The POLIN Museum manager Prof. Dariusz Stola compared the National Armed Forces with UPA. The veterans responded with a statement: it was a "slash" and "ahistorical" thesis, contrary to the achievements of historians and with 2 resolutions of the Sejm.
One conviction in Polsat studio
In the program "The Most crucial Questions" on Polsat News, on August 10, Prof. Dariusz Stola spoke about Polish-Ukrainian memory. The manager of the POLIN Museum of past of Polish Jews stated that "the anticipation that the Ukrainians would now settle with the legacy of UPA is simply unrealistic". After that, he moved to the Polish backyard: “We had akin people. Here it was called National Armed Forces and ONR". He concluded briefly: "They were enemies of democracy and enemies of national minorities".
That's all it took. The conversation about individual else's memory ended with the establishment of the Polish armed underground in 1 row with the formation which slaughtered Polish villages.
The Combatant Response
The National Armed Forces Soldiers' Union, the commanding environment of the underworld soldiers, responded with a statement. "We took the words of the manager of the POLIN Museum with outrage", reads the release. "This scandalous thesis is not only anti-Polish but a historical one" (literal quote), especially since 1990, the availability of sources about the Polish national underground "believing the past mythology of lies created by the communist propaganda apparatus".
The communists believe that a individual in specified an exposed position should "put aside his own political sympathy" and not build a communicative that "rarely contradicts the sources known to us." They call the director's words straight insulting soldiers, "who died in Gestapo executions, mass executions, or in Communist prisons."
There is simply a passage in this message that is worth reading twice due to the fact that it responds to allegations of hostility towards minorities. The union lists who served in the ranks of the NSZ: "Poles, Belarusians, Russians, people of German or judaic origin, Catholic, Evangelical, Orthodox or Moscow denominations, who in the ranks of the NSZ did not spare blood or sacrifices of their own life for free and independent Poland".
Volyn was not an incident.
In order for the alignment to make sense, 1 would gotta consider that on both sides we have a akin balance. We don't.
On 11 July 1943, on Sunday morning, UPA troops hit respective twelve Polish towns in Horochów, Włodzimierzski and Kowelski districts. Older findings talk of 99 affected villages and settlements, newer works rise this number to about 150. In July 1943, 520 villages and settlements became the mark of the attacks, and the number of Poles who were murdered then estimates 10–11,000. People were killed in churches, during mass, with axes and forks, with full families.
The Sejm of the Republic closed this substance by a resolution of 22 July 2016, establishing on 11 July the National Day of Memory of Victims of Genocide made by Ukrainian nationalists on citizens of the Second Republic. The resolution identifies perpetrators by name: CNS, UPA, SS Galizien division and another formations cooperating with Germany. He speaks of over a 100 1000 murdered citizens of the II Republic, mostly peasants. It besides mentions that Jews, Armenians, Czechs, representatives of another minorities, as well as Ukrainians, who took the side of the victims, died alongside Poles. 432 Members voted for the resolution, no 1 opposed it.
It's not a description of the gangs that escaped command. The scale, simultaneousity and repetitiveness of the attacks are evidence of the plan: removing the Polish population from a circumstantial territory. The crime was an operational target, not a side effect of fighting.
Some look for bones, any give names
Here comes the hypocrisy of flagism, and it's not just a memory difference. Ideology, which presents itself as a free movement, began practice by cleaning its own neighbourhood. She killed Poles, but besides Ukrainians who refused to participate or helped victims. present its heirs anticipate solidarity from Warsaw, at the same time entering perpetrators into the state pantheon.
Let's put together 2 columns from the last fewer months.
Polish side: in April 2025, the first exhumations of UPA victims, murdered on the night of 12 to 13 February 1945, began in Puźniki. The remains of 43 people were found, buried solemnly in mid-September 2025. Identity was restored by geneticists from the Pomeranian Medical University in Szczecin, utilizing comparative material from about a 100 relatives. The second phase of the search, conducted in 2026, closed without uncovering another grave; according to witnesses, there may be 90 people in it. The next phase of work is scheduled for August.
Ukrainian side: On 14 July 2025, by Decree No 488/2025, the patron of the 31st Mechanized Brigade was General Leonid Stupnycki, 1 of the commanders of UPA in Volyn. On May 26, 2026, Volodymyr Zelenski, by decree No. 440/2026, gave the "Piwnicz" peculiar Operations Center the name of the UPA Heroes. By the end of 2022, over 500 Stepana Bandera streets were in operation in Ukraine, and the Kiev Court of Appeal left the streets of Bandera and Szuchewycz in the capital.
The settlement is so "unrealistic" not due to the fact that it would be difficult. It is unrealistic due to the fact that the Ukrainian state is going precisely the other way, and it is doing so by decrees of the President, not by the whisper of respective radicals from Galicia. Poles sift the earth in search of bones. Ukrainian politicians sift through the list of commanders, seeking patrons for the brigade.
Ninety 1000 people and 2 occupiers
The National Armed Forces were formed on 20 September 1942, erstwhile Colonel Ignacy Oziewicz issued order No. 1/42. In September 1943, there were about 73,000 officers and soldiers, in April 1944 around 90 000. It was the second largest and most consecrated formation of the underground Polish Army. About 3.5 1000 NSZ soldiers fought in the Warsaw Uprising.
The largest guerrilla unit was the Świętokrzyska Brigade, formed on 11 August 1944. In December, she had 822 men, and in the march west she grew to 1,417 soldiers. She fought with Germany, with russian guerrillas and the People's Army.
The bill for specified a biography was issued by communists. In September 1946, the defender carried out the operation "Lawin": the soldiers of the NSZ Group of Captain Henry Flame "Bart" from Podbeskid were taken under the pretext of being sent to the West and murdered in the area of Łambinovic in Opole. The findings talk of 180–200 murdered, and mass graves were found at the erstwhile airport in Old Grodków.
Holiszów, meaning "enemies of national minorities"
On 5 May 1945, soldiers of the Świętokrzyska Brigade, working with American troops, hit the German women's concentration camp in Holiszów. The IPN describes this briefly: the Świętokrzyska NSZ Brigade saved the prisoners of the German camp. About a 1000 women were kept in the camp, including 400 French women, 280 judaic women and 167 Polish women, as well as Czechs, Dutch women, Belgian women, Romanians, Yugoslav women, Italian women, Ukrainian women and Russian women. On that day the Germans planned to execution the Jews, locked in a building prepared for arson. The camp was taken almost without failure of its own, 2 Polish soldiers were injured.
The formation whose soldiers lead 280 judaic women out of the building prepared to burn is simply a mediocre candidate for the "enemy of national minorities". If you put it in the same frame as UPA, it's on the other side of the barrel.
The accusation of hostility towards democracy is simply a separate substance and there is no point in pretending that the national camp dreamed of liberal parliamentaryism. However, the second is not based on this allegation. From the "counter of parliamentary democracy" to "the same as the people who slaughtered villages" the road is very far away, and Prof. Stola travelled it in 1 sentence, in a tv studio, without a footnote.
Which must not be silenced
Honesty requires the most severe charge to the NSZ. On June 6, 1945, about 194 inhabitants of the village, most of them Orthodox Ukrainians, 65 children, died in Wierzchowiny, Lublin. Mieczysław Pazderski "Grary" commanded the unit to which this crime is attributed. The Lublin IPN committee has been investigating and decommissioned since 2007 on September 30, 2011, considering 3 versions of the events, including the engagement of the underground impersonating group and the work of another conspiracy structures. The historians' dispute about the Mounties is not closed.
However, this case does not balance Volyn and cannot be applied to it. Volyn had a directive and a territorial objective, consistently implemented for 2 years on a scale of 1 100 1000 killed. The tops were not the execution of any order from the NSZ Headquarters. There is besides a difference in what both parties do with their own dark cards: the Polish state conducted a multi-year prosecutorial investigation in this case, Ukrainian gives military units the names of UPA commanders.
A resolution the chief didn't mention
On September 15, 2017, the Sejm adopted by acclamation, i.e. without a vote against any club, a resolution to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the establishment of the National Armed Forces. It states that "this formation has earned its country well." 5 years earlier, on 9 November 2012, the home adopted a resolution on the 70th anniversary of the NSZ. It is the same Sejm which in 2016 called Volyn genocide and identified UPA as the perpetrator.
Thesis of manager POLIN collides with 2 papers of the same Chamber. 1 resolution says that Poland deserved well. The second says that UPA committed genocide on Polish citizens. It takes a truly strong interpretive will to arrange "like people" out of these 2 sentences.
The memory of Volyn is not aimed at Ukrainians and does not service Moscow. It is aimed at lying, including comfortable, spoken in Polish and with an academic title. The alliance with Kiev against the Russian threat remains a Polish state ration, but the alliance is not a silence agreement. If the UPA settlement is considered "unrealistic", what precisely does Polish memory gain when, in return, the censored soldiers are placed? The veterans responded with 1 word: slander.
Source: message Union of National Armed Forces Soldiers of August 12, 2026; message by Prof. Dariusz Stola in the program “The Most crucial Questions” (Polsat News, August 10, 2026); Resolution of the Polish Parliament of July 22, 2016 on tribute to victims of genocide (Polish Parliament); Resolution of the Polish Parliament of 15 September 2017 on the 75th anniversary of the NSZ (Polish Parliament); historical memo on NSZ and Świętokrzyska Brigade (IPN).
