Re: Szare Seregi - Norman Davies


Minelo bez wiekszego echa uhonorowanie Normana Daviesa,
ktoremu kraj nasz i narod - zawdzieczaja bezprecedensowa
popularyzacje naszych wartosci historycznych i kulturowych,
w anglojezycznym swiecie.

"Norman Davies uhonorowany nagroda Szarych SzeregówHistoryk, Norman Davies
zostal uhonorowany nagroda Szarych Szeregów imienia Stanislawa
Broniewskiego. Wyróznienie przyznawane jest dla patriotów i ludzi
szczególnie zasluzonych dla Polski. Autor ksiazki "Powstanie '44" odebral
statuetke i dyplom w warszawskim Ratuszu. Czlonek kapituly honorowej Szarych
Szeregów Zbigniew Lenka powiedzial, ze wyróznienie dla Normana Daviesa to
przede wszystkim nagroda za pisanie prawdy o Powstaniu Warszawskim."
http://www.rzeczpospolita.pl/News/1,10,13595.html

Interview with Prof. Norman Davies
http://elt.britcoun.org.pl/u_ndavies.htm

"Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead . . ."
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~sarmatia/495/davies.html

............................
Just a note on Norman Davies, who received in Saturday a Special Prize
of "Szarych Szeregow" for his contribution and writing of the truth about
"Warsaw Uprising 1944".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Davies

This is a hefty volume -- more than 1100 pages of text, and several hundred
more of notes -- but the only dry thing about it is the humor (of which
there are discreet but lovely examples). Davies, a British scholar who
specializes in Eastern Europe, has written a comprehensive study of the
chunk of land we call Europe from prehistoric times to the fall of the
Soviet Union. It's slow, detailed, but fascinating going, and Davies breaks
up the text with "time capsules": boxes of digressions from a couple
paragraphs to a couple pages which focus on specific subjects, from the
history of printing to the origin of the term "jeans." Lots of details about
individuals and mass movements stick in the memory, such as the way French
Republican officers executed great numbers of revolutionaries in 1794 Nantes
by repeatedly sinking a ship with prisoners chained aboard. Davies has an
eye for irony and humor: Lenin owned a Rolls Royce, he notes; medieval
Constantinople gathered sacred relics such as "two fragments of the True
Cross ... the Crown of Thorns, the Sacred Lance, the Virgin's Girdle, and
several heads of John the Baptist"; and the Nazis championed "the tall,
slim, blond, Nordic type -- as tall as Goebbels, as slim as Goering, as
blond as Hitler...." Unless you're retired, don't expect to dispose of this
in a week or two; I dipped into it for months on end.

David Loftus, Resident Scholar
http://www.allreaders.com/Topics/info_4375.asp


=======================================


Norman Davies, "Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead," The
Independent, 29 December 1987.
Buczacz
"Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead . . ."
by Norman Davies
THE DEACONRY OF BUCZACZ. In 1939, this district contained 45,314 Polish
inhabitants. Among its 17 parishes, Barycz numbered 4,875, Buczacz 10,257,
Koropiec 2,353, Kowalowka 3,009, Monasterzyska 7,175. . . .

In Barycz, a couple of Polish families were murdered by Ukrainians in 1939.
.. . . One of the Biernackis had a leg severed. . . . But the main attack. .
.. took place on the night of 5-6 July 1944, when 126 Poles were killed. Men,
women and children were shot, or hacked to death with axes. The "Mazury '
ward of the town was burned down. The attackers were armed with machine guns
and shouted "Rizaty, palyty" [kill, burn]. The survivors fled to Buczacz
where they lived through the winter in terrible conditions, in ex-Jewish
houses without doors or windows. . . .

The attack on Puzniki followed shortly afterwards. Over 100 Poles were
killed and the village burned.

The [Catholic] parish of Nowostawce, though sparsely inhabited was very
extensive. It contained three Greek-Catholic parishes within its bounds. The
ratio of Poles to Ukrainians was 2:3. In 1939 co-existence was still
possible. But conditions worsened after the German Occupation. In 1944, when
the German-Soviet frontline passed through, nothing but ruins remained. . .
..

The vicar of Korosciatyn reported an attack on his village on 28 February
1944, when only a handful of houses were saved. 78 persons were shot,
smothered or axed in the vicarage cellar. . . . Some ninety people had
perished in an earlier attack in 1943. Then typhus carried off a further
fifty. A curious thing occurred. The village had thirteen so-called "wild
marriages." All of these couples died except one.

In Koropiec, no Poles were actually murdered. But it was reported that the
Greek-Catholic pulpits resounded to calls regarding mixed Polish-Ukrainian
marriages: "Mother, you're suckling an enemy - strangle it."1

Forty years after the event, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland was still
trying to document the wartime atrocities, of which Poles and Catholics had
been victim. Buczacz was just one of scores of districts in the former
eastern Poland that had been terrorized by Ukrainian groups. Buczacz, ninety
miles from Lwow [Lviv], lay in the sometime Austrian province of Galicia. As
in the neighbouring province of Volhynia, its pre-war population contained
substantial Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish communities. The Jews were killed
by the Nazis in 1942-43, sometimes with local collaboration. Then the
Ukrainian nationalists turned on the Poles, in a classic demonstration of
the technique later to be called "ethnic cleansing." Estimates of Polish
losses in East Galicia and Volhynia range from 100,000 to 500,000. Later,
the whole region was annexed to the USSR. Soviet security forces destroyed
the Ukrainian organizations in yet another wave of mass terror and
'repatriated' most of the remaining Poles.

Ethnic cleansing in wartime Poland had been launched both by the Nazis, who
cleared large districts for resettlement by Germans, and by the Soviets, who
in l939-41 deported millions from the East. It was taken up by the
nationalist faction of the Polish underground (NSZ), who sought to drive out
Ukrainians, and on a much larger scale by various Ukrainian factions,
especially the UPA. At the end of the war, it was revived once again by the
Soviets and their agents, who sought to cleanse the Ukrainian SSR of Poles
and, through Operation Vistula, the "Polish People's Republic" tried to get
rid of Ukrainians in southeastern Poland. Ethnic cleansing was implicit in
the policy of the Allied Powers, who agreed to the expulsion of all Germans
from east of the Oder.

In post-war eastern Europe, however, all wartime crimes were officially
ascribed to the Nazis. Victims from areas like Buczacz - none of whom were
Russians - were lumped together in the "Twenty Million Russian War Dead,"2
or otherwise covered by the veil of silence. The process of honest
documentation was only just beginning in the 1980s. The process of
reconciliation between Poland and Ukraine could not even start before the
collapse of the communist regimes in l989-91.3

The multinational dimensions of the wartime tragedy were not widely
appreciated. Historians of all nationalities have been guilty of counting
and publicizing their own losses to the exclusion of others. Only
occasionally one meets accounts of shared suffering, where the gehenna of
one community overlapped with that of another:

Between May and December 1942 more than 140,000 Volhynia Jews were murdered.
Some who had been given refuge in Polish homes were murdered together with
their Polish protectors in the spring of 1943, when of 300,000 Poles living
in Volhynia, 40,000 were murdered by Ukrainian "bandits." In many villages,
Poles and Jews fought together against the common foe.4

But no general survey of wartime genocide in all its manifestations exists.

Attempts to establish Polish/Catholic losses in the East, for example,
inevitably sideline the Jewish and Ukrainian experiences. They naturally
stress the role of Jewish and Ukrainian collaborators in the Soviet service,
or of Ukrainian police units under German control; but they are not
concerned with the activities of German Schupo units from Silesia, i. e. of
Poles in German police uniforms, nor with the effects of the Polish Home
Army's decision to assist the Soviet campaign against the Wehrmacht. It is
not part of their brief to count the UPA's Jewish and Ukrainian victims,
still less human losses in the region as a whole. It is a sad truth: in
reporting a war of omnes contra omnium, any exercise which only looks at one
side, or which suggests a monopoly of suffering, is bound to paint a
distorted picture.

Buczacz (Buchach), now in Ukraine, was once the home town of Simon
Wiesenthal, "Nazi-hunter extraordinary."



NOTES

1 Bishop Wincenty Urban, Droga Krzyzowa Archidiecezji Lwowskiej, 1939-45
[The Way of the Cross of the Archdiocese of Lwow 1939-45] (Wroclaw 1983),
52-55.
2 Norman Davies, "Neither Twenty Million, nor Russians, nor War Dead," The
Independent, 29 December 1987.
3 In 1993, President Kravchuk of Ukraine was reported as saying: "We will
not hide the fact that during the Second World War Ukrainian chauvinists
murdered around one half million Poles in the eastern borderlands of pre-war
Poland. Even for several years after the war, Polish villages burned and
Poles continued to perish. . . . Hence, the qualms of our conscience in
relation to the Polish nation."
4 Martin Gilbert, Atlas of the Holocaust (London 1982), 82.


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