The Baligród massacre

On Sunday 6 August 1944 a unit of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) commanded by Volodymyr Shchyhelsky (“Burlaka”) surrounded Baligród, a small town in the Lesko district of the Bieszczady mountains, at dawn and, after the morning Mass in the Roman Catholic church had ended, began murdering Polish men. The victims were selected according to the nationality entered in their German identity cards (Kennkarten). They were shot in groups near the church or dragged out of their homes. According to the findings of the IPN historian Artur Brożyniak, 39 Poles were killed that day, together with one Ukrainian who produced a document recording his nationality as Polish. The memorial in Baligród, erected in 1984, bears 42 names, and this figure – 42 murdered Poles – has become established in the literature. The discrepancy arises partly because the local parish priest also listed among the victims of the raid Jan Szpot, a resident of the town who had been abducted and killed by the UPA two or three days earlier and was buried together with those murdered on 6 August.

The Baligród massacre was one of many mass murders of the Polish population of the Bieszczady and the Sanok region in the summer of 1944 – at a time when the German–Soviet front was passing through the area, and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (its Bandera faction, OUN-B) and the UPA, which was subordinate to it, were seeking to remove Poles from territories they regarded as Ukrainian.

Background: from Volhynia to the Bieszczady

The Polish–Ukrainian conflict in Eastern Galicia and Volhynia had a long history – from the fighting for Lwów (Lviv) in 1918–1919, through the nationalities policy of the Second Polish Republic and the OUN’s sabotage actions, to the German occupation, which fanned the antagonisms between the two communities. In 1943 the UPA carried out a mass campaign of extermination of the Polish population in Volhynia, which culminated in the Bloody Sunday of 11 July. From the autumn of 1943 and in the winter of 1944 the wave of killings moved into Eastern Galicia. Polish self-defence units and Home Army detachments responded with reprisals in which Ukrainian civilians also died, and in some cases Polish units themselves committed crimes against the Ukrainian population. Historians, among them Grzegorz Motyka, estimate the number of Polish victims in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia at about 100,000, and the number of Ukrainian victims of Polish reprisals – including the first post-war years – at between 10,000 and some 15,000 or more; these figures remain a matter of debate.

The Bieszczady and the foothills around Sanok and Lesko were an ethnically mixed area: alongside Poles lived Ukrainians and Lemkos, and before the war numerous Jews as well. Under German occupation Baligród belonged to the Kraków District of the General Government. Most posts in the local administration and police were filled by Ukrainians, while the Poles – according to studies – were harassed. In the autumn of 1942 the Germans murdered the Jews of Baligród. In the summer of 1944, as the Red Army approached the Carpathians in the Lwów–Sandomierz offensive (it took Sanok on 3 August), many Ukrainian policemen deserted and went over to the UPA. The OUN issued proclamations calling on Poles to leave the “Ukrainian lands” on pain of death, and further killings took place in the area.

The last days before the raid

At the beginning of August a UPA kurin (battalion) of three sotnias (companies), numbering about 210 men according to Brożyniak, was formed from former policemen at Żernica Wyżna. It was placed under the command of 24-year-old Volodymyr Shchyhelsky (“Burlaka”), a native of Lwów who had fought in the defence of Carpatho-Ukraine in 1938, then underwent Abwehr sabotage training, and during the occupation commanded posts of the Ukrainian auxiliary police; in 1940 he had spent several months as deputy commander of the post in Baligród itself. According to IPN findings, the local OUN providnyk (leader), Vasyl Tsebeniak (“Bohdan”), set the kurin as its first task the murder of the Polish inhabitants of Baligród, and the district providnyk, Volodymyr Kit (“Prostil”), drew up a list of about 40 people whose killing the organisation particularly wanted.

On 30 July UPA men abducted eleven Poles from Średnia Wieś and hanged them in the forest near Baligród. Some of the Poles then fled to Lesko. The rest sought an understanding: a delegation including the parish priest, Father Józef Miezin, the lawyer Stanisław Śmietana and the judge Stefan Schlarp spoke with a representative of the local Ukrainians, and on 3 August the Polish delegates met the commander of one of the UPA sotnias at Stężnica, who assured them that the Poles were in no danger. The local doctor, a Rusyn, Dr Włodzimierz Kuźmak, warned them not to trust these assurances. On 4 August in nearby Stężnica Soviet partisans, who were operating in the area ahead of the front, killed several Ukrainians after a clash with UPA men.

Sunday 6 August

On the morning of 6 August, the Feast of the Transfiguration, Burlaka’s kurin approached from the direction of Stężnica and Huczwice and surrounded the town. When the congregation began to leave the church after the morning Mass, the UPA men separated some of the men, led them to the place of execution and shot them – according to accounts, they were ordered to lie face down on the ground and were shot in the back of the head. Two men managed to escape. At the same time small groups of attackers went from house to house taking away selected men; several were killed on the spot. Brożyniak points out that in practice the proscription list was no longer used: life or death was decided by the entry “Pole” or “Ukrainian” in the identity card. Women and children were not killed, though they were threatened that “next time” everyone would die. Among those murdered were old people, including men in their eighties, as well as the judge and Polish Army reserve artillery captain Dr Stefan Schlarp. One of the men detained on his way to the service, Michał Ochman, was tortured before being killed. The UPA men also took medicines from the pharmacy.

The UPA men intended to force their way into the church, where some of the population had taken refuge. They were stopped by a Greek Catholic priest (named in some studies as Father Olenka), who stood in the doorway and declared that if they wanted to commit murder in the church they would first have to kill him. Thanks to him, Father Miezin and several parishioners, among others, survived. According to Brożyniak, some members of the unit, unable to refuse the order openly, staged mock executions and in this way saved at least five people. The inhabitants recognised among the attackers the former commander of the Ukrainian police in Baligród and former policemen from neighbouring villages, among others.

On receiving news that Soviet partisans had appeared in the area, the UPA men withdrew from the town. The surviving Poles took refuge in the forest; fearing Polish reprisals, some of the local Ukrainians also fled to the forest. That same day the kurin attacked a Soviet partisan camp between Stężnica and the Łopiennik range, but was repulsed and scattered, losing six killed. For this defeat Shchyhelsky was relieved of command of the kurin – on 8 August it was taken over by Vasyl Mizerny (“Ren”), a former commander of the Ukrainian police in Sanok – while Burlaka was left in command of a sotnia.

Reprisal or planned action?

OUN propaganda presented the raid as a reprisal for the events at Stężnica on 4 August. Brożyniak rejects this version: the partisans operating at Stężnica were Soviet, with no Poles in their unit, and the order to murder the Poles of Baligród and the list of victims were drawn up – according to IPN findings – within the OUN structures independently of that incident; the organisation’s leadership merely used Stężnica to stir up a desire for revenge among the rank and file. The investigation conducted by the IPN branch commission in Rzeszów also found that some local Greek Catholic clergy incited the killing of Poles, Jews and “Bolsheviks” – while another priest of the same rite, as noted, saved people in the church. Brożyniak describes the raid as ethnic cleansing and part of the genocide of the Polish population perpetrated by the OUN-UPA with the aim of removing Poles from the region.

Place in the war

Baligród was lost in the shadow of the great events of the same week – the ongoing uprising in Warsaw, the Wola massacre and the round-up in Kraków – but it shows clearly what the war looked like in the south-eastern borderlands of the old Polish Republic in the summer of 1944. Less than two weeks after the Home Army had fought for Lwów while the NKVD disarmed and arrested its soldiers (the Lwów uprising), the lands between the San and the Carpathians saw simultaneous clashes between the retreating Wehrmacht, the advancing Red Army, Soviet partisans, the Polish underground and the UPA, while the civilian population of both nationalities paid the highest price.

For the Bieszczady the crime of 6 August marked the beginning of several years of fighting. A year later, on 1 August 1945, a UPA sotnia attacked the militia post in Baligród; the defenders held out until morning, and the attackers burned several houses as they withdrew. In 1945–1947 Polish Army units fighting the UPA were stationed in the town. On 28 March 1947, near Jabłonki on the road from Baligród to Cisna, the Deputy Minister of National Defence, General Karol Świerczewski, was killed in a UPA ambush – his death served the communist authorities as a pretext for Operation Vistula, the forced resettlement of the Ukrainian and Lemko population from south-eastern Poland to the Recovered Territories. The Greek Catholic deanery of Baligród then ceased to exist.

Volodymyr Shchyhelsky later commanded the UPA sotnia Udarnyky 4, and in 1947 tried to break through Czechoslovakia to the American occupation zone in Germany. Surrounded, he surrendered to the Czechoslovak army and in 1948 was handed over to Poland. Under interrogation he admitted to having led the massacre in Baligród, but – for reasons that remain unexplained – he was never formally charged with it. Sentenced by the District Military Court in Rzeszów for other acts, he was executed by firing squad on 7 April 1949 in the prison in Rzeszów Castle.

Memory of the crime remains divided. Since 1984 Baligród has had an obelisk bearing the 42 names of the victims and the inscription “Eternal peace to the murdered, shame on the murderers”; the victims are also commemorated by the monument to the fallen and murdered in Sanok. Meanwhile in Lviv, on the building of the school Shchyhelsky attended, a plaque has been put up honouring him as a “legendary commander” of the UPA. Responsibility for the Baligród massacre rests with specific people and structures – the district leadership of the OUN-B and Burlaka’s kurin – and not with the Ukrainian neighbours of the victims, some of whom warned the Poles, and one of whom, a Greek Catholic priest, saved people in the church.