In a letter sent to her Ukrainian counterpart, Barbara Nowacka called for an immediate review of the textbooks and suggested reforms to the bilateral textbook review process, Polish state news agency PAP reported.
In the letter, made public on Wednesday, Nowacka said the Polish government was deeply troubled by the way events in the Volhynia region between 1943 and 1947 were portrayed in a Ukrainian high school textbook titled History of Ukraine, published in 2023.
She cited a passage that frames the conflict as a mutual war between Poles and Ukrainians, stating that “the reason for the escalation of Polish-Ukrainian relations was the mass killing of Ukrainians by the Polish Home Army,” and that the Home Army, described as an underground Polish force aiming to restore Poland’s prewar borders, targeted civilians in several regions.
The passage characterizes the Polish-Ukrainian conflict as a “bloody war” in which both soldiers and civilians died, lasting until 1947.
Nowacka objected to this framing, stating in her letter that “the most difficult period in the history of Volhynia, and of Polish-Ukrainian relations, was during the Second World War, when mass atrocities were committed against the Polish population, known as the ‘Volhynia massacre,’ carried out by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and local Ukrainian civilians.”
She called on Ukraine’s education minister, Oksen Lisovyi, to review not only this textbook but others as well, and to begin work on new teaching materials that better reflect the current state of Polish-Ukrainian relations.
Nowacka also proposed changes to the operation of the Polish-Ukrainian Expert Commission on the Improvement of History and Geography Textbooks. She suggested that both sides should be able to nominate textbooks for joint review, in light of ongoing concerns raised by both Polish and Ukrainian participants.
At the most recent meeting of the commission in January, held in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod, one Ukrainian member proposed the creation of a joint history textbook. Nowacka asked Lisovyi to formally respond to this idea and to the proposed changes to the commission’s procedures.
The debate over how to interpret the role of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) during World War II remains one of the most sensitive issues in Polish-Ukrainian relations.
From 1943 to 1945, the UPA carried out a systematic campaign of ethnic cleansing in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, killing an estimated 100,000 Polish men, women and children. These events are widely regarded in Poland as a genocide.
A memorial to the victims of 1943 Volhynia Massacres in the southeastern Polish village of Trepcza near the Ukrainian border. Photo: Lowdown, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Ukraine, by contrast, often sees the same events as part of a broader wartime conflict in which both sides suffered losses. Many Ukrainians view the OUN and UPA primarily as anti-Soviet resistance fighters, downplaying or disputing their role in anti-Polish violence.
The 82nd anniversary of the worst atrocities was marked last Friday.
On July 11, 1943—known in Poland as “Bloody Sunday”—the UPA units attacked nearly 100 Polish villages in Volhynia. Over the course of July 11 and 12, coordinated assaults took place in more than 150 locations across the region.
Polish civilian victims of a World War II massacre committed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). Image: Władysława Siemaszków, Ludobójstwo, page 1294, from Henryk Słowiński collection, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Historians estimate that around 8,000 people were killed in those two days alone, many of them brutally murdered with axes, pitchforks and knives.
(rt/gs)
Source: IAR, PAP