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The video was recorded by the Pilecki Institute as part of the “Witnesses to the Age” project.
English subtitles will be available soon.
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Our today’s interviewee:
Helena Ciszak (born 1936), from Ihrowica near Tarnopol (now: Ternopil. Ukraine), a Polish-Ukrainian village. Until 1944 both of nations lived in peace, but tension started growing when a sotnya of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army arrived in the village. On 18 December 1944 the Banderites shot two Poles who were guarding warehouses with grain. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army launched the main attack on Ihrowica on Christmas Eve. Helena Ciszak and her mother and younger brother (her father was away, fighting the war) were about to begin their supper when a Ukrainian woman they knew ran into the house and told them to flee, because the Banderites were murdering Poles. Helena’s mother didn’t know what to do, so the Ukrainian woman agreed to hide the three of them at her place. In the morning, Helena’s mother went to her parents’ house and saw the results of the previous night’s massacre: the corpses of brutally murdered victims were everywhere. In the rectory Helena’s mother found a burnt body of a girl, as well as the priest and his family with their heads cut off. She contacted her parents, her sisters and their children - luckily, they all survived. They fled to Tarnopol, but Helena’s mother went back to Ihrowica to get food. She was saved for the second time by a Ukrainian woman who warned her that the Banderites were waiting for Poles. Other Poles from Ihrowica weren’t so fortunate - they were murdered. In February 1945, Helena Ciszak moved with her family beyond the Bug River. Most inhabitants of the Eastern Borderlands were travelling towards the Recovered Territories, but Helena’s mother decided to wait for her husband in Chełm. When he returned from the war, he wanted to go back to Ihrowica. In 1952 he went there and saw a Ukrainian man living in his house. That’s when he realized that there was no chance of going back, so he decided to settle permanently in Chełm.
Copyright by Instytut Solidarności i Męstwa im. Witolda Pileckiego.