Once the forest between the villages of Datyn and Zamshany was like home for all those young Ukrainian insurgents. Quite a few of them would find their last repose there... At a forest cemetery one is almost instantly lost in thought, pondering the destinies of Ukraine and its people.
IN THE HERMIT’S DOMAIN
A black stork was in a meadow, several dozen feet from us, basking in the fresh air, amidst the thick grass. He let us get so close we could see his shining black “tuxedo” with a white “shirt” and a long red beak. The meeting was totally unexpected, an experience one could count on perhaps once in a lifetime. This bird is entered in the Red Book, it is extremely cautious, settling only far away from man — probably the reason why it is locally known as the black hermit.
The black stork we suddenly met must have flown from the forest not easily reachable even in the 21st century. We rode in the editorial office’s jeep for ten kilometers, taking sharp turns, following a narrow path winding its course among motley grass growing from what had once been marshland. Even now it felt springy underfoot. The driver had to be especially careful on the treachery banks of abandoned soil-reclamation canals. Driving up to the next huge puddle, we would stop and think whether we should risk negotiating it or get out and continue on foot. In end we left the jeep at the edge of the forest.
They say that, when it came to developing a forest cemetery in 1995, its very existence took many by surprise, including people in certain governmental agencies. Naturally, had the Soviet authorities known, the place would have long been erased from the face of the earth. The secret had been kept owing to the remoteness of the place, thickness of the forest, and the populace keeping their mouths shut after surviving more than one less than friendly regime. Actually, the habit is still strong. A very old bedridden man we were taken to at the end of the village of Zapillya told us only that some lads from the forest had indeed stayed there, fighting body lice. We could see he knew more but would keep it to himself.
“A man lived in that nutwood grove there, Stepan Kyrykevych by name. He made coffins for fallen UPA soldiers and hid in the grove from the kids, for they might tell someone, you know... And where we stopped the first time had been Holubka’s home. Holubka [Little Dove] is the alias of Paraska Artemuk. She received 10 years for collaboration with OUN-UPA. They took her when she was pregnant. They left her husband and three sons. What was her crime? She gave food to Banderites. How could she say no? With no one around, just the forest. Who would protect her? My uncle lived at that edge of the forest. They also threw him in prison. Here you’ll find a 10-year ex-con in almost every family. All on charges of anti-Soviet activities, ‘for Ukraine,’ as we say,” we were told by Pavlo Budnyk, former history teacher from Zapillya, leading us further into the forest.
There were only five homes left of the village of Ostrivky (locally known as Zakhid, or West — local legends had it that the Sun set there), each separated by more than 500 yards from the next. The one nearest to the forest cemetery (some 1,500 yards) belonged to Maksym Sas, 82.
“Right, Vuiko [Uncle] Maksym could tell you a lot about the forest guys and the Red Partisan. What can I tell? I was born in 1938 and was just a kid when all that happened. The KGB burned Vuiko Maksym’s home, giving chase to Kos, pushing him to the forest. One KGB man was especially eager to get him. He was known as Riaboshapka [Spotted Hat] because he sported a very unusual hat. He was hot on Kos’s tail, he even went to the forest alone. He was brave.” Pavlo Budnyk was mentally turning pages of the local annals.
Birds singing above us, ankle-high bilberry shrub laden with fruit around us, we followed the guide, stepping on springy thick moss, feet used to sinking now slipping on the smooth surface. And then we saw the forest cemetery. Six graves on a small hill, including a common one. A wood cross and an inscription reading, “To UPA soldiers, to all that died for Ukraine.”
GRAVES NO ONE WEPT UPON
They say that a woman came to the forest cemetery at Datyn after the war, traveling all the way from Chervonohrad in Lviv oblast. People saw her tend an anonymous grave, some insisted it was her husband’s, that he was a Banderite. Among those buried in the forest were families in the villages of Zamshany and Budyn (currently part of the neighboring Starovyzhivsky district). Yet everybody knew better than discuss the matter (one of my relatives, a woman, used to be summoned to the local KGB station once every year for an interview, until the 1990s and Ukrainian independence. Right after the war, a group of armed people entered our home and took away my younger brother. We knew they were Banderites. My brother never returned and we still don’t know whether they took him to join them or to kill him. Yet several decades after the war my sister would be summoned and asked the same question, Where is your brother? — N.M.)
Kalyna Niorba, a journalist with Ratne district newspaper, says that former UPA soldiers Andriy Kozel and Pantelei Repeta from Zamshany visited her in 1995, being aware of her views. They told her about the graves of their comrades in arms in the forest, that they had to be tended and that local authorities refused to help (Suppose those were bandits with hands washed in human blood?), but nor did they object. And so the graves were tidied up, crosses and fences erected, even a bench built on the eve of St. Mary the Protectress [October 1].
This forest cemetery is quite different from other burial sites. No flowers, because they wouldn’t survive in the thick of the forest. The graves are overgrown with fern. The big trees, like the populace, jealously preserve secrets of the past.
“See how big the trees have grown! I remember they were a bit higher than I was, now I have to look all the way up to see the sky,” says Pavlo Budnyk.
His memories as a small boy preserve many details of that stormy period, eventually described as a national liberation movement, when brothers rose in arms against each other, when people in a village would go to bed, expecting anyone to knock on the window in the middle of the night.
“I saw people killed before my eyes in Zapillya where we lived... I was seven, maybe eight, and I was herding our cow. Then I saw a man running across the field, heading for the willow bushes. Then another man and another one. And then I saw riders chasing them and shooting at them. They killed them all as they ran... Those men weren’t Banderites, they were unarmed. They helped the forest guys, doing house chores, because they couldn’t say no...”
“Tell them about granny Paraska,” says his daughter Myroslava, librarian at the local grade school.
“Paraska is my mother-in-law. Her husband was at the front and guys in the forest used to come for food. They knew whenever she received a parcel from the front. Well, she must’ve had more than she could take and she had a very sharp tongue. She told them what she thought of them. They wanted to kill her right there and then. They threw her to the floor, but then someone knocked on the window. The woman couldn’t see who it was, but they let go of her. Later, Ivan (alias Hordy) living next door, warned her to watch her tongue, for it might well get her killed. She assumed he had knocked on the window and saved her that night.”
“Where there people among the locals bearing grudges against the Banderites?”
“Things happened at the time,” Budnyk replies diplomatically, reluctant to rake over the dust and ashes of the past, when UPA soldiers, condemned to death by the new regime sought refuge in village homes in winter, exposing whole families to the threat of exile in Siberia (at best!). Old timers well remember the punitive NKVD detachment from Stara Vyzhyvka. Its men would disguise themselves as Banderites and provoke locals to help “liberate Ukraine.” One of the villagers, Stepan, fell into the trap and was executed on the spot.
“A lot of young village fellows went to the forest to join the Banderites. As the front moved closer they had to retreat and hid in bunkers. Young Pavlo saw one behind the village of Doshno. It was well equipped and camouflaged, with young pines growing on top. No one would have suspected a dugout with armed people underneath... It was there the NKVD caught Hordy, a well-known leader of the national liberation movement.
“Banderites never surrendered, killing themselves with grenades. Hordy was badly wounded, they thought he was dead. He got blind from the wounds. They took him to a hospital, treated his wounds, and made him stand trial in Ratne. The blind man spent 15 years in a prison camp. When it was time to release him, they sent a letter to the village, asking if his relatives would accept him. They said no, they were afraid. He spent the rest of his life in an old people’s home. He was tall and handsome. Hence the alias Hordy, Proud Man.”
“Was he married?”
“No, but he left children. Adam, Vasyl (Pavlo Budnyk told their last names, much to his daughter Myroslava’s surprise). In fact, their middle names are Ivanovych, it’s in their passports, and they know about their father.”
“PRESERVE UKRAINE!”
“Forest fellows” existed in both Western Ukraine and the Baltic states. The last battle with them took place in Lithuania in 1967 (sic), when the only surviving guerilla by the name of Trojanis shot himself in his bunker, surrounded by Soviet troops. The Banderites were destroyed in Western Ukraine considerably earlier, but also years after the war. The last group of Ukrainian insurgents was liquidated in April 1960, near the village of Lozy, Pidhayetsky district, Ternopil oblast.
Banderists operated in the Zamshany-Datyn forest till the early 1950s. Pavlo Budnyk says that the last ones were killed at the village of Butsyn in 1952. Cows would long afterward fall into abandoned bunkers. “Blood ran between my fingers as I died for Ukraine... Farewell, my only brother, I’m dying, never giving up, you must preserve Ukraine!” We heard these lines from Kateryna Savluk in Datyn. The song had been written by her father’s brother. The woman is well known locally as a folklorist. She consults scholarly expeditions, knows countless proverbs and songs, but apparently has far from exhausted her repertoire, just as she has not voiced all her thoughts even at 72.
“Children, you’ll be the first to hear this,” she told us. “We kept a Banderite hiding place at the pigsty. My mother and I dug it during the night, then the boys came from the forest and hid there, and the Soviets raided the village the following morning, turning everything upside down, looking for them... We’d often be within a hair’s breadth of death afterward.”
There was a photo of her son on the wall above her bed, the seventh of eleven children (“I’ve wept for them every day, for the past twenty-four years”).
“This one got killed in the army. A Korean soldier called him Banderite and my son called him a wog. The Korean shot him.”
Had the fellows buried in the forest beyond Datyn lived to see this day, they would have felt victors, their most cherished dream come true. Ukraine is a free country now. But they would have had to live all those decades prior to independence in an atmosphere of fear and distrust, effectively upheld by the powerful Soviet regime, as well as by controversial people’s memories.
“Banderists came at night and said you’ll go to the neighboring village tomorrow and wash our soldiers’ linen.”
“You couldn’t say no, could you?”
“You saw the drinking well in the yard, didn’t you? They’d throw me down the well just like that,” recalls the oldest woman living in Lavriv (known in Volyn as a Banderite village). This reminded me of my mother’s friend Nastia accidentally shot by a young Red Army soldier at a vechornytsia traditional village evening party. Young villagers were taken to Lutsk for questioning for several months afterward and pressured to testify that the girl had died at the hands of a Banderite. As in any civil war (for how else can the armed confrontation in Western Ukraine after World War II be described?), it is virtually impossible to define who was on the wrong and the right side. In the Baltic states, the “forest brothers” were rehabilitated in the early 1990s. Their Ukrainian counterparts still hope to be recognized.
In the meantime, the graves of people, whose only fault was love of their native land, are visited only by black hermits.
