Magdalena Rigamonti, Onet: What is in Volyn land?
Olaf Popkiewicz: Tens of thousands of human remains, mostly laid down in collective pits.
Complex?
Put in. They were buried erstwhile they smelled. No, not to be buried decently, just due to the fact that the Ukrainians were disturbed by the stench. frequently these remains are stretched, plowed and dismembered. As of 1943, from the Volyn massacre they lie in the ground, in sands, in wetlands, in various places. The Ukrainians allowed us to exhume only once, in 2011.
How many human remains did you find?
About 400. There's a fewer more 1000 in the ground. We have a massive crime rate here. Until today, we don't know how many people were murdered. These are just estimates, from 60 to 120,000 victims.
What condition could they be in?
Depends on the soil. If the bodies were buried in clay soil, they could have undergone a fatty-wax transformation.
And?
And the soft tissue was preserved, which means it could look like it was thrown into the tomb a fewer months ago. erstwhile you discover them, the odor is fundamentally unbearable. It's just a stench. And sweet. hard to handle. erstwhile the Polish squad exhumed the victims of the Katyń massacre in Kharkiv, where the land was wet, it turned out that the remains were very well preserved. And there the stench was hard to withstand.
I don't think there's much clay in Volyn.
It's mostly sand, but it's swamp. In the swamp, specified remains can be mummified. However, in most cases we can anticipate to see reasonably well preserved human bones.
In 2011, we dug at the alleged Dead Pole. There were bodies of women and children and most likely 3 men, but old men. Sand is very easy permeable there, and due to the fact that the remains were buried very shallowly, the root network of trees caused a strong demolition of human bones.
Roots let their shoots go, grow, and very willingly penetrate the bones. They go inside, let go of the side legs, and smash those bones. There was a very large proportion of the remains of children on the Tropim Pole whose skeletons are not as mineralized as the bones of adult humans.
Are you saying there's not much left of these kids?
Sometimes just a fistful of skull bones, 1 tooth, if evidently this baby already had teeth...
Things found during the exhumation in Volyn
They were sent to bury the bodies due to the fact that they were disturbed by the stench.
How many bodies were dumped in this pit?
We counted 239. The bottom was 5 by 3 meters tall. The bodies were thrown on the another side, but not until 2 weeks after his death. Before that, they were lying where these people were murdered. It was August 1943. The heat's terrible. Forest animals, different foxes may have used... Eventually, people from the village close Sokół were sent to bury these corpses, only due to the fact that the stench was simply unbearable.
Who made that decision?
Of course, there are no documents. We only know the witness report. We know that the commander of the Ukrainian Insurgency Army (UPA), a guy called Lysy, was sick of this stench, besides drove out women and children from the Ukrainian village and told them to bury the corpse. We know that people, for example, utilized to put the remains of children on pitchforks and throw them into a shallow pit.
Why would women and children do that?
On the 1 hand, due to the fact that men were few, due to the fact that they were either at war or in POW camps, on the other, due to the fact that women were the ones who were cleaning up. The UPA soldiers didn't want to do the dirty work. They were impunityless and could command anyone, so they went to bury the effects of their crimes of innocent people. I'm talking about innocent people due to the fact that you can't put an equal mark on all the Ukrainians who were there. He was guilty of Lysy, who ordered the killing of Poles, his soldiers who carried out this order were guilty. On the another hand, the Falcon people had to just submit.
The falcon lies right next to the Polish-Ukrainian border.
Yeah, close the Bug River.
It was expected to be reconciliation. Only bushes were cut at the cemetery
Why then, in 2011 the Ukrainian side agreed to exhumation in Volyn?
The reason seems rather sublime, namely Euro 2012, the European football championship, which was to take place in Poland and Ukraine. And before that the Euro was to come to reconciliation between Poles and Ukrainians. Then the president of Poland was Bronisław Komorowski and Ukraine was Viktor Yanukovych. Yanukovych lit a candle and a devil's eye. He smiled at the European Union, waved to Americans, to Russians, bowed to Poles.
Pro-Russian, anti-Ukrainian.
Then in 2014 we found that out. Remember, however, that we are in 2011. The thought was that Polish archaeologists exhume the remains of victims in Volyn, and Ukrainians in Poland exhume Ukrainian victims of Polish retaliatory actions. It was called a failure parity. Then there would be celebrations, meetings of both presidents and reconciliation ready. Satan's idea.
On the another hand, the Ukrainian expedition found nothing or 1 corpse. I do not know whether it was the consequence of their inability, of making a bad historical question, or of the fact that the scale of Polish retaliation in Ukrainians was much smaller than the murders of Poles by Ukrainians. On the another hand, as I have already said, we exhumed about 400 human remains on the Dead Pole and in Wola Ostrowiecka. And the failure parity didn't work, and reconciliation didn't happen. And there was expected to be a gathering of the presidents at the cemetery in Ostrówków, where the remains were found, there was expected to be a mass, reconciliation, and all that ended was that bushes were cut off by the road leading to the cemetery, and the crosses that stood there.
The Ukrainian side did not agree to further exhumations?
There's been a blockage. However, thanks to the fact that in 2011 we had this exhumation window, we besides gained cognition about how the corpses were treated, how they were treated, and how they could be in condition. We know that there are many opponents of the exhumation of victims of the Volyn massacre in Ukraine. We've experienced this before, 13 years ago.
It must be remembered that president Yanukovych was a large enemy of the Swoboda party, a nationalist Ukrainian organization whose representatives denied the fact of the Volyn massacre, so it is no wonder that they opposed our work. erstwhile we led the excavation, we were inactive invaded by activists of this party. They tried to discredit our actions differently. OMON was watching us at the time.
“A group of men arrived, any of them dressed in white, in specified sports suits”
Did you talk to the people of Svobody?
Yes, at any point they even required us to present the remains to them before the ceremonial burial. They were already in coffins, composed of large Pietism. That was interesting. A group of men arrived, any of them dressed in white, in specified sports suits, and any of them, as usual. Turns out the white ones don't defile themselves with physical work, better. Everyone's fat, which means they're surviving well. Six of them were. Next to them, there were guys with hairs and mosquitoes. They came here to prove that your analysis of Dr. Iwony Teul, an anthropologist at the Medical Academy in Szczecin, was inappropriate. The point was, in their opinion, we've raised the number of casualties in this burial chamber. They demanded that we open the coffins. We agreed, and the Ukrainians started throwing out the bones of children and women like potatoes. Then they said it was impossible that they were the remains of 239 people.
The remains of bodies found during exhumation work in Volyn
What was the methodology of your counting?
Every man has 2 femurs and a skull. It turned out that Ukrainians could not separate the femur from another long bones.
You said yourself there was a problem with the bones of children.
But there were another remains, fragments of skulls. I remember that Dr. Teul was furious at the time, and she had to explain herself to the ignorant from the investigation that was very honest. We all felt that Ukrainians wanted to kill these children again. They succeeded erstwhile in 1943, one more time in 2011. Fortunately, erstwhile we dug in the village of Wola Ostrowiecka, in the place where the school building stood until 1943, they no longer appeared. There we listed 150 human remains, besides based on human bones. These remains were very scattered. There was no trace of the building, there was just an arable field behind the communism of the collective farm.
What happened there in 1943?
Women and children were closed at school, after which the building was set on fire and thrown grenades.
That body didn't burn to the ground?
Nope. It's called bone scrap. But assuming that all man has 1 spine bone called an atlas, 1 rotor, we've counted 150 corpses in more space than the school occupied. The most shocking thing for me, but for the full crew, it was uncovering the remains in anatomical arrangement. They lay deeper, below the plough. It was a skeleton of a parent and a child. That female hugged the baby...
I know you're active in the archaeology of crime, that you inactive find human remains.
But then I couldn't take it. Besides, not just me. Even then, we knew what had happened there, how innocent people were treated, what they were doing with women and children. But then, in Volyn, I first saw so many skeletons of children. I've seen grown men, soldiers, war victims before... The remains of children show thoughtlessness and the destructive power of evil. Yes, it was shocking for me in Volyn. I couldn't accept it. He grabs his throat, he catches it. It's truly hard for me to realize the cruelty of the Ukrainians.
How are specified collective death pits sought?
I frequently hear, especially in the media, that you gotta usage georadar. I gotta talk about it. Georadar shows anomalies in the ground, but it will never show with certainty that this anomaly is just a burial pit. It could be a gap buried in a dung hole, a foundation in a home or something. The only way that's going to work is to do geological drilling, and then see if there's any human remains in the drill can.
“Men went in and there were killed with both axes”
How did you find Dead Pole?
Looking for casings. I knew that the people who were thrown down the pit were shot first. 3 people survived this slaughter. I met 1 of them. He was 13 in 1943. He told me everything step by step. First, the Ukrainians spent all the men from Ostrówówka village to 1 building. Pretext was medical examinations. The UPA branch entered the village with a song on their lips. Then there was an announcement that there would be a call for a joint Polish-Ukrainian military division to fight with Russians and with Germans. And they request men of draft age. And consequently, all man had to show up alone in a building that was expected to be the doctor's quarters.
Men came in and there they were killed with both axes. It was about not making any noise. And erstwhile these men were killed, Germans approached the village — Wehrmacht was alerted to the UPA battalion operating in the area. The Ukrainians had device guns on their heads, opened fire on the Germans and stopped them.
At the time, women and children were locked in the church. possibly the Ukrainians simply wanted to burn them as they did in another villages, specified as Kisielina. erstwhile the shooting took place, the Ukrainians realized that even if they set the church on fire, the Germans would be able to open it and release these women, children and old people. They chased them away, covering them like shields in front of the German army. As they passed by the cemetery, on the northern edge of the village, the older residents were to ask them to kill them on consecrated ground. And so most of the old men were murdered there.
The remainder were driven through fields towards the village of Sokół, north of Ostrówków. About halfway there was a decision to kill everyone. The bald men ordered bayonets, due to the fact that it's a waste of bullets. There was a terrible racket, children were crying, people howling, screaming, and UPA soldiers demanded that he let the usage of firearms. He said yes. 10 people each. Neighbors would get into groups, larger families would walk together, then they would hold hands, lay their face to the ground, and the Ukrainians would approach each another separately and shoot. The gentleman I was talking to, he lay next to his mom, and he survived just due to the fact that his mother's brain blew his head off. The Ukrainian who shot that female ran out of magazine, loaded it, saw this brain on the boy, and most likely figured he'd already killed him, missed him, and shot another man.
Is he inactive alive?
I don't know. In any case, thanks to him, we know that Ukrainians utilized firearms. But specified a execution is uncommon during the Volyn massacre. More often, Ukrainians murdered bayonets, forks, both axes, due to the fact that ammunition was scarce. And specified pits with remains will be harder to find. And there are thousands of them, if not tens of thousands. According to witness reports, UPA left these human remains on top. Both the National Army soldiers and the local population spoke about this. They said that after killing the full Polish village Ukrainians would leave, and the corpses of residents would fall everywhere. And usually after a while, they were buried or thrown into different places because, like I said, they smelled awful.
The remains found during work in Volyn
"This looks more like an effort to cover up the traces of Volyn crimes"
Now the Minister of abroad Affairs ensures that Poland will have the right to exhume victims of the Volyn massacre.
And I have serious doubts about that. Will it be as it is heard in our archaeological environment that the website of Polish scientists, archaeologists and anthropologists is to be an observer, and the exhumations are to be conducted by Ukrainians?
Why do you think this is simply a bad solution?
With these nationalist sentiments that are presently reigning in Ukraine, besides fueled by the war, I fear that this will not be a fair exhumation. Ukrainians are contaminated with the worship of UPA, which broke out with tremendous force in Ukraine as the war began. This was even visible at the minute erstwhile president Zelenski appeared against the banners of the flag.
In specified a situation, we can only look and photograph. It seems to me more like an effort to cover up the traces of these Volyn crimes than an effort to settle. I may be harsh on the Ukrainians, but I've been watching things there, and I've been in situations that make me have limited assurance in the Ukrainians on this subject. In my opinion, the Ukrainians, by giving their consent to the exhumation, want to effort to whitewash themselves from the crimes of the Ukrainian Insurgency Army.
