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| -Short Attention Span Theater- |
| 100,000 Poles Were Killed By Their Neighbours In 1943. Most of the World Never Heard. |
| 2026-05-09 |
| [YouTube] On the morning of July eleventh, nineteen forty-three, Ukrainian militias attacked ninety-nine Polish villages simultaneously. They came at dawn, while families were dressing for Sunday mass. They surrounded the villages so no one could flee. They killed men, women, children, with axes and knives so the gunfire would not give them away. By nightfall, eight thousand Poles were dead. The killings would continue for months. Across Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, the dead would eventually number around one hundred thousand. The Germans, who occupied the territory, did not stop them. The Soviets, advancing from the east, would later call it a footnote. This is the story of the Volhynia massacres of nineteen forty-three to forty-four — one of the largest single ethnic cleansing campaigns of the Second World War, carried out by Ukrainian nationalist militias against the Polish civilian population of what is now western Ukraine. The killings were ordered by the Bandera faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists. They were carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, the UPA. They were aimed at the creation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state. In Poland, the dead of Volhynia have been remembered for decades. In June two thousand and twenty-five, the Polish parliament made July eleventh a national day of remembrance. The first exhumations of victims on Ukrainian soil, after years of dispute, began in May two thousand and twenty-five. By the Polish state's estimate, the remains of around fifty-five thousand victims are still in unmarked graves. In Anglophone histories of the war, Volhynia is mostly absent. It is not in the textbooks. It is not in the films. The story is carried, mostly, by the Polish-Volhynian diaspora and by the people who lived it. |
| Posted by:Ulailet+Thud3602 |