The UPA attack on Baligród

On the evening of 1 August 1945, less than a year after the murders of 6 August 1944, a unit of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) once again entered Baligród, a small town in Lesko county in the Bieszczady mountains. This time the target was the post of the Citizens’ Militia (MO) – that is, a local outpost of the new communist authorities. According to descriptions based on militia reports, the attack began at around 10 p.m. The militiamen barricaded themselves in the post building and returned fire throughout the night, until at about 5 a.m. the attackers withdrew. As they pulled out they set fire to several buildings in the town – seven houses is the figure most often given – which Polish reports presented as reprisal for the resistance.

Lists of the victims of the Polish–Ukrainian conflict, compiled from the reports of MO posts, record that on that night UPA fighters murdered two Poles in Baligród, among them a woman, Maria Głogowska. Some of these lists date the attack to the night of 31 July–1 August, and the reports also mention losses among the defenders themselves; the details vary from source to source. It was not an isolated attack: the same night UPA units struck nearby Hoczew and Zahoczewie. In Hoczew, according to Polish reports, five Poles were killed and five militiamen were abducted from the local post; Ukrainian figures were somewhat different.

Some English-language lists of the events of 1945 describe the defenders of the post as “Polish soldiers”. According to Polish reports, however, it was the crew of a militia post that defended itself. Larger forces of the communist-led Polish Army arrived in Lesko county only in September 1945, in connection with the forced resettlements, and from then on a permanent garrison was stationed in the town.

Lesko county in the summer of 1945

In 1945 the Bieszczady were an ethnically mixed area. The villages were inhabited mostly by Ukrainians – Greek Catholics, including the highlanders known as Boykos – while Poles and the once numerous Jews were concentrated in small towns such as Baligród and Lesko. After the front passed through in the autumn of 1944, power here was taken over by structures subordinate to the Polish Committee of National Liberation and then to the Provisional Government. In practice, however, their presence was confined to the towns and the militia posts. The forests and many of the villages were controlled by the Ukrainian armed underground.

The conflict had a bloody past behind it. The massacre of Poles in Volhynia, which culminated in the “Bloody Sunday” of 11 July 1943, and the fighting in eastern Galicia in 1943–1944 had spread to areas that after the war were to remain in Poland. At the Yalta Conference it had been decided that Poland’s eastern frontier would run approximately along the Curzon Line. The Ukrainian nationalists of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the UPA, however, regarded the lands to the west of it – the Lemko region, the Bieszczady, and the areas around Przemyśl and Lubaczów – as part of Ukrainian ethnic territory, which they called Zakerzonnia (“the land beyond the Curzon Line”), and had no intention of giving them up without a fight.

The UPA in the Bieszczady

The UPA units operating here formed Tactical Sector “Lemko” (PL), part of the VI Military District “Sian”. It was commanded by Vasyl Mizernyi (PL), known as “Ren”. In 1945 his kurin (battalion) included, among others, sotnias (companies) known by their commanders’ noms de guerre: “Khrin” (led by Stepan Stebelsky (PL)), “Stakh”, and “Buryi”, later known as the “Bir” sotnia after the nom de guerre of Vasyl Shyshkanynets (PL). According to the sector’s strength returns, they usually numbered from eighty to between one hundred and two hundred men. They could count on support in the Ukrainian villages: food, quarters, information and recruits. Some of this support was voluntary, some extracted by threats.

In the spring and summer of 1945 the UPA waged a systematic campaign against militia posts in the counties of Sanok, Lesko and Przemyśl. According to chronicles of the fighting, it destroyed some twenty of them between mid-April and mid-May. Tyrawa Wołoska, where the post office and the militia post were burned, and Cisna were also attacked. Attacks on Polish inhabitants also took place outside the towns – in April 1945 in Borownica, in Przemyśl county, according to Polish findings some sixty Poles were killed, among them women and children. The attack on Baligród fitted this pattern: the aim was to drive the militia and the Polish administration out of the area and to intimidate the Polish inhabitants.

Violence on both sides

The victims of the conflict in the borderland were not only Poles. The Polish underground and self-defence units carried out reprisals against the Ukrainian population. The most notorious of these crimes was the attack on the village of Pawłokoma near Dynów on 3 March 1945: the unit of Józef Biss, “Wacław”, supported by Polish self-defence men from the surrounding villages, murdered there – according to various calculations – between 150 and 366 people. Some historians describe the Pawłokoma massacre as reprisal for the earlier abduction and killing by the UPA of Poles living there. In April 1945 the Ukrainian villages of Brzuska, Sufczyna and Bachów were burned and some of their inhabitants murdered; the perpetrators were probably members of Polish self-defence units. The following year units of the communist-led Polish Army also carried out pacifications of Ukrainian villages, among them Zawadka Morochowska and Terka.

For both sides each attack was “reprisal” for the previous one. Polish and Ukrainian historians still argue over the numbers of victims and over responsibility for particular crimes. What is beyond doubt is that in the borderland in 1944–1947 it was above all civilians who died – on both sides.

Resettlement

The violence overlapped with a great resettlement operation. On 9 September 1944 the Polish Committee of National Liberation concluded with the Ukrainian SSR one of the so-called republican agreements (PL), providing for the “evacuation” of Poles from the territory of the Ukrainian SSR and of the Ukrainian population from Poland. Formally, departure was to be voluntary. By mid-1945, however, only about 80,000 Ukrainians had left, and on 24 July 1945 delegates of the Ukrainian population told government representatives that most did not want to leave their homeland.

The authorities – from the end of June the Provisional Government of National Unity – therefore decided to use compulsion. On 22 August 1945 the 3rd, 8th and 9th Infantry Divisions were sent to the areas covered by the resettlement, and from the beginning of September they began clearing villages in the counties of Lesko, Sanok, Przemyśl and Lubaczów. In response, on 9 September the UPA command in Poland ordered its units to attack the resettlement commissions and the army and to burn abandoned villages so that Poles could not settle in them. Altogether, in 1944–1946 some 480,000 people were deported from Poland to the USSR, most of them by force.

Further fighting for Baligród

The attack of 1 August was not the last. According to chronicles of the operations of Sector “Lemko”, on 26 August 1945 sotnias of Ren’s kurin attacked Baligród again. In the months that followed the town became one of the army’s main garrisons in the Bieszczady – the soldiers called it “Diabligród” (“Devil’s town”). All around, a guerrilla war went on: ambushes on columns, attacks on posts, the burning of villages that were being emptied and of those that were to be resettled by Poles.

Significance

The attack on the post at Baligród was a minor episode, but it shows clearly that for the inhabitants of the Bieszczady the war did not end in May 1945. In the Polish–Ukrainian borderland it went on for more than two more years. Its turning point was the death of the Deputy Minister of National Defence, General Karol Świerczewski, who was killed on 28 March 1947 in a UPA ambush near Jabłonki, on the road from Baligród to Cisna. It has never been established beyond doubt which unit attacked him – various accounts have named the “Bir” sotnia or platoons from the “Khrin” and “Stakh” sotnias. The general’s death served the communist authorities as justification for Operation Vistula. From 28 April 1947 the army deported more than 140,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos from south-eastern Poland to the Recovered Territories, scattering them among the Polish population; people suspected of links with the underground were sent to the labour camp at Jaworzno. The UPA units were destroyed or fought their way through to Ukraine or to the West. The Bieszczady were left deserted for many years. The old Boyko villages vanished from the map, and of many of them nothing remains but the sites of churches, wayside crosses and overgrown orchards.