Monuments to unknown warriors

While their descendants are erecting obelisks to the insurgents, if only to console themselves temporarily with the feeling of being “patriots of Ukraine,” the remaining participants and eyewitnesses of those events are quietly passing away without sharing their memories.

500 VILLAGE HOMES BURNED DOWN

On the feast day of the Transfiguration of our Lord memorial slabs commemorating the events of 1943-1945 were unveiled in my native village of Lavriv. They were dedicated to two memorable battles fought by the Ukrainian insurgents. Of course, the first one, which took place on Aug. 20, 1943, could not have possibly reversed the course of history. Nevertheless, it played a historic role in the destiny of this village and its residents. I first heard about this when I was a little girl. Shortly after that battle almost all of Lavriv was burned down — over 500 village homes were consumed by fire in three days.

“The Germans walked from one house to the next, carrying torches, and the cattle were roaring in the closed barns. It was like the end of the world. People fled to the forest and neighboring villages,” recalled my late mother, Liubov Pylypivna.

She almost never told me anything about the battle that preceded the fire. She had probably never gotten over those experiences that had taught her to hold her tongue. The Soviet government used fire and sword to eradicate all memories of the Ukrainian insurgents. My mother died this spring, three days before Easter, at the age of 84. She almost died when she was a young woman; on two occasions bullets narrowly missed her head. A month before the German troops burned down the village, they set fire to the church. The wooden church of St. Mary the Protectress stood on top of the same hill as the current brick church. It had a precious ancient icon with gold ornamentation, and gold and silver bowls. Some people even said that the church was burned down by a local night watchman, because “he had given the relics to the Germans.” In order to cover his tracks, he threw a red herring across the path. But there is a more plausible version of events: the church was razed to the ground because it was a gathering place, where people discussed the struggle against the Germans. Shortly before the fire, the Nazis opened fire on a crowd of villagers, who had gathered in front of the church after the service. One of the bullets barely missed my mother.

Today the participants of that memorable battle of 1943 are no longer among the living, but some eyewitnesses who are still alive remember it. One of them is Nadia, the wife of Mykhailo Korolchuk, a political prisoner, who was repressed and exiled to Siberia in 1940. She recalls that the insurgents ambushed a German convoy of three trucks and one car in the vicinity of Mukhavets (the name of a street in Lavriv), in a place known as Seredokhresnia. The convoy was traveling from the direction of a railway substation called Pereparov.

There was an entire company of insurgents led by Vladik Herasymchuk. He was nicknamed Vykhreshcheny, probably because one of his relatives was Jewish. He had served in the tsarist army. He knew how to fight. The Germans were stopped because they were supposedly going to burn the village down. The insurgents killed them all. Later the Germans lured them to Prince Lubomirski’s former estate and shot nearly all of them. Vladik was killed in that battle, along with his son and son-in-law. They all died for Ukraine.

In retaliation, the Germans, together with the Poles, burned down Lavriv a few days later. Afterwards, when Mother and I tried to recall whether a single old house in Lavriv had survived the fire — even just for show — we could barely count a few dozen, and most of those were located in remote hamlets. The inhabitants of Lavriv built dugouts on the ash- heap of the burned village. These dugouts survived — along with the bunkers of scattered Banderite detachments in the neighboring forests — until the early 1950s. I was born in 1955 in such a dugout, on the burned-out site of our house.

During a village party in 1945, a “Soviet” soldier named Mykola entered the dugout home of our neighbor, Granny Yaryna. When he was playing with his rifle, it went off, apparently by accident.

“He was sitting opposite us and Yaryna’s daughter Nastia was sitting beside me. After the smoke dispersed, he asked: ‘Whom did I shoot? Did I shoot Liuba?’ There was a tiny hole in Nastia’s forehead from the bullet, and a drop of blood. Mother often talked about this.”

After that bloody village fete, our young people were often dragged off to the NKVD station in Lutsk; they wanted a statement that Nastia was killed by one of the “forest brothers.”

“We cried and said it wasn’t true, but the investigating officer laughed: ‘Moscow doesn’t believe in tears.’”

HELLO, SISTER! FAREWELL, BROTHER!

While the people of Lavriv have more or less accurate memories about the battle of 1943 (perhaps due to the compelling association with the ensuing fire), there is only one surviving insurgent, who in the winter of 1945 took part in a three- hour battle outside the village with the members of an NKVD extermination battalion, in which about 50 of them were killed. His name is also Volodymyr Herasymchuk (no relation to Vladik Vykhreshcheny; Herasymchuk is a common surname in Lavriv). This ailing survivor lives in Lutsk. The chairperson of the Lavriv village council, Svitlana Herasymchuk, says that his recollections are blurry.

“Natalka, why didn’t you ask your mother?” I heard this phrase many times from my fellow countrymen.

My mother had a good memory and didn’t have to read any notes to recall individual episodes from the village’s history (things she had witnessed) as well as facts from the life stories of many families. Her accounts were never tainted by opportunism; she related facts as they really happened, and she never spared anyone for the sake of historical truth.

“I saw Jews being shot in the place where the collective farm’s hencoop was later built. Our mother told us to climb up to the attic, and we watched through the window. They were surrounded on four sides; the large pit that was quickly filled heaved for a long time, with blood oozing out. Do you think only Germans did it? Our people were among them, wearing their uniforms.”

I asked her a lot of questions, but I didn’t have time to ask many more. And now I can’t. Shortly before my mother died, Halyna Tabakovska-Zakoshtui, the niece of Ananiy Zakoshtui, our neighbor and Krai leader of the OUN, who led the insurgents to their last battle with the NKVD in 1945, sent her several old photographs from Lithuania, where she has been living since returning from exile: “Let them remind you of Lavriv in those days,” she wrote.

The pictures were taken by her uncle. A small faded photo shows the boys from the forest. Any older Lavriv resident takes one look at it and identifies them as the men from that insurgents’ detachment. My mother told me their names. She would get mad at me for pestering her with such questions, saying “These people died a long time ago.” But I never wrote down their names, and now no one can identify them.

After Ukraine became independent, a memorial complex was built for these insurgents in Lavriv, opposite the Church of St. Mary the Protectress, including a gravestone for Ananiy Zakoshtui and stellae engraved with a long list of names of victims of the purges, UPA soldiers, and people from Lavriv who were shot in Lutsk Prison on June 23, 1941. Entire families lie buried here. Some victims have no graves — no traces or memories are left. They are alive in other peoples’ memories, but these memories do not seem to interest the independent Ukrainian government.

“Oh, my God, is that Sonia?” Nadia Korolchuk whispered to me when a woman bent with age and wearing a simple embroidered blouse approached a microphone during the unveiling ceremony.

“Who is she? Who is that woman?” Voices were heard in the crowd that had been patiently but absentmindedly listening to excruciatingly correct speeches of the powerful.

I escorted Sofia Ilchuk-Zubkovych, the only surviving participant of those events, to Nadia Kovalchuk. In a moment both women were so immersed in their reminiscences, they didn’t notice anything happening around them.

They had been friends in the mid-1940s, when the insurgents were still strong. Kovalchuk’s brother also went to the forest.

“My father begged him not to go, but he went because ‘someone has to fight for Ukraine.’ And he died for it when he was 17 years old. He was buried near the village of Kalnatychi, now in Rivne oblast, past Sukhovolia, near Stavriv. I visited my brother’s grave and met Sonia’s father. He used to be a lumberjack in our forest, and for a time he lived in our dugout. Their house was burned down because they had links with the insurgents. So they installed a stove in the cellar and lived there.

“Natalka, did you hear Sonia’s story about the baby that she was looking after? That girl was the daughter of Maksym Rudiak, a Lavriv resident. He and his wife fled the village, running for their lives, and they left their child to be looked after by fellow villagers, and she ended up with Sonia’s father. I saw the child at that time. Later I heard about her as she was growing up. The NKVD started looking for her. All of the Rudiaks died fighting for Ukraine; some of them were shot or they died in the camps of Kazakhstan.”

Sonia and her parents were also deported. She served her sentence in Vorkuta. The girl, Svitlana Rudiak, escaped, and later in Bakivka she married a Slovak named Josyp Tarchu, and the two of them later went to Czechoslovakia.

ONE FORMER SOLDIER IDENTIFIED, BUT HE IS A STRANGER

Aunt Halka, one of my relatives, is eating a blessed apple. Opposite the memorial dedicated to the heroes of the national-liberation struggle stands the restored Church of St. Mary the Protectress. My aunt sighs sadly:

“Those widows whose husbands served in the Soviet army keep receiving pension increases. My husband limped on his wounded leg until he died; they all know that he had fought for Ukraine, but this state isn’t paying us anything for them.”

The few former Banderites who live in Lavriv can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Age is taking its toll. I remember when the village was sent into a paroxysm of excitement a few years ago when an UPA veteran arrived all the way from Great Britain. Half the villagers “recognized” him as one of their old friends or a relative believed to have perished long ago in a bunker. They say he kissed the earth of Lavriv after being driven to the village boundary from Lutsk, but he never gave his name and refused the invitation of the then village council chairman Arsen Sydorchuk to pay homage at the ancestors’ graves.

“What do you mean, he’s unidentified?” exclaims Sydorchuk, now the deputy head of the Lutsk oblast state administration. “I went to Lviv to pick him up. His name is Hnat Yushko. But he was not born in Lavriv, that’s for sure. He was not interested in anything there, not in the people or the history. When our church burned down (St. George’s Church in the old graveyard) I wrote so many letters asking for help! One letter was published in a journal read by Ukrainian emigres all over the world. Hnat got in touch with the editor, Pavlo Dorozhynsky, and asked how much he could trust those people and whether his donation would be of any use.

“While he was visiting Lavriv, Yushko lived with the family of Stepan Dyl, Mykhailo Korolchuk’s son-in-law. His Uncle Yosyp Dyl has lived in Great Britain for a long time; he found his way there after World War II.

“This man Yushko was not active in the Ukrainian community. My uncle was the head of the community in Nottingham, and we have lots of acquaintances there, including people from Hnat’s village. My wife and I have visited Great Britain 11 times, but no one seems to know him. He stayed at my place for several days. He said he was born in Vyshenky, a village in Ternopil oblast. I told him I could take him to his native village, no problem. He said no. He visited it only once after the war. His sister and nephews lived there. He started sending money to them, but then there were some misunderstandings, and he stopped sending money. He had a British wife and two children, but then something went wrong and he moved to the Ukrainian Club where he was given shelter. When we were in Britain, we called him and hoped that he would invite us over. He didn’t and then all our contacts broke off.”

The Banderite “stranger” donated 5,000 dollars to the church in Lavriv. The roof was covered with tin and icons were purchased.

Quite a few Lavriv insurgents have died without ever talking about the past. Recently we found a photograph of Leonid Romaniv, another participant in the battle of 1945. He was not even 20 years old when he was wounded and died for Ukraine. This village, which found itself at the crossroads of the great highways of history — invaded by Tatars, Turks, the French, Austrians, Cossacks, Germans, and Poles — is immortalizing history on its own small scale. But without state recognition, all these memorials will remain monuments without memory.