(A)symmetry of (Non-)memory

Introduction: Pawłokoma as a Symbol of the Traumatic Past and Reconciliation

In the most recent history of Polish–Ukrainian relations, we can find numerous examples of grievances and mutually inflicted harm between the Poles and the Ukrainians. The Polish–Ukrainian conflict is believed to stem from the geopolitical status quo that prevailed in Eastern Europe for almost twenty years after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles and the end of the Polish–Ukrainian, Polish–Soviet, and Ukrainian–Soviet wars. The new borders of the Second Polish Republic encompassed about five million Ukrainians who constituted more than 14 percent of the total population of the country. Simultaneously, the Ukrainians, who did not have their own state at that time, were the largest national minority in interwar Poland. ¹ The political life of the Ukrainian minority was concentrated in two streams: a participatory stream orientated toward organic work, and a revolutionary, nationalistic stream. ² Proponents of nationalism, associated with the Ukrainian Military Organization (UVO, Ukrains’ka Viis’kova Orhanizatsiia) and the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN, Orhanizatsiia Ukrains’kykh Natsionalistiv), focused on acts of terror and sabotage against the Polish state and its functionaries, as they believed such actions constituted a fight for the independence of the Ukrainian state. In 1930, Polish authorities replied to an OUN-inspired wave of arson and robbery in Galicia by using the army and gendarmerie in a pacification campaign which involved beatings, destruction of property, and closing the centres of Ukrainian cultural life. ³ The OUN activists considered Bolesław Pieracki, the Polish Minister of Internal Affairs, to be responsible for the pacification campaign. He was therefore killed in 1934 in an attack carried out by the OUN in Warsaw. The attack prompted the Polish authorities to establish a detention camp in Bereza Kartuska, ⁴ where OUN activists were one of the largest groups of prisoners. ⁵ In the second half of the 1930s, Polish policy towards the Ukrainians became increasingly repressive, acting as a catalyst for rivalry between Polish and Ukrainian nationalism. ⁶ The conflict reached its peak during the Second World War. In 1943, after gaining control over Volhynia from the Germans, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA, Ukrains’ka Povstan’ska Armiia), created by Ukrainian nationalists, began a campaign of ethnic cleansing directed against Volhynian Poles. ⁷ As a result, about fifty thousand Polish citizens were killed and tens of thousands were forced to flee. ⁸ The massacre in Volhynia was the beginning of a civil war waged by the Poles and Ukrainians in Galicia, where the epicentre of the conflict had moved. It lasted until the summer of 1944, when the Red Army entered the area of conflict. ⁹ In the new political reality of the People’s Republic of Poland, the main opponent of the UPA was the Polish army, which brutally implemented the policy of resettling Ukrainians from Poland to the Ukrainian SSR in 1944–1946. ¹⁰ The spiral of retaliation, which also engaged Polish partisans fighting with the communist government, claimed both Ukrainian and Polish civilians as victims. In 1947, the death of the Deputy Minister of National Defence, General Karol Świerczewski, killed in a skirmish with the UPA, became a direct pretext for Operation Vistula (Akcja “Wisła”). ¹¹ Its aim was not only to destroy the UPA structures operating in south-eastern Poland, but also to uproot and disperse Ukrainian communities living in that territory, aiming at the assimilation of its members into Polish culture and the ethnic homogenisation of Polish society. ¹² In the aftermath of Operation Vistula, over 140,000 Ukrainians were resettled onto so-called “Recovered Territories” in the north and west of Poland, twenty-seven people died during transport, at least 175 were sentenced to death for collaborating with the UPA, and between 3,873 and 3,936 were detained in the concentration camp in Jaworzno. ¹³ It is estimated that between seven and eight thousand Poles and between ten and twelve thousand Ukrainians died as a result of the conflict of 1943–1948 in the territory of present-day Poland. ¹⁴

Among the numerous sites of the conflict, Pawłokoma is a place of significant meaning. During the Second World War, Pawłokoma, a village located a dozen kilometres from the current Polish–Ukrainian border, was a place of ethnic conflict that had both Polish and Ukrainian victims. The most dramatic stage of the local conflict between Poles and Ukrainians started at the beginning of 1945, when an armed unit kidnapped seven Polish inhabitants of Pawłokoma and Dynów, a neighbouring village. Their fate remains unexplained. The families of the victims were convinced that the kidnapping was instigated by the UPA. ¹⁵ During 1–3 March 1945, an act of retaliation took place. It was organised and carried out by soldiers under the command of Józef Biss “Wacław” from the former Home Army (AK, Armia Krajowa) unit, which was quartered in the area, and by the members of Polish self-defence units from Pawłokoma and neighbouring villages. ¹⁶ Between eighty and five hundred Ukrainian inhabitants were murdered in the massacre; different sources provide different statistics concerning the incident. ¹⁷ The acts of retaliation for this massacre were undertaken by the UPA and lasted until October 1946. As a result of Operation Vistula, the ethnic conflict came to an end. Since that time, Pawłokoma has been inhabited solely by Poles. ¹⁸

However, not only the past but also the present imposes a particular meaning on Pawłokoma in Polish–Ukrainian relations. On May 13, 2006, the cemetery located near the Greek Catholic Church, where the Ukrainians who were murdered in the aforementioned act of retaliation were buried, became the place where an official ceremony was held in commemoration of the victims of the conflict. The Polish president, Lech Kaczyński, and the Ukrainian president, Victor Yushchenko, attended the ceremony. Both presidents paid tribute to the Polish and Ukrainian victims; they encouraged the Poles and the Ukrainians to forget the wrongdoings committed on both sides and to forgive and reconcile:

We meet in Pawłokoma today to jointly pay tribute to the Ukrainian and the Polish victims of the past conflict. . . . Our nations would like to show the world that there is no past resentment which cannot be overcome. . . . Let us all show mercy and courage to pray together to God with the words “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This is what I am asking for. (The public speech of Lech Kaczyński)

The tragedies we are talking about were the tragedies of tens of thousands of souls both on the Ukrainian and the Polish side. I can only imagine how difficult it is for those people to reconcile; today we bear witness to that reconciliation. (The public speech of Victor Yushchenko) ¹⁹

Even though both presidents focused on national and international perspectives in their speeches, they each addressed the members of the local Polish community:

I address my words of special thanks to the inhabitants of Pawłokoma village. I am grateful to you for your patience, tolerance and understanding. (The public speech of Victor Yushchenko)

The fact that the inhabitants of Pawłokoma take part in this gesture of reconciliation and prayer at today’s ceremony is of great value. (The public speech of Lech Kaczyński) ²⁰

The conduct of the inhabitants of Pawłokoma at the ceremony itself, as well as during the regular visits of Ukrainians to the cemetery, indeed seems to reflect the “patience, tolerance and understanding” mentioned by President Yushchenko. Since the ceremony, no hostilities or resentment toward any act of remembrance for the victims of the retaliation have been openly expressed in Pawłokoma. However, is this attitude connected with an understanding of the need to commemorate the Ukrainian victims and acceptance of the information about the involvement of former members of the local Polish community in the retaliatory act? Did Polish families in Pawłokoma deal with the traumatic memory of lost relatives? In other words, can the Polish inhabitants’ memory of the ethnic conflicts between Poles and Ukrainians be deemed as having been worked through? This article is an attempt to answer these questions in light of theories of collective memory and the working-through concept.

Collective (Non-)memories and Their Frameworks

As Halbwachs stated, “no memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections.” ²¹ From this perspective, the frameworks of collective memory can be revealed as socially constructed patterns of perception, influencing attitudes towards a common past. At least two aspects of these frameworks can be distinguished: discursive and physiognomic. ²² Language and narratives constitute the discursive aspect; meanwhile, the physiognomic aspect is a “system of gestures, social practices, artefacts, territorial sites and so on.” ²³ The character of the frameworks should be considered a result of the interaction between the two dimensions of collective memory distinguished by Bodnar: vernacular and official. Vernacular memory, based on “lived or shared experiences of small groups” consists of the transmission of autobiographical memories in groups such as family or neighbourhood circles and can lose intensity “with the death and demise of the individuals who participated in historic events.” ²⁴ Official memory, which “originates in the concerns of cultural leaders or authorities at all levels of society,” ²⁵ consists of interpretations of the past popularized by members of the “symbolic elites” who control dominant public discourse: politicians, journalists, writers, teachers and scholars. ²⁶ Usually there are some points of contact between official and vernacular memories, but sometimes there is a huge asymmetry between what “ordinary people” remember and how symbolic elites want the former to perceive a group’s past. The People’s Republic of Poland is an example of such a gap between official and vernacular memories: While memories of the Soviet repression of Polish society were once alive in many Polish families, state authorities remained silent about the harm done by their allies. ²⁷ Events such as the mass murder of Polish soldiers committed by the Soviet secret police in Katyń should be considered objects of officially produced non-memory, as social non-memories can be analysed both on a vernacular and official level. The term “social non-memory,” as defined by Hirszowicz and Neyman, covers not only the forgetting but also “the tendentious blocking of certain elements.” ²⁸ Social actors may block the transmission of knowledge about various events from a group’s past not only “at odds of ideology or political strategy,” ²⁹ but also to defend particular interests or a positive and coherent collective identity. ³⁰ The social production of non-memory is not the only way to deal with a group’s traumatic and/or shameful past, though. The representatives of symbolic elites and other group members can work through it as well.

Working Through as a Way of Dealing with the Traumatic Past

Although he was the first to use the phrase, Freud never precisely defined the term “working through.” ³¹ In light of his works, working through is assumed to mean overcoming the patient’s resistance during psychoanalysis as a result of analytic work, and also as a result of the patient’s own process of working over the reclaimed material. ³² The working-through process is the opposite of acting out, which, according to Freud, takes place when “the patient does not remember anything of what he has forgotten and repressed, but acts it out. He reproduces it not as memory, but as an action; he repeats it, without, of course, knowing that he is repeating it.” ³³

Theodor Adorno carried out studies of Freud’s working-through concept in reference to the legacy of the Nazi past in post-war Germany. He presented the results in an essay entitled “The Meaning of Working Through the Past.” ³⁴ Adorno understood the working-through concept as drawing the right conclusions from the past and eliminating the negative phenomena that caused past tragedies. Assuming that “the past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated,” ³⁵ he saw German anti-Semitism as the cause of the Holocaust.

Currently, Dominick LaCapra is continuing theoretical work on the concept of working through. Crossing the boundaries of psychoanalysis, he continues to refer the term to individual experiences, accounting, however, for the fact that traumatic recollections may concern tragedies shared by entire social groups, such as the Holocaust. In the opinion of LaCapra, working through is tantamount neither to forgetting nor to avoiding the past and focusing on the present. Unlike “acting out,” which concerns the re-enactment of the traumas, working through “is itself an articulatory practice that counteracts the compulsive effects of post-traumatic symptoms without pretending to achieve full mastery or total conscious dissolution of past traumas.” ³⁶ During the process, an individual not only “tries to gain critical distance on a problem and to distinguish—as well as explore the interactions—between past, present and future,” but also gains ethical, or even political, subjectivity. ³⁷ Working through the traumatic group past enables members of the community, by gaining this critical distance, to cope with the negative emotional states associated with loss, defeat or resentment, ³⁸ and thus allows them to experience such feelings as being less overwhelming. The process can also create opportunities for the stabilization and cleansing of negative emotions in relations between the groups involved in a traumatic past. The role that was played by a psychoanalyst in Freud’s model is, according to La Capra, played by “social and political action in the present, including the attempt to create institutional conditions and norms that further desirable forms of social bonding, the viable binding of anxiety and the integration of affect and knowledge, including empathic and compassionate relations to others.” ³⁹ Underlining the impact of institutional factors on the effectiveness of working through, La Capra concludes that working through “has greatest chances of at least relative success when it is a social process.” ⁴⁰

For Paul Ricoeur, who has also creatively developed Freud’s considerations, the foundation of a successful process of working through is to achieve a “truthful relation to . . . [the] past.” ⁴¹ The opposite of accepting the truth about the past, however painful or embarrassing it might be, is the abuse of memory, such as the manipulation of historical facts in the name of ideology. ⁴² By comparing these reflections to the situation of the local Polish community in Pawłokoma, we could discuss a successful working-through process only when the inhabitants have learned and dealt with the truth about the fate of the kidnapped Poles and their place of burial, at the same time accepting the version of events that indicate the participation of Polish residents in the retaliatory act. The ceremony that Presidents Kaczyński and Yushchenko attended was a chance for the Polish inhabitants of Pawłokoma to work through the memory of the conflict. For various reasons, that chance—as I argue later in this text—was lost.

Methodology and Research Plan

The empirical foundation of this study is based on individual, in-depth interviews conducted within the framework of a research project on the social mechanism of remembering and forgetting the mass murders that Poles have committed against other ethnic groups. Assuming the triangulation of the data sources, the interviews were conducted with three categories of respondents. The first category was composed of leaders of the community of Pawłokoma. These representatives of local “symbolic elites” influence the form and content of the collective memory of members of the local community. They include current and former members of the authorities of the local government, clergymen, teachers, etc. The second group of interviewees consisted of inhabitants of the village from different age groups who were not representatives of the local “symbolic elites.” The third group was made up of so-called experts. These people were not members of the local community, but they had significant knowledge about it; thus, this group mainly consisted of journalists and historians. In total, I conducted thirty-seven individual, in-depth interviews with representatives of the aforementioned categories of respondents and thirteen short, several-minute-long individual interviews with inhabitants who did not want or were unable to speak for longer. The selection of these particular groups aimed to develop an inter-subjective approach to the problem. Its essence was to contrast the common knowledge obtained from social actors immersed in the studied reality, who differed from each other in regard to their power and social status, with the knowledge of experts acquired from a perspective that was external to the local community. Since the research in Pawłokoma was part of a wider project on the social mechanisms of remembering and forgetting the mass murders that Poles have committed against representatives of other ethnic groups in local communities, I focused my study on the way the Polish inhabitants of Pawłokoma remember the conflict today. Due to this perspective, I decided not to conduct interviews with the Ukrainians who go to Pawłokoma to pay tribute to the victims of the retaliation or with the still-living Ukrainians who formerly inhabited the village.

The data collected in the interviews at the two stages of research (the first stage took place in March 2014 and the second in September 2014) was supplemented with secondary data such as newspaper articles, legal acts and historical sources, which were subjected to critical study prior to selection. Analysis of these documents allowed me to validate and complement the data obtained during the interviews. Consequently, I was able to determine the course of events in 1945 and recreate the dynamics of changes taking place in the local, collective memory of the events.

The (A)symmetry of (Non-)memories Prior to the 1990s

Let us reconstruct the dynamics of change in local (non-)memories about the conflict, starting with the first few years after the Second World War. Interviews conducted with the inhabitants of Pawłokoma prove that the conflict between the Poles and the Ukrainians was alive in the vernacular memory of the inhabitants after the war and was the topic of conversation between members of families:

I . . . only know it from the stories told by my mother-in-law. When I was still living at my parents’, [Polish] partisans came. . . . Here in Pawłokoma they shot everyone. . . . They expelled pregnant women with children and made a collective grave for the others. (A woman aged about eighty)

Then certain tensions arose—I remember my mother saying so—and then . . . the Ukrainians took those Poles. One of our neighbours was coming from the mill, and they took him, and they murdered him in these woods. (A woman aged about seventy-five)

After the Second World War, there was a specific symmetry of (non-)memories about both Polish and Ukrainian victims in Pawłokoma. Local social frameworks of the two memories were composed only of the discursive aspect, whereas the physiognomic aspect was practically non-existent. The Polish victims had no graves while the anonymous collective grave of the victims of the retaliation, located in the neglected Greek Catholic cemetery in the village centre, was a forgotten and forsaken place:

There was nothing there but fallen monuments, old trees and everything overgrown with weeds. (A man aged about forty)

Now the cemetery is restored and somehow it looks as it should, and before it was just a dump site. (A woman aged about eighty)

In the Polish People’s Republic, the character of the official memory promoted by the authorities was contrary to the logic of the process of working through the traumatic past. The activities of the state and local authorities produced non-memory about the Polish–Ukrainian conflicts. They not only made the details of Operation “Vistula” taboo, but they also treated the memories of the mass murders in Volhynia “as the subject of eastern lands absorbed by the Soviet Union.” ⁴³ The monopoly over public discourse on the past, first exercised by the totalitarian regime and then by authoritarian authorities, allowed the graves of the Ukrainian victims to sink into oblivion.

As a result of the political transformations that began in Poland in 1989, the process called the “democratisation of memory” commenced. ⁴⁴ Various interpretations of the events that the communist authorities wanted the public to forget started to arise in public discourse. Sometimes, as in Pawłokoma, new social actors started to appear in the local communities, undertaking activities aimed at the revival of previously suppressed memories.

The person who commemorated the victims of the Polish massacre in private, long before the first visits of the Ukrainian delegations after 1989, was a village dweller named Dionizy Radoń, who was the son of a Polish father and a Ukrainian mother. He described his motives to Paweł Smoleński, a Gazeta Wyborcza journalist:

I felt ashamed that I only lit the candles while the cemetery looked like a dump site, with rags, tins all over, with the path made by the cows and pigs running across it, with the overgrown grass never mowed. It was a shame before God and the people who sometimes came from Canada or America. Thus, I decided to take the cemetery under more intensive care. ⁴⁵

This “more intensive care” became a bone of contention between him and the inhabitants of Pawłokoma. One of the reasons why Radoń was met with resentment from some of the village inhabitants was his alleged tendency to hold them responsible for littering the cemetery. Some of the inhabitants, in response to Radoń’s statements, wanted to prove that Radoń himself had also contributed to the state of things:

He said that he had taken care of it, but he himself . . . pastured the cows in this cemetery. (A woman aged about thirty)

He littered, and then said that it was terribly littered. . . . But in fact, no one left garbage there, only him. (A leader)

As well as mowing the grass and lighting the candles at the mass grave, Radoń erected mounds with birch crosses in them. His own initiative was met with the resentment of some of the village inhabitants, who, according to Radoń’s report, decided to destroy his mounds of commemoration:

So I put those mounds, and I see the people coming, entire families, young and old, each holding a spade, a mattock. Even the good woman, bent to the ground because of her illness, who never leaves her house, swoops at the mounds with her mattock. So I say: “You are also so silly to mess with the graves.” And she goes: “I will stop doing so if you tell me where your people took my daddy.” ⁴⁶

The village inhabitants, including those who were related to the Poles who disappeared before the retaliation, said almost nothing about these allegations in their statements. One of the leaders only incidentally mentioned the conflict that took place at the cemetery:

There were protests, some first mounds were erected, crosses put. At first there was such resentment, the people started protesting . . . that they were to be commemorated and the victims on our side were commemorated by no one. (A leader)

The leader indicated the same reason for the destruction of Radoń’s mounds as the old woman. By commemorating those who were murdered in the Polish retaliation operation, Radoń, who, as a consequence of his actions was identified as “keeping the side of the Ukrainians,” gave the advantage to the memory of the Ukrainian victims in the local landscape. As a result, he evoked protests from the relatives of the kidnapped Poles of the village, claiming that the former Ukrainian residents of Pawłokoma knew where their bodies were buried. Radoń’s establishment of an “asymmetry of memory” in the local landscape intensified the sense of injustice felt by the Polish residents who could not bury their relatives, and thus end the period of mourning for their loss. ⁴⁷ The Ukrainian side was responsible in their eyes for this state of affairs. In contrast to the Poles, the Ukrainians not only knew where the bodies of their victims were, but also, thanks to Radoń, attempted to establish the physiognomic aspect of the framework of memory of their victims in the Polish “symbolic domain.” ⁴⁸ In the 1990s, because of this feeling of injustice, some of the inhabitants voiced their resentment against the Greek Catholic prayers for the dead, called panakhydas, which were held in the cemetery. ⁴⁹ Two respondents recalled this incident as follows:

As far as I know, after Easter, on the first Sunday, they have those rituals commemorating the dead. When they came here . . . everyone wondered “What is going to happen here?” The police came with the dogs to watch. (A leader)

At the beginning, when the Ukrainians started coming here . . . the old people who were still alive and whose relatives were murdered would lash out against it. (A man aged about seventy-five)

The chance for the resolution of the memory of the conflict arose in the 2000s when Polish authorities held consultations with inhabitants and local elites prior to the erection of a monument for the Ukrainian victims.

Polish–Ukrainian Reconciliation in Pawłokoma: A Symbolic Substitute for the Working-Through Process

The involvement of representatives of the Polish state institutions in the commemoration of the victims of the retaliatory act was an opportunity to work through the traumatic past in Pawłokoma. The ceremonies commemorating both victims of the conflict were to be preceded by the erection of a monument in the Greek Catholic cemetery for the murdered Ukrainians that the Ukrainian groups had actively requested for some time. Thanks to one of the Ukrainian foundations, the cemetery was fenced in 1997 and communal authorities set three crosses on its premises; the local community did not approve any other kind of commemoration. ⁵⁰ Before working on the commemoration itself, in March 2005 the representatives of the Council for the Protection of Struggle and Martyrdom Sites (Rada Ochrony Pamięci Walk i Męczeństwa) conducted consultations in Warsaw with the representatives of local and regional authorities. Almost three months later, there was a meeting with the residents of Pawłokoma attended by the Secretary General of the Council, Andrzej Przewoźnik. ⁵¹ The talks became an opportunity for village inhabitants to voice their feelings of injustice and the wrongdoing they felt arose from the planned legitimisation of the “asymmetry of memory.” Initially, they demanded that before the commemoration of the victims of the retaliatory act, the Ukrainian side should indicate the burial place of the abducted Poles: ⁵²

We were against it. . . . We wanted no commemoration. The condition was that they indicate where . . . the bodies of the people they kidnapped were. (A leader)

We . . . wanted to know the truth about our people . . . so that we could move [them] to some worthy place. (A man aged about eighty)

People on the Ukrainian side who, according to some inhabitants, may know the location of the Polish bodies have kept silent for years. My data does not allow for an unequivocal assessment of how much this attitude can be attributed to an actual lack of knowledge in this regard and how much to ill will. The solution to this stalemate turned out to be a symbolic exchange that set up the physiognomic frameworks of both memories and thus achieved symmetry in the landscape of local memory. In response to the demands for disclosure of the Polish victims’ burial places during the meeting in Pawłokoma, Przewoźnik presented the inhabitants with a proposal to commemorate the kidnapped Poles. This proposal had already been discussed at the meeting with local and regional authorities in Warsaw. Assured of such a possibility, the residents did not object to the commemoration of the Ukrainian victims of the retaliatory act:

And so not to be left with nothing, we agreed, but only under that condition of commemorating our victims. . . . And for that reason . . . this cross is there. (A leader)

Przewoźnik said that if we agreed to that, they would erect the cross in exchange for our consent. (A man aged about eighty)

The cross was placed in the square in front of the Roman Catholic Church with the following inscription preceding the surnames of the Polish victims: “In memory of the Polish inhabitants of Pawłokoma village who, in the years 1939–1945, suffered death from the hands of the Ukrainian nationalists or died in the ‘inhuman land.’” Even if not erected in the place where the victims were murdered, as the monument commemorating the Ukrainians is, it still indicates who was responsible for the Polish suffering. A monument commemorating the Ukrainian victims was erected in the Greek Catholic cemetery where their mass grave is situated, not far from the “Polish” cross. On the plaques located on the right and left, the surnames of the Ukrainian victims are inscribed in Ukrainian. A short inscription in the centre of the cross says “Eternal memory to 366 victims who died tragically in the village of Pawłokoma on 1–3 March 1945.” The inscription attributes no collective identity to the murderers, corresponding to the local non-memory of participation by the former inhabitants of Pawłokoma in the act of retaliation. When talking about the victims, the village inhabitants relatively often put the blame on the military unit of Biss “Wacław.” This unit, though composed of Poles, had no connections with the pre-war Pawłokoma community:

They suspect the local people, but they had nothing to do with it. . . . Our Polish partisans came here from the East . . . and they took everyone to the cemetery. (A woman aged about seventy)

Then the [Polish] partisans came. One day they came to Pawłokoma, . . . and they shot everyone. . . . Those who were in our village were all from Lviv. (A woman aged about eighty-five)

The above statements show unambiguously that the participation of Pawłokoma inhabitants in the act of retaliation, as well as the events causing the “trauma of the victims” felt by those who lost their relatives in the conflict, have not been worked through. Eight years after the ceremony attended by the presidents, the collective memory of Pawłokoma residents seemed to be dominated by the idea that the act of retaliation was an event that did not involve members of the local Polish community. Furthermore, the families of the abducted Poles still have not found out exactly what happened to their relatives and where their bodies lie:

The Ukrainians have a grudge against the Poles and the Poles against the Ukrainians. The difference is that the Poles have no graves of those who perished at the hands of UPA. And the Ukrainians in fact have a place to light a candle. (A man aged about seventy-five)

The ceremony in Pawłokoma that was attended by the presidents was not accompanied by an attempt to create proper and complex institutional conditions and norms to enhance the working-through process as mentioned by LaCapra. This kind of institutional impulse could be provided by state and/or local authorities in undertaking actions to mediate dialogue involving the Polish and Ukrainian witnesses and participants in the tragic events, their families, and historians who study the issue. Such a dialogue, whose importance was pointed out in a speech by President Kaczyński, ⁵³ could facilitate the reconstruction of events from the past and their acceptance by both the Polish inhabitants and the Ukrainians. One of the experts emphasised the lack of such initiatives preceding the official ceremony:

Preparation . . . at the state level . . . was certainly well done; however, no one had conducted an educational campaign among the residents. There was not anything like preparation for the process of reconciliation or a historical dialogue. (An expert)

The actions undertaken in connection with official celebrations were focused more on creating a symbolic Polish–Ukrainian reconciliation rather than on producing institutional conditions for memory work. Consequently, in the context of the Polish–Ukrainian reconciliation in Pawłokoma and the accompanying events, we cannot observe successful working through, but rather a kind of symbolic substitute of that process which was intended to alleviate the conflict of memory.

As a result of the meetings between Przewoźnik, the residents, and representatives of local authorities, we have arrived at a symmetry between memories of the Polish and Ukrainian victims in the symbolic space of the village. At the ceremony of reconciliation on 13 May 2006, there were no disturbances. So far, the two memorials have remained standing in Pawłokoma, several dozen metres apart. Their final symbolic meaning is the result of the compromises made by both parties. Since the end of the ceremony, there have been no memory conflicts in Pawłokoma. Panakhydas regularly take place near the Ukrainian memorial. For Polish inhabitants, religious prayers commemorating the Ukrainian victims have become a common sight in the landscape of Pawłokoma. Some of them expressed their contentment with the fact that the neglected cemetery was cleaned up, stressing that every human has the right to a dignified burial:

Everyone is busy with themselves, everyone has their own problems. Nobody disturbs them, they come . . . and they go to the cemetery and probably have religious services there because the priests are with them. . . . This has become so common that nobody is interested in their arrivals. We used to say, “The Ukrainians were there.” . . . Now, nothing like that is heard. (A leader)

It is very good that all of this is now cleared and they take care of it. It should be so, because people are buried there. (A woman aged about forty)

Conclusions: What Was Missed in Pawłokoma in Working Through the Traumatic Past?

Despite playing an important role in the mitigation of the memory conflict, the memorial of the Polish victims and the consultations held prior to its erection should only be deemed as a substitute for the working-through process. In Pawłokoma, the ceremony has not resulted in significant steps to establish “social bonding . . . including empathic and compassionate relations to others.” ⁵⁴ Examples of positive relations with the “Others” still exist, though, in the memories of some Pawłokoma inhabitants. When interviewed, they recalled examples of peaceful coexistence between the Ukrainian and Polish inhabitants of Pawłokoma before the Second World War:

Everything was fine. Before the war, my father . . . lived here . . . the Greek Catholic Church was here and they celebrated their religious holidays: these used to be two weeks after [ours]. . . . They all celebrated together . . . they got married. (A leader)

They would get married, a Pole with a Ukrainian, a Ukrainian with a Pole, they would invite one another to celebrations. Only later this hatred came from the East. (A man aged about eighty)

In the memory of the inhabitants of Pawłokoma, in particular those whose relatives were abducted, the conflict seems to prevail over the “positive past.” The opportunity that was created by the reconciliation ceremony to work through traumatic memory in the local community was missed not solely because of the lack of appropriate institutional support. The attitudes among some Poles and some Ukrainians should also be recognised as an impediment to the success of such a process. Because they were focused on the wrongs inflicted upon their own groups, they were unable to see the other party’s point of view. Such a conclusion can be drawn both from the reports of elderly village residents upon meeting their Ukrainian peers, and from the memories of the conflict that have been preserved by the Polish inhabitants of Pawłokoma. Poles relativize or rationalize the suffering of the Ukrainian victims, while Ukrainians fail to understand the wrongs suffered by the Polish people:

And this . . . Ukrainian from Canada . . . also started with me that they were good, that it was the Poles who murdered them in a horrible way. And what they did with us, she [passed over]. (A woman aged about seventy)

The [Polish] partisans arrived from Lviv and told them to leave, so maybe those who tried to flee were sometimes killed, things happened. (A man aged about eighty)

Although members of older generations are far more entangled in the traumatic past, they are not the only group considered as part of the working-through process. In his studies on working through, LaCapra draws attention to the need for the involvement of the descendants of parties burdened with a traumatic past:

It is also significant that descendants of perpetrators and victims may have a basis for coming empathically together to deal with events that divided their parents and ancestors, for they experience a psychic burden regarding events for which they are not responsible. ⁵⁵

In Pawłokoma, the Poles and the Ukrainians were both not only victims, but also perpetrators. For that reason, the involvement of the younger generations in the working-through process seems even more justified. Even though they are not engaged in the tragic past today, they can be confronted with it in the future. Hence the need to include younger generations in any dialogue about the past and to undertake appropriate educational actions. According to one of the leaders and a former pupil of the local primary school, the topic of the Polish–Ukrainian conflict was raised during classes at the local school:

These issues have always been talked about. . . . You must not exaggerate blaming one or the other party, because [these issues] are still painful. (A leader)

We had a class on the topic of World War II and the teacher also mentioned it. (A man aged about twenty)

However, statements by other young people, ranging from twenty to thirty years old, show that the issue of the Polish–Ukrainian conflict might have been mentioned in history classes mainly as a result of the ceremony held in the village in 2006:

No such topic was raised. . . . When the Polish and Ukrainian reconciliation event was held here—I was in primary school then—and after that . . . definitely they would not talk about it, they concluded that there was nothing to talk about as they had reconciled. The school kept silent about it and I bet . . . that today they also do not talk about it. (A man aged about twenty)

Even if the young people cannot learn enough about the tragic history of the village at school, they have a chance to learn, in particular about the suffering of the Poles, from their parents or grandparents. For the younger generation, past events usually do not seem to be as important as for the eldest generation of the village inhabitants, though:

To be honest, I was not interested in this. . . . They should take care rather about Poland than about the past, because we cannot turn back time. (A man aged about twenty)

My children . . . do not care about it. (A woman aged about seventy)

There are also instances of young people from the victims’ families who show a lack of interest in the traumatic events that affected the lives of the eldest members of the family:

I talk to the children. I explain to them what it was like. . . . Surely they will want to know. . . . But my grandchildren are of a different opinion. (A man aged about eighty)

The past in general, not only the traumatic past related to the Polish–Ukrainian conflict, is not often a topic of interest for the young inhabitants of the village. Facing unemployment and with no prospects of satisfying work in the area, they are focused only on the present. As a result, their efforts to earn a living sometimes result in temporary or permanent migration:

They keep leaving, everything is sold up . . . everything is gone. (A man aged about seventy-five)

They have other things on their minds: to find work, to have something to drink. (A man aged about eighty)

The members of the young generations are usually not interested in local history; they often leave the village looking for employment, which weakens their bonds with the local community. At the same time, the eldest inhabitants are gradually dying out. In light of these facts, the discursive aspects of the framework of the local memory of the conflict, transmitted mainly within families, may disappear over time. This state of affairs may thus result in a kind of symmetry: the disappearance of the discursive aspect of the local framework of memory, both of the Polish and the Ukrainian victims, will be accompanied by the coexistence of the material commemorations.

The memory of conflict is usually not nearly as important to younger people as it is to the oldest inhabitants of the village. However, even if the tragic past is no longer a significant point of reference for the younger inhabitants in the process of defining their identity, the situation may change as a result of political, economic, or migration crises. Factors of this kind may activate negative memories among the members of the two previously conflicted communities; these memories focus on the harm that their own communities have suffered, stimulating and exacerbating antagonisms between the groups, as happened in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. ⁵⁶ Those threats motivate attempts to draw conclusions from the case study of Pawłokoma that could prove useful in other social contexts. Two kinds of circumstances occurred in Pawłokoma that were not used appropriately in the working-through process: the presence of witnesses of the traumatic events and the involvement of state and local authorities in the commemoration of the conflict. If this institutional involvement had been more oriented towards social dialogue about the past, it would not only have enabled the Polish and Ukrainian witnesses to overcome the barrier of resentment and shame, encouraging them to participate in the process of reconstructing the truth about the conflict and making this truth public, but also have facilitated the social acceptance of this truth. Furthermore, the inclusion of the younger generations in the dialogue would have helped decrease the risk of the traumatic past becoming a source of conflict between the two groups. ⁵⁷ “The lost chance” for working through the traumatic past in Pawłokoma thus emphasizes the need for inclusion of the members of three groups into memory work: witnesses and participants of tragic events, members of younger generations from both groups involved in the conflict, and representatives of local and/or state authorities. The appropriate involvement of each of these groups in the process of memory work reduces the risk that the working through will turn into its own substitute.