Tailor of Inverness, The (25 page)

The following autumn, Hela told me that a memorial to the Gnilowody Poles who died at the hands of Ukrainian militiamen during the war was to be unveiled at a ceremony in Lezyce in October. This was part of a process which was being carried out with the support of the Polish government in many of the communities which had been resettled from Ukraine, more than sixty years after those dreadful events. Any public discussion of the conflict had been banned under the communists and it was only now that a formal
acknowledgement
and honouring of the dead was taking place. In Ternopil in 2003, Xenia had told me that there had been no violence between Poles and Ukrainians in Gnilowody. I
remembered
meeting the old woman Praxedha in Mieszkowice and her eyewitness description of the execution of Poles in Gnilowody. On my second visit to the village, in October 2007, Olga Kindzierska had admitted that there had been some violence, ‘but only towards a couple of Polish families, only a few were killed’.

I decided to attend the ceremony and took a flight to Berlin and a hire car to Lezyce, three hours away, driving through early morning mist and following our old holiday route south from Frankfurt Oder. I met Hela and her husband Douglas in a car park on the edge of Zielona Gora and they led me to Janek and Jozia’s house. Both in their 80s, they were sprightly and very welcoming. Jozia had made fresh doughnuts. They both recognised me, a typical Zajac. They said my presence made them feel as if they were back in Gnilowody.

The memorial had been erected on a piece of ground before Lezyce’s pretty little church. It consisted of four flat stones standing vertically on a plinth, angled towards each other as if in conversation or communion. The first declared their purpose, the others listed the dead, their names and ages and the dates when they died. Forty-five people, men, women and children, some with names which had become familiar to me
– Bokla, Olszewski, Laska. No Zajacs. There were 10 Olszewskis. Later, Hela told me that her mother was related to all of them, that she and Janek were the only members of her family to survive.

The ceremony began inside the church, with a 25-minute recital by a local choir followed by prayers and a brief sermon. There were around 175 present. There were a few old men in their Polish army uniforms, carrying banners and accompanied by a group of boy scouts. They led us out of the church and down to the memorial. There were conciliatory speeches by the mayor of Zielona Gora and a Ukrainian representative from Ternopil. An old Polish man gave a fiery speech which criticised the Ukrainians for failing to fully admit culpability. A smartly dressed man in his fifties spoke on behalf of the people of Lezyce, fighting back tears. I discovered later that his name was Rafael and that he was married to a distant cousin of mine, one of the Lezyce Zajacs. Another then read out the list of the dead. His name was Czeslaw Laska. He was also related to me. We stood in a circle round the memorial and listened to the names in the biting wind. There was a minute’s silence. The priest gave his blessing and we walked to the church hall for drinks and sandwiches.

In the hall, I was introduced to Rafael’s wife, Valeria and her mother Stefania, Zajacs descended from my great grandfather’s brother. Stefania explained that on the day of the most extensive murdering in Gnilowody, a Ukrainian friend came from Mozoliwka, my grandmother’s village, to warn her family a few hours before the Ukrainian militiamen arrived. The family fled the village and survived.

I spent the evening as a guest at Valeria’s house, eating with her extended family (
my
extended family!) and trying to keep up with all these new family connections. An old photograph of my grandfather’s cousin, a patriarch of this family, had pride of place on a display cabinet. He was a farmer standing
in the sun before the camera in his working clothes, tall, weather-beaten and dark-haired with a bushy moustache. Very similar to the only picture I’d ever seen of my grandfather Andrzej. The photograph must have been taken around 1920. I was told that my Great Uncle Michal’s children were living in Katowice, and that my Great Uncle Anton’s daughters had emigrated to America before the war. A new family tree was scribbled out for me. When you start looking into these things, it can become quite overwhelming. All these relatives I never knew I had: Valeria, Stefania, Anton, Michal, Jan, Irena, Hanka, Michal, Ivan, Pela, Hanna, Maria, Antonina, Piotr, Julia, Czeslaw, Micha, Wanda, Henryk, Sabina, Franciszek, Jan, Anna, Pawel, Ludwig, Stasza, Halina, Czeslawa, Marian, Wladyslaw, Bogdan, Mykola, Mariana, Khrystyna, Ira, Tania, Beata, Mirka, Marek, Piotr, Sabina, Wojtek, Jakub, Karolina, Nikolai, Irena.

During my later visits to Mieszkowice, Pidhaitsi and Hnilowody, I gleaned information about the fate of my
grandfather
, Andrzej. It was never entirely clear, but it seems that he was also a victim of the Ukrainian militia. I was told that he had been badly beaten up by them, that he had never fully recovered from the beating, and that this was the cause of his death a year or two later. I was told that his marriage to my Ukrainian granny had probably prevented them from killing him. I was told that my granny had taken revenge for his beating, and maybe for the murders too, that she had informed her people in Mozoliwka who the culprits were, and that those culprits had received summary justice, that they had been executed by their own people. I was told that my grandfather’s grave may not have been marked because of the extreme poverty at the war’s end. It’s possible that if it was marked, it was destroyed as part of the anti-Polish hatred. On my second visit to the Hnilowody cemetery, I discovered some Polish graves. Most of them had been desecrated many years
before, their headstones removed. One of the few intact Polish graves was that of my great grandfather, the Mateusz Zajac whose tribute was painted on the wall of the Orthodox church. The inscriptions on what was left of the other Polish graves had been painted over. I found a large kind of medallion with a relief of Jesus beside one of them, a grave decoration, and used it to scrape away the paint, revealing a name: Anton Zajac, quite possibly my great-uncle. On a second grave, I uncovered the name of Jakub Zajac.

From both a military and political point of view, the history of Ukrainian nationalism during and after the Second World War is riddled with complexity and contradiction. When the Nazis started recruiting for their two SS Halychyna Divisions in 1943, it split the nationalist underground resistance between those who saw it as an opportunity to create a standing Ukrainian army which could resist the oncoming Soviets, and those who refused to collaborate. There was already a Ukrainian puppet administration headed by leaders who saw the Nazi occupation as their opportunity to assert statehood, however compromised. There was the Ukrainian Partisan Army (UPA) and the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). A faction of the OUN, known as OUN (B) or the
banderovci
, was led by the Ukrainian hero, Stepan Bandera. There is a tendency for this name to be applied to every Ukrainian militia group of the time. Some historians argue that this is inaccurate as there were further splinter groups, factions and
opportunistic
groups of bandits, sometimes simply groups of thugs who bore a grudge against a neighbouring village or particular families.

There were occasions, too, when groups of Polish partisans acted independently and brutally. The thirst for revenge drove these groups to ever-increasing acts of cruelty. There are many conflicting accounts of what actually happened during the Ukrainian-Polish conflict, not helped by the fact that most
information about it was heavily suppressed by both the Polish Communist and Soviet governments as a way of trying to suppress nationalism. Fighting continued sporadically for years after the war, between Poles and Ukrainians and between Ukrainians and the Soviet Army. Indeed, I’ve been told that the Soviets only succeeded in putting an end to violent Ukrainian nationalist resistance in Western Ukraine as late as 1960. What is clear is that the fighting and terror during 1943-44 was savage and often indiscriminate and that the Ukrainians had the upper hand, especially those who were sanctioned by the Nazi occupiers.

On a visit to Pidhaitsi in June 2008, I stayed with Bogdan’s daughter Tania and her family. Her house was on the opposite side of the valley from the main part of the town, high on the valley slope. Tania’s 18-year-old daughter Khrystyna took me for a walk one morning through the fields behind the house. We walked over the brow of the hill, just beyond the view of the town, passing a statue of a saint which commemorated a battle which had been fought there between the Poles and the Mongols. Khrystyna led me to two grassy mounds, guarded by a few shrubs and a couple of trees. These are the mass graves of the Pidhaitsi Jews. The survivors of the ghetto had been marched to this hidden field in 1943 to be murdered, each child, woman and man shot in the head to fall into the freshly-dug pit. The mound suggests that the bodies piled too high, that the pit wasn’t deep enough to contain them. The second mound marks the grave of the Jewish administrators of the ghetto, those who had collaborated, believing it might save them. They had followed the first group. A memorial stone stood by the first grave. There was none by the second.

As with Pidhaitsi’s Jewish cemetery, I was reminded that, for all the casual anti-semitism I had encountered during my visits to Ukraine, communities such as Pidhaitsi’s still manage to retain some degree of respect for the remaining physical
evidence of their murdered heritage. Occasionally, a party of Jews or Poles will visit Pidhaitsi to walk the streets and visit the Jewish cemetery, the mass graves, the ruined synagogue and the Polish church. They are the survivors, the children, the descendants of those who once lived there. Like me, they have come to remember.

There are many people who have been essential in helping me to complete this book. Most of them feature in it. My aunt, Aniela Zajac set me on the trail to Ukraine. Bogdan and Hala Baldys were my hosts on my first trip to Ukraine and Lesia Kalba was my vital translator. The hospitable Mykola and Xenia Baldys, Olga Kindzierska and Olga Zenov provided me with crucial details. Taras Teslyak was our patient driver. Stefania Szarejko put me in touch with Irena and her mother. Piotr Butrymowski translated for me on my first trip to Mieszkowice and Beata and Marcin Mokrzyccy, and Mirka and Marek Butrymowski were my generous hosts. I must also thank, in Ukraine, Tania, Khrystyna & Marianna Teslyak, Tekla & Milanja Tischanyuk, Hrihoriy Kalba, Oleg Cyganovich, Sasha Papusha, Mychaylo Forgel, Ira Dzadukevich, Iryna Suharska, Vasyl Kalba. In Poland, Ula & Janusz Wozniak and Wojtek Wozniak for additional translation work, Marek & Ula Bogucki. In Berlin, Tom Morrison, Klaus Mummenbrauer and Johannes Steinbruckner. In England, Barbara Kroll at the British Army Archive, Hela & Douglas Deacon. In Scotland, Lallie, Pip & Steve Wilson and Maria Gibbs.

I must also thank those who enabled the theatre production
of
The Tailor of Inverness
. The creative team: Ben Harrison, Jonny Hardie, Gavin Marwick, Ali Maclaurin, Tim Reid, Timothy Brinkhurst, Kai Fischer, Sholto Bruce, Laura Edwards, John Spiers, Karen Sutherland, Laurence Winram, Angela Cran, Catherine MacNeil, Liz Smith, John Gordon and Hamish MacDonald. Judith Docherty of Grid Iron and Mary Shields. The Scottish Arts Council/Creative Scotland and the Hugh Fraser Foundation for financial support, Hi Arts and Highlands & Islands Enterprise.

Finally, I must thank Virginia Radcliffe and my daughters Ruby and Iona for living with me through it all. And for opening their doors to me, I thank Anna and Jan Kotek and, of course, my half-sister Irena Bogucka and her husband Czeslaw.