UKRAINE’S BLOOD LANDS

Our Cata­lan farm­house creaked in the wind like a galleon on the high seas as I climbed the wooden stairs into the cold loft. I was search­ing through old files for a cut­ting from 1991. The topic was the blood lands of Ukraine.

My ar­ti­cle 31 years ago sparked out­rage, caught the pos­i­tive at­ten­tion of Ukrain­ian com­mu­ni­ties around the world and prompted the one and only time I have been of­fi­cially in­vited to visit a coun­try.

It was three months after Ukraine’s de­c­la­ra­tion of in­de­pen­dence fol­low­ing the po­lit­i­cal, eco­nomic and eth­nic dis­in­te­gra­tion within the So­viet Union. I had just so hap­pened to be on the West/East Ger­many bor­der ex­actly two years ear­lier when the wall and fences and So­viet-al­lied pack of cards came tum­bling down. It was a tu­mul­tuous time. What I wrote then prompted the fam­ily of one Ukrain­ian vet­eran to con­tact me.

What fol­lowed was a painful his­tory les­son, of shat­tered lives and un­think­able de­struc­tion. Ukraine has a tragic his­tory of con­tention. There had been a cat­a­logue of atroc­i­ties, and it needed ex­plain­ing. Why? In the UK at that time the hunt was on (at long last) for Nazi war crim­i­nals. For­mer SS sol­diers had been shipped to the UK as pris­on­ers of war in 1947. It made the head­lines, short and sim­ple. There were among their num­ber some ap­palling, evil men. No ques­tion. No­body doubted it, in­clud­ing me. I still don’t.

But noth­ing is ever sim­ple.

I pub­lished a grainy pho­to­graph of an SS sol­dier, Petro. I told the sto­ries of two lives. The head­line was “The case for the de­fence”. There were the guilty but also the in­no­cent. The out­cry was swift, but short lived. Did you read it, all of it, I asked? The vit­riol stopped.

Petro and Stephan, from the for­ever-con­tested lands of the Ukrain­ian re­gion of east­ern Gali­cia (yes, an­other Gali­cia), were then re­tired farm labour­ers liv­ing out their days in Eng­lish vil­lages far away from their past. Sud­denly their his­to­ries were being ques­tioned, by fam­ily, neigh­bours, au­thor­i­ties. Yes, they were in a Gali­cian unit of the Waf­fen mil­i­tary SS, enough in­for­ma­tion for rapid con­clu­sions and for their worlds to cave in once again.

I went deeper, re­searched, in­ter­viewed pieced to­gether and told their sto­ries and that of their peo­ple, their mur­dered fam­i­lies, de­stroyed vil­lages, their de­fi­ance and sur­vival.

Ukraine had long wanted self-rule. The Aus­tro-Hun­gar­ian Em­pire had reigned over east­ern Gali­cia until its col­lapse in 1918. The Ukraini­ans tried again to es­tab­lish in­de­pen­dence but Poland fought them in a bit­ter war. Pol­ish rule and con­trol by force lasted until 1939 when the Nazis and So­vi­ets signed a pact and par­ti­tioned Poland. An­other war front swept west across Petro and Stephan’s home­land. Both men served in the Ukrain­ian re­sis­tance, the UPA.

Hitler’s swift, scorched earth in­va­sion of the USSR in June 1941 brought fur­ther de­struc­tion and tragedy. It was seen by some sur­vivors as lib­er­a­tion from so­viet atroc­i­ties, but it was short-lived. The blood-let­ting began again. Petro fought on in the UPA. Stephan had been taken by the So­vi­ets dur­ing their re­treat, forced to join the Red Army and sur­vived the des­per­ate de­fence of Stal­in­grad. Cap­tured by the Ger­mans, he was taken back to Gali­cia where, as the war turned, he and Stephan, along­side boys and older men, were forcibly con­scripted into a Gali­cian unit of Waf­fen SS to fight the USSR forces. Once more a war front crossed and dec­i­mated their lands and lives. Ter­ri­fied of So­viet ret­ri­bu­tion, they some­how made their way west and sur­ren­dered to the Al­lies.

A Be­laru­sian was the first and only per­son in the United King­dom to be con­victed under the UK’s War Crimes Act 1991. There were, un­doubt­edly, many more de­spi­ca­ble peo­ple guilty of atroc­i­ties liv­ing se­cretly not only in the UK, but in Spain and across all of West­ern Eu­rope and the world, war crim­i­nals who es­caped jus­tice. That was wholly wrong and they should have been found and tried.

What was and still is also wrong is the in­creas­ing de­valu­ing of de­tail cou­pled with so­ci­ety’s swift­ness to cer­tainty, where, as ever, a grain of truth is never enough.

And war? We need such ac­counts to be re­minded that con­flict brings noth­ing to the peo­ple but unimag­in­able hor­ror and grief.