By this stage, OUN had moved on to dreams of an independent Ukraine and saw neither the weakening Germans, nor the seemingly exhausted Russians, but the Poles as the main enemy. The Polish-Ukrainian fighting carried on throughout 1943 and intensified in 1944 as deserters from SS Galizien brought manpower, arms and German military skills to one side, and the AK attempted (with limited success) to organise the disparate Polish units into a more coherent force on the other.
At this point, the Soviets entered the fray once more. Both Stalin and his Polish communist acolytes had shed their earlier internationalism and saw the future in terms of discrete ethnic political units. Stalin’s preferred means of achieving this was mass resettlement.
In September 1944, after it had been occupied by the Soviets, a huge operation was put in train to remove all Poles and Jews from territory east of the new Polish frontier and resettle them in Poland, and to uproot all Ukrainians living to the west of it and transplant them to Soviet Ukraine. Virtually the entire population of the city of Lwów would eventually be moved into the ruins of the former German city of Breslau (now Wrocław). In all some 780,000 Poles and Jews were moved in this way, a trip which sometimes involved weeks in cattle trucks which were shunted onto sidings and repeatedly redirected before they were allowed to spill their human loads in some depopulated area. Those who did not register for ‘repatriation’, feeling no great national loyalty and wishing only to remain where they had always lived, were harassed by the NKVD or attacked by UPA fighters. Similar arrangements with regard to Lithuania and Belorussia yielded comparable numbers, most of whom were resettled in Pomerania or the areas newly acquired from Germany. Not surprisingly, since the area taken over by the Soviet Union amounted to 47 per cent of Poland’s pre-war territory, the 1,500,000-odd resettled in Poland did not account for the whole Polish population of the area, and at least as many remained behind.
The same went for the Ukrainians and Lemkos (a small Ruthene nation inhabiting the eastern Carpathians) whose homeland was to remain in the new Poland. According to arrangements made by Stalin, they should have been resettled in Soviet Ukraine, but they had no wish to go, and they were supported in this by fighters of the UPA and the remnants of the SS Galizien division, which had been forced out of Soviet Ukraine and were now operating in south-eastern Poland. Attempts to implement Stalin’s plans led to a running battle beginning in late 1945 between them and NKVD and Polish army units under Russian command, in the course of which half a million Ukrainians and Lemkos were deported and some 4,000 killed. But the action was by no means conclusive, and early in 1947 the Polish army launched Operation Vistula to deal with UPA and the remaining Lemkos. As the Soviet Ukraine no longer wanted them, some 150,000 of these were resettled, family by family, in distant parts of Poland. The UPA was defeated and forced to withdraw into Soviet Ukraine, where it went underground.
The massive scale on which people were being shunted about and resettled, a process which normally involved brutality at the outset, followed by rape and pillage by bandits of one sort or another along the way, and hostility from the host community at the other end, had a profoundly traumatic effect on all those involved. Communities which had been uprooted and split up lost their sense of identity and disintegrated into embattled family groups. Resettled on farms or in houses that had belonged to others who had been murdered or deported, they felt no empathy with the alien landscape and no real sense of ownership, only a fear of potential consequences. With no local leadership of any kind (surviving landowners were not allowed to come within fifty kilometres of their former estates) and a constant prey to lawless militia, soldiers and criminal gangs, they did not constitute communities, only masses of fearful families and individuals.
As they tried to rebuild their lives against a background of civil war and political terror, all felt an overwhelming sense of powerlessness, which bred resentment and even hatred of any ‘other’, along with a desire for revenge for all the wrongs they had suffered. Anyone living through those times witnessed hideous acts of revenge in the final stages of the war. Wartime informers and representatives of the new order were tortured to death by former AK soldiers. AK soldiers were subjected to all the refinements of Soviet interrogation by UB operatives.