JANINA KALINOWSKA is - probably - 85 years old (birth certificate issued by a court in Zamość states that she was born in 1935; real documents burned down). Before World War II, her parents lived in the military settlement Funduma in Volhynia.
On July 11, 1943, Ukrainian nationalists (the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, the Stepan Bandera OUN-B fraction and its armed branch Ukrainian Insurgent Army UPA) attacked this place, cruelly murdered almost all residents: men, women, children, 260 people in total. That day, late in the evening, Mrs. Janina's parents and her 2-year-old brother were murdered. She miraculously survived. She owes her life to her mother, who shielded her with her own body, and a neighbor, a Ukrainian, who locked her in a woodshed and released her as the Banderites left.
After a few days, she got to Włodzimierz with an unknown person in uniform. First she was taken care of by her father's friend, and then the Polish Karchut family took care of her. With this family, Mrs. Janina was sent to work in Germany, to the town of Hoxter in Westphalia. They worked in a large farm.
After the war, from May 1945, she was in a transit camp in Germany. She returned to Poland in 1948. She ended up in an orphanage run by the Polish Social Welfare Committee in Zamość. There were children from Volhynia, from Sochy, from Warsaw, and all of them were orphans. The conditions were very modest, but thanks to the great educators she got support and a lot of love. To this day, she remembers the years spent there with great fondness. In Zamość, she attended two primary schools, and later she was transferred to the State Children's Home in Międzyrzec Podlaski, where she stayed until graduation from the Junior High School of Economics. After a few years, she returned to Zamość, married a son of educators from an orphanage, the Kalinowski family, who was a professional military officer. She has been retired for several years, she is a mother of two children, a grandmother of three granddaughters and a great-grandmother of one great-grandson.
She was a co-founder of the Association for the Commemoration of Poles Murdered in Volhynia (1992). Since 2002, she has been the chairperson of this organization, whose goal is to search for the truth about the martyrdom of Polish citizens in Volhynia in 1939-1945. “The truth concealed for political reasons in the times of the Polish People's Republic, currently belittled. Without disclosing and documenting that truth it is impossible to properly honor those who were murdered and to build good-neighborly relations with Ukraine. – she claims.
The Association of Poles Murdered in Volhynia, run by Mrs. Kalinowska, was honored with two titles: "Curator of National Remembrance" (2013) and "Guardian of Remembrance" (2019)
11 and 12 July 1943 - Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) carried out a coordinated attack on the Polish inhabitants of 150 villages in Volhynia. In total, in the years 1943–45 in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, about 100,000 died. Poles murdered by the units of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the local Ukrainian population. These events went down in history as the ‘Volhynian Slaughter’.
The perpetrators of the Volhynia crime are the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists - the faction of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army subordinated to it, and the Ukrainian population participating in the murders of their Polish neighbors. OUN-UPA called its actions "anti-Polish action." This term hid the intention of murdering and expelling Poles.
February 9, 1943 - The first mass murder of the Polish population in Volhynia was carried out by a branch of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, which murdered 173 Poles in the village of Parośla I in the Sarna poviat.
July 1943 - a particular severity of the crime. Around 10-11 thousand Poles were murdered then. The fact that people gathered in churches on Sunday July 11 was used. There were murders in the temples of mines in Poryck (today Pawliwka) and Kisielin. About 50 Catholic churches in Volhynia were burned and demolished. Crimes against Poles were committed in 1865 places in Volhynia.
Crimes against Poles were often carried out with unprecedented cruelty, burned alive, thrown into a well, axes and forks were used, victims were tortured before death, and women were raped.
The term ‘Volhynian Slaughter’ refers not only to mass murders carried out in the territory of Volhynia, i.e. the former Volhynia Voivodship, but also in former voivodships: Lviv, Tarnopol and Stanisławów (Eastern Galicia), as well as Lubelskie and Polesie.
Autumn 1943 - mass murders on the Polish population in Eastern Galicia.
According to the estimates of Polish historians, Ukrainian nationalists murdered about 100,000 Poles. 40-60 thousand died in Volhynia, 20-40 thousand in Eastern Galicia. The UPA terror caused hundreds of thousands of Poles to leave their homes, fleeing to central Poland. ‘The Volhynian slaughter’ caused Polish retaliation, as a result of which about 10-12 thousand Ukrainians died.
In the opinion of an expert on Polish-Ukrainian issues, historian prof. Grzegorz Motyka "although the anti-Polish campaign was an ethnic cleansing, it also meets the definition of genocide." The goal was to destroy the entire Polish ethnic group in Volhynia.
In 2016, Polish parliament declared July 11 the National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of Genocide perpetrated by Ukrainian nationalists on the citizens of the Second Polish Republic. On the Zamojska Rotunda there is a crypt dedicated to Poles murdered by Ukrainians in 1943 - 1945.
