coffins. They must have been tortured for a long time. All eyes gouged out, ears and noses cut off. Women washing and dressing their bodies said there were no tongues and genitals, either, and dozens of wounds all over... They would not surrender and they had no munitions left, so the Poles had taken them alive.”
He remembers well yet another Ukrainian-Polish skirmish, in the fall of 1943, in October or November. People said that a large Armia Krajowa unit (more than a hundred men) stopped in Ruzhyn. The insurgents had intelligence to the effect that the Poles would advance on Mylianovychi. The insurgents sent word to the village for the people to get prepared to flee if the Banderites had to retreat (it was rumored at the time that the Poles attacked villages and massacred the residents and burned their homes).
“And so we got prepared... My father had harnessed the horses in the barn, loaded the cart with the most valuable and necessary things and now we could only wait. The night was very dark, as usual in the late fall. I sat on the bed, mother sat on the bench by the window, and father was at the table. I remember the tension. No one spoke. We just sat and waited... About ten p.m. we heard a loud crash in the corridor. We all thought that the Poles had broken down the door. Mother fell to the floor in a dead faint. Father went pallid. I did not cry or shout, I was scared stiff and numb. A minute passed, then another. No one burst into the room. Father was the first to rise and open the door and we saw our tomcat, his eyes shining in the dark. He had jumped from the attic and dropped a tin sheet leaned to the wall on the floor. We expected to see a Polish scout and found our cat instead...
“Then there was gunfire beyond the village, but it stopped soon. Klychkovychy, the neighboring village, was ablaze... In the morning we learned that the Poles had burned down several homes there, shot an old man, and people started fleeing to Mylianovychi. Several Polish scouts had appeared in the outskirts but were met by the insurgents. That explained the gunfire. The Poles hadn’t moved any further because they weren’t sure how many Banderites they’d meet.”
* * *
In Mylianovychi, the Banderites shot just one Polish family. The other Polish colonists had left for their historical homeland before 1943, before what Semen Martyniuk describes as “that hatred and conspiracy” began.
“It was a very poor family, they had one room and clay floor. They had many children. One of the boys, Juzek, herded village cows, he drove them to the Bir ravine so he could sniff around for the insurgents. They said he had spied out Sotnyk Khmara and his men and the Poles bushwhacked them. After that Banderite SB [security service] people came to the village at night and because of what Juzek had done the whole family was taken to Bily Hrud, it’s a spot of white sand (the Germans would shoot the local Jews there). Juzek escaped on the way and his family died.”
* * *
Apart from Poles (said to be taking part in German punitive missions), the village was afraid of the Soviet partisans. A partisan unit was stationed in the Perevalivsky Forest not far from Mylianovychi and they would often raid the village, searching every home, allegedly for weapons, but actually grabbing everything they found: sausage, fatback...
“My aunt was a bit on the intellectual side, she worked for a Jewish family in Kovel, and she dressed like a city woman, her underwear was silk, not homespun. I was a kid but I well remember a partisan opening the chest, pulling out panties and shoving them inside his jacket... Another time the partisans carried out a ‘procurements’ operation. They burst into the village at night, shooting a lot of pigs and burning down pigsties... People were afraid of them and would hide everything they could, seeing them approach the village. In Siomaky (a village currently in Starovyzhivsky district — N.M.), partisans from Kovpak’s regiment shot 60 residents, allegedly as insurgents, although they could see 80-year- old men and kids among them.” Semen Martyniuk turns another page of his memories.
Didn’t the Banderite do any looting?
“They didn’t because they represented power. They would send people to visit homes and take what people would offer them.
“Locals among the partisans would do the looting. There were also Russians from retreating Soviet forces. They did no looting, for where would they take the loot?” Yevheniya Zavadska offers her interpretation of the partisan policy, based on a lifelong experience.
* * *
The Russians — regular Red Army forces — entered Mylianovychi in the spring of 1944. A couple of days later the Germans kicked them out... After that the front would roll like a tidal wave over the village several times. Young Semen was more than once within a hair’s breadth of death. Once a German soldier nearly drowned him in a barrel of water. Another time the whole family was placed against the wall of the house, facing a German firing squad. And then they hid a wounded Soviet soldier and looked after him at the risk of their lives.
It was in the course of that world of manslaughter that a stray shell cut down the large oak pole the insurgents had erected on the grave of their butchered comrades in arms. Someone would plant flowers on the grave late at night. Others would mow the grass when the place was deserted. Of course, no one would even think of tending it properly, in the open. People were even afraid to walk past it, lest they be accused of sympathy.
“Now that Ukraine has been independent for a decade, a woman came and tidied up the grave. Her family, like mine, had nothing to do with the insurgents, it’s just her Ukrainian spirit. After that people started visiting the place, planting flowers, putting up a new cross. I’ve done some digging there...”
Semen’s father was known as “Pushkin” in the village, because he knew how to talk and could tell interesting stories, although he was illiterate at first and an orphan. He earned a living herding cattle and learned to read and to write himself. He was very fond of literature and history. This had almost cost him to be exiled to Siberia. In 1946, Soviet propagandists came to talk the villagers into forming a kolhosp. One of them was quartered at Semen’s father’s. One night, over a bottle, they discussed Ukrainian history.
“It was my father’s hobbyhorse, he could talk for hours on end. Among other things, he told the man that Ukraine had suffered the Tatar yoke and was now suffering from Moscow’s. ‘You son of a bitch,’ yelled the propagandist, ‘so you hate Soviet power.’ My mother burst into tears, begging forgiveness for the old fool. Fortunately, the man was decent enough to forget it and the family wasn’t sent to Siberia...”
Another fifty years would pass before the fellow countrymen of Mylianovychi’s Pushkin would start studying their history at such length and depth.
