Quoting Grzegorz Motyka’s From the Volhynian Massacre to Operation Vistula: The Polish–Ukrainian Conflict 1943–1947, pages 89–92:
The OUN‐B and UPA’s operation in the western districts of Volhynia was to cover — to surprise Poles and thwart any possible attempts at defence — many more localities than in the eastern part of the region as was previously the case.
Over the last months, UPA units in this area became stronger and attained greater fighting capabilities than those Dubovyi’s units had possessed in March–May. The UPA was also able to take advantage of the experience gained through police deserters. The date of the onslaught was set for Sunday, July 11 to attack Poles gathering in large numbers for mass.
According to the plan, after killing the population of a given village, UPA sotnias were to move quickly to the next village to carry out the next massacre. The intention was to achieve the greatest possible surprise and minimize chances of escape. Only Ukrainian self‐defence groups were to stay on spot and “clean” the area. Poles escaping the conflagration were not favoured by the time of year. Summer temperatures made spending nighttime outside feasible, but the short July night did not give the Poles, who literally became game, much time to escape and hide under the cover of darkness.
UPA units struck, as planned, on July 11, 1943. According to Władysław and Ewa Siemaszek’s findings, they simultaneously attacked ninety‐six villages in Horokhiv and Volodymyr counties and three in Kovel county. The next day, July 12, the same fate befell another fifty villages in Horokhiv and Volodymyr counties².
One of the first villages attacked was Dominopol, where the aforementioned Polish unit maintaining contacts with the UPA was stationed. It was probably liquidated on the night of July 11 by partisans from Porfyryi “Sich” Antoniuk’s zahon (regiment) supported by the OUN Security Service militia.
This is how one member of the OUN Security Service (SB) purportedly described the action to Danyl Shumuk: “We knocked on the door. The lieutenant […] opened it for us. We shot him on the doorstep. We shot the captain in bed as the typist jumped out the window and our boys shot her there. Then […] the SB boys went roaming around the village. Not a single Lakh remained alive by morning”³. About two hundred and twenty Poles were killed. The village was not burned down as the Polish farmsteads were taken over by Ukrainian [anticommunist]s.
The Gurów colony was attacked on the night of July 10–11 at about 2.30 AM. The inhabitants were dispatched inside individual houses with slashing weapons and firearms. About two hundred Poles were murdered there. At 3 AM, UPA men attacked the Wygranka colony. Inhabitants were awakened by the sounds coming from Gurów, with some seeking out hiding places or fleeing, some trying to defend themselves.
Nonetheless, about one hundred and fifty Poles fell victim to the UPA. At around 5 AM tragedy struck the Zamlicze folwark — one hundred and eighteen people were murdered. Approximately another eighty Poles were killed in the Nowiny colony at 8 AM.
In Poryck, UPA units struck when the Poles had gathered in the local church for mass, which started at 11 AM. They shot and threw grenades through the church doors and windows. This is how Jadwiga Krajewska recalled the attack:
The first shots were fired at Father Bolesław Szawłowski and the faithful during the Gloria […]. I was at church with my sister […]. When I heard the murderers walking around the church and saying “oh, this one’s still alive” I quickly grabbed some hat soaked in warm, sticky blood and used it to rub my and my sister’s faces. We pretended to be dead. The smoke was very suffocating, so people tried to flee the church, but machine gun fire ended their suffering at the church entrance. […] The Ukrainians shouted, “come out, whoever’s alive” and killed those exiting at the door […] attempts were made to blow the church up, but we only felt a terrible shock and then everything fell silent⁴.
While the slaughter in the church was taking place, other groups of partisans killed Poles remaining inside their homes. Attack participant Ivan Hrin later testified that the bodies of “up to 200” dead “were buried next to the Polish church. Residents were assembled to do this, [who — G.M.] dug a large hole at the west side of the building and carried the corpses from inside there. The corpses were buried just 25–30 meters from the church”⁵.
Poles gathered at church were also attacked by UPA men in Chrynów. The church was cordoned off and those leaving the 9 o’clock mass were stopped, while those entering for the 11 o’clock mass were let through. Around this time, machine gun fire opened up on the crowd. Once all those who were shot lay on the ground, the UPA men retreated without killing the wounded, thanks to which some of the fallen survived.
Meanwhile, UPA patrols killed Poles inside their homes. About one hundred and fifty people died. Poles were attacked at church in Zabłoćce as well. Seventy‐six people were murdered there.
Adela Preis (née Ziółkowska) recalls the events that took place in Kisielin:
After Mass, around 1 PM, bandits burst into the church […] murdering those inside. They smashed small children against the walls. Some of the congregation hid in the presbytery, including myself, my father, and my brother Stanisław. We went up to the second floor. The first floor was set on fire. The attackers used ladders to get to us. We struck them with bricks we’d attained from dismantling stoves and the walls. My brother […] was killed by a bullet that hit him directly in the heart. It was fired by a UPA man sitting on the roof of a nearby barn⁶.
Around 10 PM the UPA men left Kisielin — the effect of their operation was the murder of about ninety Poles. Most of those holed up in the presbytery survived.
Tragedy also befell Huta Majdańska in Zdolbuniv county. In the spring of 1943, the inhabitants of this village declared their loyalty to the Ukrainian underground and in exchange for a guarantee of safety provided the UPA with food (eggs, milk, grain, meat).
Despite this, on July 12 Ukrainian [anticommunists] murdered most of the inhabitants. 184 people died (including one Ukrainian woman). Eleven Poles survived. In the village of Zagaje, UPA men murdered about 260 Poles, in the village of Linów about 70, at Pustomyty about 90. Over those days Poles were also killed in the colonies of Stasin, Milatyń, Michałówka, Pelagin, Romanówka, Samowola, Smołowa, Rykowicze, Szczeniutyn Mały, Szczeniutyn Duży, Wolica, Topieliszcze, Zaszkiewicze Stare, and Zaszkiewicze Nowe, as well as in many other localities.
The night of July 15 and the day of July 16 saw the second wave of attacks. One hundred and one Poles were killed in the village of Pułhany and about fifty in the Szeroka colony (most of them went voluntarily to a clearing by the forest to hide from an alleged [Axis] pacification of which the Ukrainians had warned them and were shot there).
At noon the UPA attacked the village of Kupowalce, which had good relations with local Ukrainians and even supplied the UPA with food. The UPA men entered the village on carts from several directions at once. Poles were killed in their houses and gardens; the cornfields were also “combed” for escapees. A total of about one hundred and fifty people were murdered at that time. That same day at least 87 Poles were killed in the Lulówka Węgierszczyzna colony.
At the turn of July and August, UPA units in this area only rarely attacked Polish villages. One can suspect the intention was to lull the Poles into a false sense of security, which would allow them to launch another concentrated attack. This was also the purpose of a proclamation made by the staff of Sich‐Antoniuk’s zahon, which declared that the massacres that had just taken place were justified by the need to punish the Poles “with all the severity of wartime‐revolutionary demands” for collaboration with the Germans.
At the same time, “full security” was guaranteed to that part of the Polish population that did not collaborate with the Germans. Poles were urged “not to succumb to hostile agitation and not to leave their settlements”⁷.
Jared McBride sums it up thus in Peasants into Perpetrators: The OUN–UPA and the Ethnic Cleansing of Volhynia, 1943–1944:
The OUN–UPA‐planned ethnic cleansing continued unabated throughout summer 1943. The crescendo came on the night of July 11–12, 1943 when the UPA planned a highly coordinated attack (known among Poles as the “Peter and Paul action” for the holiday on which it occurred) against Polish villages in three raions: Kovel΄, Khorokhiv, and Volodymyr‐Volyns΄kyi.⁴⁶ Over one hundred localities were targeted in this action, and some 4,000 Poles were murdered.
Finally, the last wave of attacks came in December 1943 before Shukhevych decided to move the cleansing operations to Galicia where tens of thousands more Galician Poles were murdered. Following the killings in Volhynia, the UPA‐North group gave the order to “destroy all traces of the Poles” by “destroying all Polish churches and all other Polish places of worship. Destroy all farm homes, so there is no evidence that anyone ever lived there.”⁴⁷
These killings were no secret in Volhynia in 1943. Many historical sources on the occupation, from diaries to official Soviet and German reports, provide details about the cleansing. Likewise, contemporaneous Soviet partisan reports from the area are littered with references to the violence.
One late May report noted, “throughout villages in Stepan’, Derazhanaia, Rafalovka, Sarny, Vysotsk, Vladimirets, Klevan’, and other raions, the nationalists are carrying out mass terror against the Polish population […] the nationalists are not shooting the Poles but are using knives and axes to murder Poles irrespective of age and gender.”⁴⁸
Another report from April 1943 remarked, “The Ukrainian nationalists are carrying out bestial reprisals against the Polish population with the goal of completely destroying the Polish population of Ukraine. In Tsuman’ raion, a sotnia (company) of nationalists was given the order on April 15, 1943 to destroy all of the Poles and burn down their villages.”⁴⁹
Similarly, German reports from this time also noted the killings, as did reports from Polish military units.⁵⁰ Eyewitness testimonies from post‐Soviet investigations and Holocaust survivor collections in the west routinely reference these cleansing actions as well.⁵¹
Not all Volhynian Ukrainians supported the murder of their Polish neighbors. Some Ukrainians warned their Polish peers of impending OUN–UPA attacks, hid Poles, and helped them escape from Volhynia.⁵² Even in the Liuboml’ area (the focus of the next section), Poles acknowledged how Ukrainian neighbors helped them survive.
In Ostrivky, Czesław Kuwałek explained, “There were also incidents in which the Ukrainians behaved decently toward the Poles […] two Ukrainian families […] sheltered my uncle’s family for about three days after the attack and then took them to Wilczy Przewόz, where they could cross the Bug river.”⁵³
Moreover, a few Ukrainian leaders, including religious authorities and organizations, protested against the killings, though their declarations accomplished little.⁵⁴ Calls for restraint did not stem the tide of violence.
(Emphasis added in all cases.)
:::spoiler Click here for other events that happened today (July 11).
1892: Gustav‐Adolf von Zangen, Axis colonel and aristocrat, came to be.
1921: Adolf Schicklgruber temporarily resigned from the NSDAP due to disagreements with the party executive committee.
1936: Berlin and Vienna signed the Austro‐German Agreement or Juliabkommen.
1937: Tōkyō recalled units of the Imperial Chosen Army and Kwantung Army, previously ordered to march into China on the first day of the Second Sino‐Japanese War, due to political reasons. The Imperial Japanese Army and IJN agreed on a boundary in China. The Army was placed in charge of conducting the war in northern China, while the Navy would take on central and southern China. The IJN’s air power in China at this time consisted of eighty aircraft aboard carriers Kaga, Ryujo, and Hosho. Lastly, Tōkyō assigned Masafumi Arima to Cruiser Division 10.
1938: The IJN issued Order № 261 to raise sunken Chinese light cruisers Ninghai and Pinghai at Jiangyin, Jiangsu Province, China.
1939: Twenty‐seven Imperial bombers attacked Chongqing, China.
1940: After Fascist submarine U‐34 sank Norwegian ship Janna southwest of Ireland at 0700 hours, Pierre Laval became the 120th Prime Minister of France with the title of the Vice President of the Council, and Marshal Philippe Pétain declared hisself head of state of the French Republic. On radio later on the same day, he spoke of the expected rôles of the young people, the parents, and the government. ‘Let us give ourselves to France. She has always led her people to greatness.’ (Privately, the younger generation responded poorly to Pétain's new vision, criticising it as discriminatory toward young women, enslaving them as homemakers.) As well, one meeting between Admiral Erich Raeder and his Chancellor took place at the Obersalzberg, Berchtesgaden, where matters of how things were in Norway and Berlin’s plans for that area were made clear. They talked about how to continue the war against Britain and again the Chancellor made it clear of his aims and that no invasion was to take place until all efforts had been made to bring London to sue for peace. (Nevertheless, within the next few days the Chancellor would change his mind.) Joachim von Ribbentrop also requested Spain to assist in the detaining of the Duke of Windsor, the former King Edward VIII of the United Kingdom. The Luftwaffe attacked the British Royal Navy Base at Portland in southern England, then Capitano Tarantini attacked Panamanian tanker Beme in the Mediterranean Sea south of Cyprus at 2300 hours as the tanker was in ballast on a voyage from Haifa, Palestine to Istanbul. The first torpedo fired missed, but gunfire disabled the tanker. After removing the tanker’s crew, the next torpedo sunk the ship.
1941: The 1.Panzergruppe marched near Kiev as Maggiore Baracca searched for a reported Allied convoy in the Atlantic Ocean. Alessandro Malaspina took orders to move to a new patrol area in the Atlantic Ocean. At 1130 hours, she sighted Portuguese freighter Quanza and submerged to approach; after positive identification, she abandoned the pursuit. Leonardo da Vinci sighted a freighter in the Atlantic Ocean at 1100 hours. At 1218 hours, they identified the target as the Spanish Navy tanker Pluton.
1942: As the Eastern Axis leadership abandoned the plans to capture New Caledonia, Fiji, and Samoa, the Western Axis captured Soviet 2nd Shock Army commanding office Andrei Vlasov. Axis submarine U‐203 sank Panamanian tanker Stanvac Palembang northeast of Trinidad at 0352 hours; five died but foty‐five lived. Axis U‐166 also sank Dominican sailing vessel Carmen with the deck gun eight miles off the northern coast of the Dominican Republic at 1900 hours; somebody died but seven did not.
1943: Axis forces in Operation Citadel ran out of momentum, even though there had been some objectives reached. Berlin refused to call off the operation, which could have saved many of the units. In Sicily, General Paul Conrath’s Hermann Göring Panzer Division overran the Yankee outposts at Ponte Dirillo and were only prevented from breaking through the Allied lines by an attack by James Gavin’s paratroopers from the rear. Elsewhere, Conrath personally led a column which assaulted the weakly held Piano Lupo, to get within two thousand yards of the beach before being stopped by the defenders. In Greece, a partisan threw a grenade into an Axis officer’s vehicle, killing the officer.
1944: Berlin summoned Claus von Stauffenberg to see his Chancellor in Berchtesgaden regarding the situation of the Home Army, and coincidentally the last 35,000 men of 4.Armee surrendered to the Soviets at Minsk, Byelorussia. London, England received many V‐1 bombs and somebody reported over thirty‐eight fatalities. The worst incident, slaughtering fourteen, was at Annerley Road in Crystal Palace, southeast London. At Public House, the Axis hit The Paxon’s Arms close by in Clapham, slaughtering eleven in the pub. At Deptford, southeast London, Axis firepower massacred eleven dock workers and destroyed some cranes and workshops. Lastly, the Eastern Axis’s 18th Army under Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi launched a counterattack in the Aitape area in New Guinea, placing pressure on Yankee troops yet sustaining heavy casualties.
1945: The last remaining Axis ambassador to the Soviet Union, Naotake Sato, failed to convince Vyacheslav Molotov to engage their two nations in a formal peace treaty.