Historical Background and Interviews
II. The War The War
in the forest. They brought them food and saved their lives in any way they could.” The Mazurian villages, he said, were isolated in the thickest forests and swampy areas beyond the River Slusch, where there was also significant Russian partisan activity. In his eulogy, Katz praised the inhabitants of the Mazurian villages, specifically Pip - lo, Levaches, Namilia, Matchulanka, Stara-Uta, Strij, Mishakova, Lushakova, Borovay, Mokreh, Zavoloche, Nova-Uta, Kozarnik, and Smolarnia, for their assistance. Others, including Aharon Golub’s childhood friend, Itzak Gurf- inkel, also singled out Mazurian villagers for their generous help. He explained that Mazurians were “mixed in with the Polish and Ukrainians, and their villages were deep in the forest in very iso- lated places where Germans did not go.... On one side of the river were Ukrainians, and on the other side were Mazurians. They had been given land a long time ago by Poland and some of them were in the Polish army. Namilia, Strij, and Lushakova were Mazurian villages, and possibly Nova-Uta.” He remembered Matchulanka and Stara-Uta as Ukrainian villages. The Mazurians appear to be a “people apart” and are listed as a separate entity in Poland’s census report in 1900. Their religion is Protestant, not Catholic like most Poles, and their speech is a sepa- rate dialect, a combination of Polish and German. At various times in history, they were mistreated by both national groups, but seem to have suffered the worst deprivations during decades of Prus - sian occupation. Krystyna Jaworowska, a retired Smith College astronomy professor from Poland, said she spent time as a young person in the Mazurian area of Poland near Byelorussia. She com- pared the Mazurians in Poland to the Cajuns in the United States, who were also ostracized from the mainstream and also survived in harsh, isolated swamplands. Both groups developed unusual sur- vival skills and maintained their own traditions. It is possible that the Mazurians went to Volhynia (and Byelorussia) from Mazuria, a region near the Baltic Sea with as many as thirty thousand gla- cial lakes. Absentee aristocrats with large tracts of thickly forested
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