Lubomyr Luciuk
Nov 1, 2025
I don’t like surprises. So, when, on my first day in Peremyshyl, I was told I was going to be taken for a ride out in the countryside, I felt a twinge of apprehension.
“Where to? And why?” I asked.
“You’ll see when we get there,” came the reply.
This was not the first time in my life that I have found myself intrigued and slightly uneasy at the same time. Like usual, I went along anyway.
Today, Przemyśl (to use its Polish spelling) straddles the San River, near the western border of Ukraine. The seat of a Ukrainian principality in medieval times, the city was, after the First World War, included in the short-lived Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, only to be captured by Polish forces in 1919. Still, the surrounding countryside remained largely Ukrainian. Then, just after the Second World War, a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing, culminating in Operation Vistula in 1947, almost erased that indigenous presence, with most Ukrainians either deported to the Soviet Union or relocated to northwestern Poland. Still traces of their lost world remain visible on the region’s cultural landscapes– in the ruins of Greek Catholic churches and many an overgrown cemetery. A Ukrainian place of worship that survived, repurposed for Roman Catholic use, is the Church of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos. Built in 1740, in Mlyny, it’s where the Ukrainian Greek Catholic priest, Mykhailo Verbytsky, served until he died in 1870. He composed the music to Ukraine’s national anthem, Ще не вмерла України (“Ukraine Has Not Yet Perished”). Over his grave, on 12 April 2005, then-Ukrainian president Viktor Yuschenko unveiled a memorial canopy to remind passersby of who once lived here, of how a historic chorus from that very anthem proclaims Ukraine will someday flourish, free and grand, “from the San to the Don.”
A determined resistance to communist Poland’s occupation was mustered by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), whose soldiers continued fighting into the 1950s. And that, as I finally learned, was why I was being led into the woods — to witness exhumations.
Descendants of the Ukrainians who had once lived hereabouts — never having forgotten who they were and where they came from – returned “home” to Peremyshyl after the collapse of the Soviet empire. They have worked to uncover the truth about what their predecessors endured. Their efforts were not always welcome. Ukrainian memorials to the victims of Operation Vistula, and grave markers of UPA insurgents, have been vandalized, some even removed by government decree. To this day, those undertaking such restorative work proceed cautiously. A few spoke of the discrimination they have faced as active members of a Ukrainian minority in Poland, including sporadic violence. But they did not give up. Having heard whispers about how UPA insurgents, killed in battle against the Polish People’s Army in early March 1947, were
dumped into unmarked graves near the village of Jureczkowa (Yurechkova in Ukrainian), they were determined to locate them.
So I was taken into the woods. The site is hilly and forested, although not far from a secondary road. That it had rained made access a chore. When we got there, I met a team of investigators from the Lviv-based Dolya Memorial Center, under the direction of Sviatoslav Sheremeta. They were working in collaboration with the Ukrainian Institute of National Memory, assisted by the Polish Institute of National Remembrance. Together, they had cleared and carefully probed the area under the watchful eyes of Polish police. The latter were there “to provide security,” most likely because Ukraine’s ambassador to Poland, Vasyl Bodnar, came to see what might be unearthed. This was the first time since 2017 that such searches have been permitted, a positive step forward in Polish and Ukrainian relations, despite lingering historic tensions over who did what to whom in the Second World War era.
No remains were found. As I looked into each excavation site, an undergraduate course I took in pedology at Queen’s University came in surprisingly useful; the soil profile in each pit dug into this clay-rich earth had not been disturbed previously. Yet someone, no one seemed to know just who or even when, placed a symbolic cross on this mound. Why here, if this was not where the insurgents were? Our guide, who was surreptitiously told about these burials years ago, thought the remains might be found further down the hill. A meandering stream down there did not suggest it as suitable terrain for burying anyone.
Are the skeletal remains of any UPA soldiers to be found nearby? Perhaps. More exhumation work must be done. I favour these efforts at closure, on both sides of the border. As for who the “bad guys” were, various Polish and Ukrainian intervenors have contested that topic with gusto and no mercy. Their arguments remind me of the medieval scholars who supposedly debated how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Even so, I am hopeful of reconciliation. Indeed, I witnessed signs of it. Inside Peremyshyl’s Ukrainian People’s Home (Narodnyi Dim), I heard a local Polish historian addressing a Ukrainian audience. This architectural gem, dating from 1904, blends Art Nouveau style with motifs inspired by Hutsul and Boyko traditions from Ukraine’s Carpathian Mountain region. Designed by the noted Ukrainian architect, Ivan Levynsky, and restored with European Union funding, cross-border Polish–Ukrainian collaboration, and international support, it was a fitting venue for a lecture chronicling how this region was despoiled by both sides, to their mutual and lingering detriment. Good people are now trying to ensure that those who attempted to erase what once was, and who pretended it never existed, will fail, although this work of remembrance remains precarious. To those brooding about who did what to whom, when, and why, let us return to the question of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? – to which I offer this salve: “as many as might wish to.” No one answer will ever satisfy everyone.
The Poland of our day is a free country and integral to Europe. And, today, Ukrainians are valiantly defending their lands against a historic foe – an enemy not only of Ukraine’s independence but of Poland’s too. Ruminating over an unhappy past is best set aside, at least for now. For everything there is a season. This ain’t it.
Lubomyr Luciuk is Professor Emeritus of The Royal Military College of Canada and a Senior Research Fellow with the Chair of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Toronto
