"Volyn Notes"

I have no family references to what happened 80 years ago in Ukraine. My Parents spent the war in captivity in Germany, my closest relatives in Siberia and then in the Anders Army. But a book recently fell into my hands, "Notes from Volhynia," by Prof. Henryk Kirschner, MD, professor emeritus of the Medical Academy in Warsaw, who died a few years ago, and who survived "Volhynia." He was the son of a Polish teacher in one of the Volhynian villages, and grew up in that village. He (then a 14-year-old boy) and his entire family were saved at the last minute by a Ukrainian from that village, Piotr Lysakiewicz. One evening he came and said "wtikajte!". Then he sobbed terribly as he let them: two adults and four children each separately out to sneak through fields and forests to a German post a few dozen kilometers away. They succeeded and survived. The book is free of bitterness, it is a record of facts from the perspective of a man just entering adult life. Terrible facts. I advise everyone to read it.

I have been warmly hosted in Ukraine over the past few years and was still advising the Ministry of Health of Ukraine a week before the Russian onslaught. Undoubtedly, today's Ukrainians are not to blame for these events. But as I was driven through the streets of a Ukrainian city and saw a portrait of Bandera on almost every pole I felt a little uneasy.

Wieslaw Wiktor Jedrzejczak

P.S. Henryk Kirschner "Notes from Volhynia" Arcana Publishing House, Krakow 2010