"The hyena of Europe" is not our insult; it is Churchill's formula for the Poland of 1938. A Ukrainian historian's look at what interwar Poland was for its minorities, how much it received in 1945, and why its present-day lectures to the east read like a joke. Documented, sharp, unsoftened.
For decades, Polish public life has cultivated a genre: the moral lecture delivered eastward. About memory, about guilt, about how Ukraine has "not grown up to Europe" until it repents according to a prescribed template. In 2023-2025 the genre became state policy: historical demands were written into the conditions of a warring country's European integration.
Fine. If Warsaw insists on speaking the language of historical accounts, let us speak that language to the end. Not from 1943, where the Polish narrative conveniently begins, but from 1919. And with a ledger not only of blood but of land. Because when the moralizer is sitting on the largest territorial windfall of twentieth-century Europe, received from Stalin's hands, and when its own interwar state ran a concentration camp, burned churches and jailed members of parliament without trial, it must be prepared for the mirror to be turned around.
The method is identical for both nations: the last pre-war censuses (Russian 1897; Prussian, Austrian and Hungarian 1910), isolines of the titular ethnicity's share at 20, 40, 60 and 80 percent, with the modern border laid on top. Map labels are in Ukrainian.
In 1945 Poland received about 95,000 km² of land where Poles had been nearly absent before the war: Lower Silesia, Pomerania, the Lubusz land, Warmia and Masuria, Gdansk. It lost about 25,000 km² of its ethnic islands in the east. Net result: plus 70,000 square kilometres, with ports, coal and industry.
Ukraine received about 45,000 km² outside its ethnic majority and left outside its border about 140,000 km² of lands with a Ukrainian majority as of the beginning of the century. Net result: minus 95,000 square kilometres.
Interwar Poland likes to live in memory as the victim of two totalitarianisms. That is true of 1939. But in 1919-1939 it was itself a state a third of whose population were minorities, and it treated them not as a republic treats citizens but as a metropole treats natives.
The ideology was explicit. Roman Dmowski, father of National Democracy and one of the state's architects, wrote plainly that the eastern Slavs were "ethnographic material" for Polonization, not nations. This is not enemy propaganda; these are his own texts. Here is the programmatic thesis of his main book:
"Wherever we can multiply our forces and our civilizational work, absorbing other elements, no law can forbid us from doing so, and such action is our duty." Roman Dmowski, "Thoughts of a Modern Pole", 1903
"Absorbing other elements." Ukrainians, Belarusians and Lithuanians are, in this picture of the world, not neighbouring nations but raw material for digestion, and absorption is proclaimed not a right but a duty. In the same book Dmowski constructed a "national ethics" in which the nation's interest stands above universal morality: whatever harms the stranger and strengthens one's own is good. And in the early 1930s the same Dmowski wrote about German Hitlerism with unconcealed interest and sympathy, as a healthy national movement whose only fault, perhaps, was being German.
"Poland is like an obwarzanek, a ring-shaped roll: everything of value is at the edges, and in the middle there is emptiness." Attributed to Jozef Pilsudski, on the Kresy borderlands
A phrase still quoted in Warsaw with tenderness reads differently in Lutsk or Ternopil: "the most valuable at the edges" meant that the value lay in the lands, not the people living on them. The Pilsudskiites generally spoke more beautifully than the National Democrats, of federation and "Prometheism", but did the same: in 1934 Poland officially renounced the Minorities Treaty it had itself signed at Versailles. The only state in Europe to do so demonstratively, from the rostrum of the League of Nations.
The schools were purged systematically. In Volhynia, of roughly 440 Ukrainian schools of the early 1920s, eight remained by 1938. In Galicia the number of Ukrainian schools shrank many times over through "utraquization" under the Grabski law of 1924: formally bilingual, factually Polish. Ukrainians were denied even the word: official terminology replaced "Ukrainian" with "Ruthenian", and in 1939 the Interior Ministry planned to ban the ethnonym altogether.
Legally it looked dry: two laws passed unanimously by the Sejm on 17 December 1920, granting land to soldiers and volunteers in the Eastern Borderlands. In essence it was the largest state programme of ethnic engineering in interwar Europe outside Nazi and Soviet practice. The land for distribution was taken from the former Russian treasury, from church and monastery estates, sometimes from Polish manors, and demobilized soldiers were planted on it in a region where the local Ukrainian and Belarusian peasantry had for decades suffered "land hunger", chronic smallholding and overpopulation.
The goal was formulated not between the lines but in plain text in the documents of the Ministry of Military Affairs: to reward deserving soldiers, to absorb the demobilized surplus of labour, and, above all, "to strengthen Polishness in the Borderlands". That is not our conclusion; it is the wording of the Polish administration itself. Pilsudski himself, in his autumn 1920 order to the future settlers, laid out the logic directly: part of the conquered land was to become the property of those who had made it Polish with the blood and toil of war. Land won by the sword is handed out as a trophy, and the definition did not cover the locals who had lived on it for generations before any sword.
The placement was not random: the plots were deliberately laid out according to military strategy, so that along the entire Polish-Soviet border there arose a continuous line of armed households loyal to the regime. The settlers remained reservists, held military exercises, had their own rifle and cooperative organizations. This was not a welfare programme for veterans but a garrison colonization of the borderland with living people: a practice every textbook on the history of colonialism recognizes without prompting.
In Volhynia alone, in 1931, there existed simultaneously 3,468 military settlers' farms on 57,731 ha and another 2,886 civilian settlers' farms on 34,176 ha: nearly 92,000 hectares of the best land handed to newcomers in a region where local peasants spent years in court over scraps of field.
The international press saw it without illusions. After the punitive pacification of 1930, which swept through those same counties, the Manchester Guardian wrote that the operation against the Ukrainian minority was among the most destructive blows dealt to any national minority in post-war Europe and a direct violation of the Versailles minorities treaty. The settler farms, embedded in Ukrainian villages as strongpoints of the state, themselves often became targets and pretexts during those operations: to the local population, an armed reservist on freshly confiscated land was not a neighbour but a symbol of occupation in the literal, not metaphorical, sense.
The state, incidentally, maintained even its own colonists carelessly: farms were often handed over devastated, promised state loans and building materials did not always arrive, which is precisely why settlers' unions arose that spent years suing their own government to keep its promises. This does not diminish the colonial nature of the project; it merely shows that even as an instrument of Polonization the settler was expendable material to the state, not a partner.
In the autumn of 1930, in response to sabotage by the Ukrainian underground, Pilsudski's government unleashed cavalry and police on the Ukrainian villages of Galicia. About five hundred villages in sixteen counties went through "quartering": mass public beatings, the wrecking of cooperatives, dairies and Prosvita reading rooms, punitive levies, more than fifteen hundred arrests, the destruction of three Ukrainian gymnasiums. The principle was proclaimed openly: collective responsibility. Not a court seeking the guilty, but an army punishing villages by ethnic criterion. The Ukrainians petitioned the League of Nations; in 1932 the League effectively washed its hands. Europe, then too, felt it was "not the time to pressure Warsaw".
In June 1934, over President Moscicki's signature, a "place of isolation" opened at Bereza Kartuska: a camp to which people were sent without trial, without verdict, without counsel, by administrative decision, for three months with the right of endless extension. Contemporaries, including the Polish opposition, called it plainly a concentration camp and compared it to the German models opened a year earlier. The regime: bayonets, truncheons, a punishment cell filled with excrement, "gymnastics" to the point of unconsciousness, a ban on speaking, prisoners' deaths. Ukrainian nationalists and communists sat there, then Belarusians and Jews, and from 1938 the Polish opposition too, because the appetite of such a machine always grows. In September 1939 several thousand people were held in the camp at once.
The state that today sets conditions about historical memory still has not a single act of parliament condemning Bereza. The memorial on the camp's site stands in Belarus, and not on Polish initiative.
May-July 1938, the Chelm land and southern Podlasie. In two months the Polish administration destroyed 127 Orthodox churches: with dynamite, dismantling, arson, by the hands of imported workers under police guard. Not in wartime. In peacetime, in its own state, the temples of its own citizens. Together with the earlier "revindications", of roughly 380 Orthodox churches of the Chelm land only about fifty remained active by September 1939. Believers who protested were beaten and prosecuted. It was the largest state destruction of Christian shrines in interwar Europe outside the USSR, carried out by a state that considered itself the bulwark of Christendom.
The Greek Catholic Church in Galicia survived structurally but lived under constant pressure: searches, censorship, cases against priests for "disloyalty", while in the Lemko region Warsaw sponsored a schism, tearing parishes away from Metropolitan Sheptytsky because he was too Ukrainian.
And lest anyone imagine only Ukrainians got it. Ghetto benches at the universities, legalized by the rectors in 1937. Numerus clausus and numerus nullus for Jewish students. The pogroms of the late 1930s, from Grodno to Przytyk. Prime Minister Slawoj Skladkowski, from the Sejm rostrum in 1936, blessed the anti-Jewish boycott with a formula that became proverbial:
"An economic struggle? By all means." Prime Minister F. Slawoj Skladkowski, Sejm, 1936 (the notorious "owszem")
The 1938 programme of the governing Camp of National Unity officially proclaimed the squeezing of Jews out of the economy and their mass emigration; the government seriously studied shipping Jews to Madagascar, sending a commission there in 1937. A year later Berlin would pick up the same idea. Three million Polish Jews were murdered by the German occupier; that crime is his and his alone. But the policy that for years taught society to see them as superfluous was home-grown, made in Warsaw.
To everything above, the Polish interlocutor has one prepared move: "but the OUN was a terrorist organization". It was. The part of the truth uncomfortable for Warsaw is that the Ukrainian radicals took both worldview and method not out of thin air. They took them from the Poles, from the best of them, the canonized ones, the ones on monuments.
| The Polish school | The Ukrainian pupil | |
|---|---|---|
| Doctrine | Roman Dmowski, "Thoughts of a Modern Pole", 1903: national egoism, the nation above universal ethics, politics as a struggle of species. Integral nationalism in Polish, twenty-three years before Dontsov. | Dmytro Dontsov, "Nationalism", 1926: active nationalism, the nation's will above reason and morality. Dontsov read the National Democrats and openly acknowledged the force of Dmowski's approach. |
| Practice | Pilsudski's PPS Combat Organization, 1904-1908: hundreds of attacks on officials and police, expropriations of banks and post offices. Bezdany, 1908: the future marshal personally robs a mail train; among the raiders, three future prime ministers of Poland. | The UVO and OUN, 1922-1939: the same genres traced through carbon paper. Post-office expropriations (Horodok, 1932), assassinations of officials: school superintendent Sobinski 1926, Tadeusz Holowko 1931, minister Pieracki 1934. |
| Organization | The POW, the Polish Military Organization: a conspiratorial network, cells of five, the cult of sacrifice, the oath. | The UVO was built by veterans of the same war on the same pattern: an underground, departments, an oath, the cult of the fallen. |
| Slogan | "Terror against the occupying state is the legitimate weapon of a stateless nation." The canon of the Polish underground from the nineteenth-century uprisings to the PPS. | The same slogan word for word. Only the occupier's name changed: now it was Poland. |
A state built by former combatants hanged young men for exact copies of its own exploits. Bilas and Danylyshyn were executed in December 1932 for a post-office raid, the very genre of action with which Pilsudski began at Bezdany, except that the marshal got monuments for it. And when the OUN killed Pieracki, the answer was Bereza: the camp against terrorists was built by men who had themselves begun as terrorists, the purest illustration of the whole construction.
Hence the "frantic energy of demonizing the OUN" that Ukrainian intellectuals themselves write about: to acknowledge the genesis means to see in the OUN a mirror of one's own history shifted by a single generation. Which is why, instead of acknowledgment, the formula operates: "this is completely different".
When Hitler came to power, Europe kept him in diplomatic quarantine. The first major state to shake his hand was Pilsudski's Poland: on 26 January 1934 the Polish-German declaration of non-aggression was signed, one of the Third Reich's first major international successes, breaking its isolation. Then five years of demonstrative friendship: Goering came every year to hunt bison in the Bialowieza forest as a guest of the Polish leadership, delegations shuttled between Warsaw and Berlin, and as late as 1939 Ribbentrop was inviting Poland to a joint march east.
When Pilsudski died in May 1935, Hitler declared mourning in the Reich and personally attended the memorial mass for the marshal at St. Hedwig's Cathedral in Berlin: one of the very few occasions in his entire chancellorship when he crossed the threshold of a church at all. To the funeral in Krakow he sent Goering, who walked behind the marshal's coffin. And in September 1939, having taken Krakow, Hitler ordered a Wehrmacht guard of honour posted at Pilsudski's sarcophagus at Wawel. The Nazi Fuehrer considered the Polish marshal the only great European of his time and did not hide it. Such facts do not fit the icon, so the icon omits them.
And here is the episode Warsaw would like erased from every textbook on earth. In the autumn of 1938, as Hitler carved up Czechoslovakia at Munich, Poland neither protested nor sympathized: it queued for the spoils. On 30 September 1938, the day the Munich agreement was signed, Warsaw issued Prague an ultimatum, and on 2 October Polish troops entered Zaolzie: more than 800 km² and a quarter of a million inhabitants of Cieszyn Silesia. In sync with the Wehrmacht, coordinated with Berlin, in the back of a state being torn apart at that very moment. Weeks later Poland bit off border pieces of Spis and Orava from Slovakia as well.
Churchill, in his memoirs, found for this episode the formula that stuck forever: Poland threw itself on the prey "with the appetite of a hyena", joining in the pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak state. The hyena of Europe: that is what Poland's chief ally called it a year before it became the victim of the same predator. The friendship with Berlin ended exactly when Hitler wanted Danzig: as long as they were dividing someone else's property, everything suited everyone.
The canonical Polish version of 1939-1945 knows only two roles: victim and hero of the underground. Both are real. But alongside them exists a third column of figures, which the national myth has cut out entirely.
In other words, more Polish citizens wore a Wehrmacht uniform than Europe's largest underground had members. This fact does not make those men traitors: in the annexed lands conscription was compulsory, refusal meant a camp, even the London government unofficially advised Silesians to sign the Volksliste to survive, and about 90,000 later deserted or reached Anders' army via captivity. But it does make impossible the black-and-white picture from which sermons are read to neighbours. When it emerged in 2005 that the grandfather of presidential candidate Donald Tusk had been conscripted into the Wehrmacht, it became the political scandal of the decade: that is how unbearable this nation finds its own third column.
The town of Jedwabne in Podlasie, the third week of the German occupation of those lands. Local Poles, neighbours, herd the town's Jewish population, about 340 people, into a barn and burn them alive. The investigation by Poland's own IPN in 2000-2002 confirmed: the direct perpetrators were Polish residents; the Germans were present and inspiring, but did not kill. Jedwabne was not a one-off: that same summer of 1941 a wave of pogroms by neighbours' hands rolled through dozens of Podlasie towns, from Radzilow to Wasosz. President Kwasniewski apologized in 2001, and part of Polish politics savages him for that apology to this day: subsequent governments demanded a "review" of the case, and the word "Jedwabne" spoken by a foreigner in Warsaw still counts as a hostile lunge.
Szmalcownictwo: in Warsaw and other cities, thousands of blackmailers preyed on Jews in hiding, squeezing the last from them under threat of denunciation and, once squeezed dry, handing them to the Gestapo. The Blue Police, the Polish police under German command numbering close to twenty thousand, took part in round-ups and in the "hunt for Jews" across the countryside. The scholars of the phenomenon, Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking, estimate the participation of part of the Polish rural milieu in the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews seeking rescue. The state's answer to this research is telling: not archival programmes but the 2018 IPN law with criminal liability for "attributing to the Polish nation" complicity (softened after an international scandal) and a court case against the historians themselves in 2021. Where scholarship finds documents, the state finds a prosecutor.
And a pre-war brushstroke. In March 1938 Poland passed a law allowing the revocation of citizenship of Poles long resident abroad: the blade was openly aimed at Polish Jews in Germany and Austria. Berlin replied with the "Polenaktion": in late October 1938 about 17,000 Polish Jews were pushed to the Polish border, and Poland refused to admit its own citizens. Thousands were stranded in the mud of no-man's land and in the camp at Zbaszyn. A son of one of those families, Herschel Grynszpan, in despair shot a German diplomat in Paris, which became the formal pretext for Kristallnacht. The chain in which a Polish citizenship law became one of the links on the road to the Reich's November pogroms is not printed in the Polish textbook.
Now, about where the Polish plus of 70,000 square kilometres came from. Not from Polish arms and not from a plebiscite. At Tehran in 1943, Churchill moved three matches across the table: this is how Poland will shift. Stalin liked it. There were no Poles in the room; their legal government was against it, and no one asked it, not there, not at Yalta, not at Potsdam.
Stalin's motive was threefold: to legalize the loot of 1939 by handing over German lands as anaesthesia; to set Poland and Germany at odds forever, making the Kremlin the sole guarantor of the Oder frontier; to cut Silesia and the Baltic away from Germany. Poland received not a gift but a leash. But a leash of gold: ports, coal, industry, a compact territory without minorities.
Ukraine, in this scheme, was small change. Stalin gave the Zakerzonnia to Poland, assigned the Brest region to Belarus, and the Kuban and Slobozhanshchyna he had already spent a decade cleansing of everything Ukrainian by 1945: the schools closed by decree in 1932, the villages starved out, millions of "Little Russians" rewritten as Russians with a stroke of statistics.
Eight million Germans were expelled from lands that today elect the Sejm. A million and a half Poles were shipped out of the Kresy. Half a million Ukrainians were deported from the Zakerzonnia, and the remainder, 140,000, were scattered in 1947 by Operation Vistula across the former German lands with the documented aim of assimilation: no more than a few families per village. The Ukrainian presence on lands where it had lasted six hundred years was erased in three. The Polish state did this itself, with its own hands, its own army, in the peaceful year of 1947.
And the final exhibit, which no Yalta can wash away, for here there is no Stalin the architect, no German occupier, no war. The peaceful Polish city of Kielce, a year after the Reich's capitulation. In the building at 7 Planty Street live several dozen Jews, nearly all survivors of the camps and the hideouts, people who had just lived through the Holocaust on this soil.
On 4 July 1946 a medieval rumour spreads through the city: the Jews had allegedly kidnapped a Christian boy and were holding him in a cellar. The blood libel, the same slander over which ghettos were sacked in the fourteenth century. And the city goes to pogrom. Not the margins: policemen and soldiers take part, the first to open fire and to lead people out to the mob, workers of the Ludwikow steel mill with crowbars, ordinary townsfolk. Women were thrown from windows; the wounded were finished off with stones and rails. 42 dead, among them pregnant women, children, people with camp numbers on their arms, and about 80 wounded. The bloodiest Jewish pogrom of post-war Europe, committed fourteen months after Auschwitz, a hundred and fifty kilometres from Auschwitz. These very days mark exactly eighty years.
The Church's reaction finished what the mob had not. A week after the pogrom the Primate of Poland, Cardinal Hlond, refused to condemn it as antisemitic: the cause of the blood, in his words, was the Jews themselves, holding posts in the new regime. Bishop Kaczmarek of Kielce held the same line. Of the entire episcopate, essentially one bishop, Kubina of Czestochowa, directly condemned the blood libel, and for that his own colleagues in the episcopal conference censured him. No Church-wide condemnation of the pogrom was ever pronounced.
The consequence was of biblical scale: a panicked exodus began. Within months of Kielce, tens of thousands of surviving Jews left Poland, up to a hundred thousand within a year: people who had survived the German occupation concluded that post-war Poland was more dangerous for them than the displaced-persons camps of defeated Germany. Nor was Kielce the first bell: a year earlier, in August 1945, a pogrom had swept through Krakow.