Starting point
This site treats Volhynia as a tragedy of Polish civilians while also restoring the Ukrainian experience of assimilation, repression, retaliatory violence, and deportation. The aim is not mutual accusation but factual clarity, memory for civilians, and the rejection of collective guilt.
This is not a site against Polish memory. It is an attempt to speak about the whole chain of violence in which Polish and Ukrainian civilian victims deserve truth, a name, and dignified burial.
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How to read this site
What this site does not claim
Ukrainian context
Before wartime violence, there was a long chain of pressure: the rollback of schooling after Lex Grabski, defensive mobilization in Polesia, the 1930 pacification of Ukrainian villages, the militarized 1938 campaign against Orthodox churches, and the postwar deportation of Operation Vistula. These facts do not justify the murder of Polish civilians. They help explain why trust between communities had been breaking down long before 1943.
How it escalated
This timeline follows a longer chain of escalation: assimilation pressure, loss of trust, radicalization, wartime vacuum, crimes against civilians, deportation, and later attempts at reconciliation.
assimilation pressure
loss of trust
radicalization
wartime vacuum
crimes against civilians
deportation
reconciliation
How the site works
The priority is archival, academic, official state, and church material. Where an older link was too weak for a sensitive claim, it has been replaced with a stronger or official source.
For deaths and material losses, the site distinguishes between by-name counts, estimates, and ranges. It does not pretend there is a single final figure where historians still work with different counting methods.
Each event carries short badges that show whether you are reading about state policy, violence against civilians, disputed figures, exhumation, or reconciliation gestures.
Example badges
The map shows that Volhynia remains the emotional center, but the events of 1924-1947 also stretched across Galicia, the Chełm region, Podlasie, and the postwar deportation zones.
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Click a marker to focus the map and open the matching event in the timeline.
Human dimension
Behind every figure stand Polish families killed or expelled from Volhynia and Ukrainian families killed in retaliatory actions, pacifications, and deportations. The point is to keep people visible, not only balances of loss.
Memory and burial
Historical truth does not end with debates over legal terminology. It also includes the right of families to recover remains, pray, bury the dead with dignity, and work jointly on memorial sites.
Names of the dead
Where names can be established, the site emphasizes them. By-name lists do not end historiographical disputes, but they limit the temptation to use the dead as anonymous political ammunition.
Present-day responsibility of memory
Only after moving through the facts does it make sense to speak about the present responsibility of memory: the tragedies of Volhynia, Sahryn, Pawlokoma, and Operation Vistula should neither be relativized nor turned into fuel for new campaigns of hatred. Responsible memory does not silence victims. It asks for language that protects historical truth from simplification, revenge, and political instrumentalization.
2026
On May 26, 2026, the President of Ukraine granted the Separate Special Operations Center “North” the honorary name “Named After the Heroes of the UPA.” In Poland, the decision drew sharp criticism because of the memory of Volhynia and crimes against Polish civilians. For Ukraine, however, the UPA remains part of the memory of the struggle for independence against Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism.
This dispute shows the hardest point in Polish-Ukrainian memory: one nation cannot demand that another fully abandon its own symbols, but honoring fighters must not mean justifying crimes against civilians. Just as Poland has the right to remember Pilsudski or the Home Army despite difficult chapters in their history, Ukraine has the right to its own tradition of liberation struggle. Reconciliation becomes possible when the right to one's own heroes is joined with honest recognition of the dark sides.
The right to one's own heroes does not remove the duty to honestly name crimes against civilians.
Path to Reconciliation
Reconciliation is not an ornamental epilogue. It is a rule for reading the whole story: acknowledge Polish and Ukrainian civilian suffering, name the structures and decisions that produced violence, and refuse to shift blame onto entire nations or later generations.
Principles of Memory