Historical Background and Interviews
II. The War The War
the Commandant would receive a kilogram of salt. The Ukrainian murderers fanned out through the forests to hunt Jews. They mur- dered them, cut off their heads, and brought them to the Comman - dant. It was terrible to see the murderers walking the streets of the town clasping the severed heads of Jews.’’ 4 Poles were particularly sought out by the murderers now that the Germans and Ukrainians being in power. In Ukrainian villages, the rallying ciy “Death to the Lakhiv” (Poles, in Ukrainian) was frequently heard. Fugitives survived in small camps, sometimes under the protec- tion of Russian partisans. One such camp east of Ludvipol was pro- tected by a united group of Polish and Soviet partisans, the Dzier- zynski Battalion, and appears to have sheltered some one hundred Jews. There were several smaller camps outside Pavursk, Ratno, and Olyka. According to Judah Raber, the Edelmans and Aharon Golub lived in one of these camps. Polish and Ukrainian partisan groups had first begun organizing clandestine nationalist operations during the Soviet occupation; the Soviet partisan movement (Naumo partisans, named after their leader) began later, in the autumn of 1942, well after the Russian retreat from Poland. The Polish partisans of the Home Army (Armia Krajowa, in Polish) were trying to reestablish Poland as an independent coun- try with its prewar border in the east. They supported self-defense units in Polish villages but kept a fairly low profile. Ukrainian partisan groups (Ukrainian Resistance Army), on the other hand, were comprised of the worst anti-Semitic rabble whose mission, besides the establishment of a Ukrainian state sometime in the distant future, was to hunt down and murder Jews. Well-organized and stronger than the Soviet partisans at first, the Ukrainian partisans for a time controlled much of central, western, and southern Volhynia. In the spring of 1943, after the liquidation of most of Volhynia’s Jews, they turned their attention to the hated Lakhiv, and Polish refugees fled into the woods. Small villages of Polish bunkers and huts sprang up. At that point, and later, when were cry
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