Hurby massacre

Hurby massacre was a mass murder of the Polish population of the Hurby village, perpetrated on June 2, 1943, by a death squad of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) and so-called brushwood self defence commando (Самооборонні Кущові Відділи, СКВ) made up of Ukrainian peasants, during the province-wide Massacres of Poles in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in World War II. Hurby (Гурби) belonged to the Second Polish Republic before the war began. It used to be located in the powiat Zdobłunowski of the Wołyń Voivodeship. It is now a valley (урочище, or uroczysko) by the same name in western Ukraine. About 250 Poles were murdered in the attack, which was confirmed by the UPA commander for Volyn, Dmytro Klyachkivsky, who said in his communique of June 1943 that Hurby "went up in smoke".

Eyewitness testimony


Below is the eyewitness account of the massacre from the already translated testimony of Irena Gajowczyk, which was published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as part of online "Witnesses of the massacre speak out" initiative in 2016.

A few Banderites, run up to my mother and one of them struck her with an axe. My mother fell to the ground and let go of my brother Tadzio, while I was screaming with horror. She crawled up to Tadzio who was crying, and tried to breastfeed him awash with blood. The Banderites ran up to her again and cut her throat. She was still alive when they stripped her naked and cut off her breasts. She was in such pain that she began to pull her long hair out, her expression completely changed. I was afraid of her.

I ran up to my father and saw how hard they were beating him. I saw them chopping off our neighbor Wasylkowska’s head on a stump. My screams were so terrifying that one of the Banderites walked up to me and stabbed me with a knife just below my throat, but I didn’t stop crying. I was paralyzed with fear. The Banderites yelled out to my father calling him by his name and my father pleading with Ivan, also calling him by his name, because he used to constantly come to our house to see my father as a friend.

When they approached me for the second time, one stabbed through my right hand with a knife and twice in my left arm below the elbow. Another one of the Banderites grabbed me by the skin on my back like a cat, and cut off that part of my skin in his hand. Then he stabbed me again twice in my shoulder blades and threw me into a huge ant nest. I fainted and when I came around I was in great pain, and the ants stung me so hard that my body swelled up. The neighbor’s head, chopped off and lying next to me, was all covered with ants.