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A Conference on the Kholm Massacre

Oct 2, 2014 | Newpathway, Community, Featured

On October 4, 2014 the Ukrainian Canadian Research and Documentation Centre along with the Shevchenko Scientific Society of Canada and the Association of Ukrainians “Zakerzonia” will host an international scholarly conference titled “The Kholm Region During World War II” at St. Vladimir’s Institute in Toronto. On September 25, 2014 the New Pathway sat down for an interview with Myroslaw Iwanek, one of the panelist of the conference.
The interview began by asking Mr. Iwanek about his motivation to study the Kholm region. He stated that it was a combination of personal and academic reasons. His mother is from the area and “I’m emotionally tied to the region because my mother’s entire side was from that area.” When he began exploring the history of the region more, he became interested in the documentary background of the area – particularly after he visited the Kubiyovych Fond at the National Archives in Ottawa (an archive of the Ukrainian Central Committee). “I wanted to verify what my parents and other villagers said with the documents I found…that’s how I became interested in the history of the Kholm region.”
He is also the editor of the “Zakerzonia” Library and became interested in the events of the Kholm region through his work on the region’s memoirs. The latest Kholm collection of memoirs is entitled “Krov Ukrainska, Krov Polska…” He began working on this latest work many years ago when collecting memoirs and letters regarding the events of the region during the Second World War. He concludes that he became interested in the region because of three factors: family ties, the memoirs he read and the documents from the Ukrainian Central Committee.
The conference, which Mr. Iwanek will participate in, originated after last year’s Polish commemoration of the Volynian Massacre. It was after their “aggressive perspective of history” in which they viewed the conflict between Ukrainians and Poles during the Second World War in a very singular viewpoint (Polish victims and Ukrainian evildoers) that the idea of the conference came about. The conference is meant to analyse the entire history of the region rather than just one perspective of one region. This international conference attempts to confront the Polish perspectives with Ukrainian ones and explain the interactions of Poles and Ukrainians during the Second World War.
Mr. Iwanek wants this conference to give a more balanced perspective of the war than what is currently being studied in Poland. He believes that Polish histories have had “a tendency to look at the facts very specifically – particularly the reasons for Volyn and only about 1943. It’s as if nothing happened outside of that region or that year. They don’t look at anything else before the war started for example…Whereas the Ukrainian perspective is more linear – the events in 1942/1943 had an influence on the events in Volyn in 1943 and onwards.” The participants of this conference follow this course and show the history of the region in a territorial and timely perspective.
Volodymyr Trofymovych from the National University ‘Ostroh Academy’ in Ukraine, for example will be discussing the Kholm events and their resonances in Volyn and Halychyna. Mr. Iwanek uses the example of how Ukrainians from Halychyna organized aid and defence committees to send material and defenders to Ukrainians in the Kholm region who were being persecuted by the Poles as early as 1942. Another topic will be centered on the Orthodox Church in the Lublin district which will be led by Ihor Halagida from the University of Gdansk in Poland. This topic will show how the church was re-established during the war years and the high price the priests paid for their efforts to re-awaken the local’s Ukrainian national consciousness.
Mr. Iwanek believes one of the most interesting discussions will be Roman Wysocki’s (University of Lublin, Poland) on the influence of the Polish Government-in-Exile in England over the actions of the Polish Home Army in Kholm. Mr. Iwanek indicates that in “March the Polish Home Army began one of their biggest military operations outside of the Warsaw Uprising [in the Kholm region aimed against the local Ukrainians], you can’t believe that one of the biggest Home Army operations was outside of the Government’s control.” To study this aspect, Dr. Wysocki has researched the archives in England.
Mr. Iwanek will look into the casualties in the Kholm region on the basis of the Ukrainian Central Committee, the Wehrmacht (German Army) and German police reports. One of the most interesting and significant aspects of Mr. Iwanek’s research is the database that he has compiled with the help of Ihor Halagida that documents the names of all those killed in the Kholm region. “Through this compilation we have concrete numbers of the casualties…The entire database is based on known names. Therefore, we did not include information about unknown casualties but only those that we have concrete information on. For example, we know that in one village a priest buried 16 people killed by the Poles but we don’t know their names. So we couldn’t include it in the list.” The list includes names from the very young (Vera Barylska was only 6 months old when she was killed in the village of Zratycheva) to the old (Havryliuk Avanasiy was 60 years old from the village of Berest). Mr. Iwanek also indicates that when you look at the total number of women and children killed, they outnumber the men.
The total number of known casualties recorded in this database is over 5,000 identified individuals. In this way, they want to go away from the popular description (from both Ukrainians and Poles) on the massacres of the Second World War: “mountains of corpses and rivers of blood”. Mr. Iwanek wants to know the exact numbers of those who died rather than imaginary figures.
What is important in the figure above is its accuracy. Mr. Iwanek researched German archives and also local memoirs and oral testimonies and they coincided with one another. However, what is truly remarkable is the difference of the scale of killings from the Ukrainian (in Kholm) and Polish (in Volyn and Halychyna) massacres. For example, the most precise numbers in the Polish deaths in Volyn and Halychyna are roughly 20,000 but the region where this occurred is wide. However, the 5,000 deaths, identified by Mr. Iwanek, occurred in a smaller region and the killings were thus much more concentrated. The proportions of death should be compared in this way and not just based on numbers.
The database also looks into the professions of those killed: the leaders of the community like mayors, teachers, priests, bankers, etc. Mr. Iwanek states that this was an attempt to destroy the Ukrainian way of life in the region. The figures and facts of the killings are unimaginably horrible and they need to be remembered. The tragic history of the Kholm region is especially important as it directly influenced the actions of Ukrainians throughout the war.
The conference begins at 10:00 am at 620 Spadina Ave. in Toronto on October 4, 2014.

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