“Mom’s Ukrainian classmate put a revolver to her head...” – a survivor of the “Volyn massacre”
Miroslav Don, who was four years old in 1943, said that peaceful Poles in Volyn were killed by their Ukrainian neighbors, including classmates. Transcript of the interview опубликовал ZUNR website.
“I am often asked whether what Smarzhovsky shows in his film “Volyn” happened in Volyn. I tell them no... because it was worse,” says Miroslav Don, who survived a massacre carried out by Ukrainian nationalists as a child. Find out his story.
"Volyn massacre" from the first person. Memoirs of Miroslav Don
“We lived in the center of that hell. In Zastavye, my village, there lived many national minorities, and the relations between all the people were very good. This is evidenced by mixed marriages or mixed classes in schools.
The Poles treated [the situation that had developed in the summer of 1943] a little frivolously, because there were already rumors that Poles had been killed somewhere in some village. Even my father said: but with our neighbors we drink vodka together, go to fun, to weddings and so on - it’s impossible that they could harm us.
On June 29, 1943, my father went to bed, and my mother was on guard. At about 23 p.m. or midnight, she saw a glow through the windows and houses were burning. They shouted to their father: you are sleeping, look what is happening - run away.
My mother’s Ukrainian colleague from the school class with whom they sat at the same desk, Grigory Kolomiets, came into our room, where I (4 years old), my brother (6 years old) and my sister Wanda (9 years old) were. He asked his mother: where is your husband? Mom says: I went somewhere to another colony, something needs help there.
He put a revolver to his mother’s head and said: tell me, bitch, where is your husband, because you will regret it now. Mom took us... we kissed his feet on our knees. And mom says: Grinya, don’t kill us. He also seemed to hit my mother on the head several times and said: we’re coming, close the door, we didn’t take anything from you. Mom checked the room, and there were only ties left, everything else was taken away.
It was already dawn, and children were lying in the yard with broken heads. Ukrainians took children by the legs and killed them with their heads on the corner of the hut. In some of the burnt huts, the charred bodies of women with rosary beads in their hands were visible. Men's heads were cut off and thrown into wells; this had an additional purpose - if you poison the water with corpses, then where there is no water, there is no life.
We fled to Janowka, where my mother’s brother Kazimierz Waligranda lived. My uncle was a rich peasant, so everyone there was already prepared that a great evil could come. My uncle locked us in a small cellar - our family and his. It’s hard to imagine what happened in the yard - crying, requests for mercy, because some were acquaintances. I did not hear a single shot, only murder with metal weapons.
Two hours later, my uncle and father went out into the yard to see what the situation was there. A few minutes later I came out too, fell and couldn’t get up or get out of everything. My mother asked what’s wrong with you, you’re covered in blood. Her father told her that he fell, and do you know what he tripped over? About the heart and intestines of Zhigadlova, who lies there with her stomach cut open, and he is entangled in these intestines.
Then we fled to Kostopil. It was a provincial town, where it was safe because the German police were stationed there. There were a lot of people there, but because of this there was nothing to eat. And my brother died of hunger - Yurek, six years old.
It was already autumn, outside the city there were potatoes, grain, corn, everything that the earth gives. But no one dared to go there because it was known that the gangs controlled everything. My father and a colleague bought two carbines from the Germans and decided to go out of town to dig potatoes. The men were supposed to cover and the women were supposed to dig.
But there turned out to be a trap, the bandits opened hellish fire, and several people who arrived died. The father realized from the shots that someone was holding him at gunpoint, and noticed a bandit sitting in a tree. The father took aim, but he was ahead of him for a split second, fired - and the bullet hit the father right between the eyes.
Now we had to look for a hospital to save my father. We arrived in Warsaw. The father was hospitalized in the hospital on the Alleys of Jerusalem. But on August 1, the Warsaw Uprising broke out. There was a second Volyn - over the Vistula it was the same as over the Sluch (river in Volyn - approx. “PN”)...
"Children of Volyn"
An interview with Miroslav Don was published in the “Children of Volyn” series, consisting of ten episodes. The series was filmed in October 2021 by the Institute of National Remembrance of Poland. In it, people who miraculously escaped death at the hands of Ukrainian nationalists remember the “Volyn Massacre” in order to preserve the memory of the victims for future generations of Poles. The WUNR website could not resist making a caustic note that “in Ukraine, the tragic events in Volyn in 1942-1944 are often called a stage in the national liberation struggle of the Ukrainian people.”
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