The history Polish memory refuses to face

ROMAN SHEREMETA

Professor. Economist. Founder. Author. Writing about geopolitics, Ukraine, power, and how decisions shape the world.

JUN 30

The most important fact about the current crisis in Polish-Ukrainian relations is that Polish memory begins in 1943.

Ask a Polish official, a Polish historian, or a Polish citizen on the street to explain the difficult history between the two nations, and the conversation will start with Volhynia. The 1943 massacres of ethnic Poles by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. Tens of thousands of Polish civilians killed in their villages. The graphic accounts of cruelty. The orders from the OUN-B leadership.

I do not contest this history. Ukrainians who want to be taken seriously about this period must acknowledge what happened in those villages.

But Polish memory has a problem. It starts the clock in 1943, and the events before 1943 – the events that explain why Ukrainian nationalism took the form it did, why the Polish state was hated in Galicia and Volhynia by the time the Second World War began, and why an organized Ukrainian armed movement emerged in territories Poland claimed as its own – have been almost entirely erased from Polish public consciousness.

This is the history Polish memory refuses to face.

The war Poland fought against Ukraine

In November 1918, as the Habsburg Empire collapsed, Ukrainians in Eastern Galicia declared the West Ukrainian People’s Republic. Lviv, the regional capital, would be its seat of government. Within hours, Polish forces launched military operations to crush the new Ukrainian state. The Polish-Ukrainian War of 1918-1919 followed. Poland prevailed militarily. The West Ukrainian People’s Republic was destroyed. Galicia, Volhynia, and other Ukrainian-majority territories were absorbed into the new Polish state, which had been created weeks earlier.

This is the founding act that Polish memory of the Polish-Ukrainian relationship has erased. Poland, in its very first months of restored independence, fought a war to deny the same right to Ukrainians. The argument that Volhynia 1943 was unprovoked Ukrainian aggression is simply false.

The Treaty of Riga betrayal

In 1920, Poland under Józef Piłsudski formally allied with Symon Petliura’s Ukrainian People’s Republic against Bolshevik russia. Polish and Ukrainian forces marched on Kyiv together. Petliura believed Poland was a partner in Ukrainian independence.

But Poland betrayed Ukraine.

In March 1921, after Polish military setbacks, Poland negotiated separately with Soviet russia at Riga. The Ukrainian People’s Republic was excluded from the negotiations. Poland and Soviet russia divided what is now Ukraine between them. Poland kept Galicia and Volhynia in the west. Soviet russia kept central and eastern Ukraine, where it would proceed to construct the Soviet Ukrainian SSR. The Ukrainian People’s Republic was abandoned by its Polish ally and collapsed within months. Petliura fled. He was assassinated in Paris in 1926.

This is not an interpretation. It is what happened. Poland sat down with russia and partitioned Ukraine, exactly as the major European powers had partitioned Poland itself a century earlier. The country that today demands Ukrainian acknowledgment of Volhynia spent the early 1920s collaborating with Moscow to extinguish Ukrainian statehood. Polish memory has buried this story so thoroughly that most Polish citizens have never heard of the Treaty of Riga.

What Poland did to Ukrainians it ruled

In the interwar period, Polish rule over Galicia and Volhynia became increasingly violent. In 1930, the Polish state carried out the “Pacification” of Eastern Galicia – a military and police operation against Ukrainian villages that destroyed property, looted Ukrainian cooperatives, and beat civilians, priests, and teachers in a campaign to crush Ukrainian cultural and economic life.

In 1934, Warsaw opened the Bereza Kartuska concentration camp specifically for political prisoners held without trial. Ukrainian nationalists were among its primary targets. The camp operated until 1939.

In 1938, the Polish military, on direct government orders, demolished more than 120 Orthodox churches in the Kholm region. Some of these churches were centuries old. The demolitions were part of a state campaign of forced Catholicization and Polonization of the Ukrainian borderland.

These are not Soviet inventions or Ukrainian nationalist mythology. They are documented Polish state policy, in the official records of the Polish government of the time.

The 1940s

The Volhynia massacres of 1943-44 took place in a context Polish memory does not include. Ukrainian deaths at Polish hands during the same period have been documented in detail.

In March 1944, units of the Polish Home Army and Peasants’ Battalions surrounded the Ukrainian village of Sahryń and killed between 800 and 1,200 Ukrainian civilians, who were shot or burned alive in their homes and church. In March 1945, former Home Army units drove the Ukrainian population of Pavlokoma into the local church, then took the men, women, and children to the cemetery in groups and shot them. 366 Ukrainians were killed. Dozens of other Ukrainian villages – Piskorovychi, Verkhovyna, Horajec, Zawadka Morochowska – were destroyed by Polish formations during the same period.

In 1947, the Polish communist state launched Operation Vistula, forcibly deporting 140,000 Lemkos, Boykos, and other Ukrainians from their ancestral lands and scattering them across the northern and western regions of Poland. Those Polish authorities suspected of sympathy with the Ukrainian underground – including priests, women, and children – were sent to the Jaworzno concentration camp, a former Nazi Auschwitz subcamp that the Polish state reopened and operated for Ukrainians from 1947 to 1949. Roughly 4,000 Ukrainians passed through it. Many did not come out.

A research program at the Ukrainian Catholic University, titled Victims of the Ukrainian-Polish Confrontation 1939-1947 and led by the Polish historian of Ukrainian origin Ihor Halahida of the University of Gdansk, has been documenting these deaths by name since 2018. As of November 2025, the program has identified 28,451 Ukrainian victims by name. The work continues. Halahida himself has acknowledged that the final Polish victim count will likely be higher than the Ukrainian one – he estimates close to 100,000. This is honest historical work, and it is the kind of bilateral scholarship Polish memory should engage with rather than suppress.

What Polish memory chooses

Polish memory chooses Volhynia. Polish memory chooses the 1943 massacres as the alpha and omega of the Polish-Ukrainian relationship. Polish memory does not choose 1918-1919. Polish memory does not choose the Treaty of Riga. Polish memory does not choose the Pacification, Bereza Kartuska, or the Kholm church demolitions. Polish memory does not choose Sahryń, Pavlokoma, Operation Vistula, or Jaworzno.

This selective memory has become Polish state policy. In September 2025, Polish President Karol Nawrocki submitted to the Sejm a bill that would criminalize denial of “crimes of Ukrainian nationalists.” The Polish Sejm rejected the bill in November. But the same president then proceeded, two months ago, to strip Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the Order of the White Eagle for the act of naming a Ukrainian Special Forces unit after UPA heroes. The asymmetry is not subtle. Poland demands Ukrainian acknowledgment of crimes against Poles. Poland refuses, at the level of state policy, to acknowledge its own.

I want to be clear about what I am and am not saying. Volhynia was a Ukrainian crime against Polish civilians. The exact mechanics of the campaign – whether it was a top-down OUN-B order or a regional initiative, the precise casualty figures, the role of Soviet provocation – remain contested among serious historians on both sides, and I will return to that historiographical debate in a future piece. But the core fact is not contested: tens of thousands of Polish civilians died in their villages at the hands of Ukrainian forces. Ukraine carries the larger share of blame for that specific atrocity.

But that is not the whole conversation. The whole conversation includes the war Poland fought to crush Ukrainian statehood in 1918-1919. It includes the Treaty of Riga, where Poland partitioned Ukraine with russia. It includes Bereza Kartuska, the Kholm churches, Sahryń, Pavlokoma, Operation Vistula, and Jaworzno. It includes 28,451 named Ukrainian victims documented by Polish and Ukrainian scholars working together at the Ukrainian Catholic University.

Polish memory’s refusal to engage with this longer record is not historical reckoning. It is the political weaponization of a single Ukrainian crime to obscure a century of Polish ones. The two countries cannot reconcile until Polish memory grows up enough to include what came before 1943.

Until then, the conversation is rigged. The verdict is decided before the trial begins. And Moscow, which has spent eighty years building the wall between these two nations, watches in satisfaction as Warsaw bricks the latest course into place.

Glory to Ukraine.

© 2026 Roman Sheremeta
548 Market Street PMB 72296, San Francisco, CA 94104

https://romansheremeta.substack.com/p/how-poland-betrayed-ukraine

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All Ukrainians have relatives or friends who were wounded or killed because of the russian invasion.

I am one of them. I lost three friends, and my cousin was severely wounded. This pain will stay with us for the rest of our lives.

But Ukrainians have no choice. They are defending their freedom and paying a terrible price for it. It is a matter of survival.

I know there are people in America and Europe who say “this is not our war.” To be honest, I don’t think I have much to say to you. Somewhere along the way, you lost your basic decency and humanity. I only hope you never experience the pain that Russians have inflicted on Ukrainian families.