MOSCOW, September 24. /TASS/. Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) has made public an archival document disclosing the blood-curdling details of how residents of the Ukrainian village of Skopow were slaughtered by former members of Poland's Armia Krajowa (Home Army) in March 1945.

As the FSB’s public relations center noted, on September 9, 1944 an agreement On the Evacuation of the Ukrainian Population from the Territory of Poland and Polish Citizens from the Territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Ukrainian SSR) was signed in Lublin. Nikita Khrushchev inked it on behalf of the Ukrainian SSR, and Edward Osobka-Morawski, for the Polish side. The resettlement was supposed to be voluntary, but in reality was often accompanied by anti-Ukrainian violence.

The Armia Krajowa was officially dissolved on January 19, 1945, and many of its former members joined the civil militia and the Polish Army, as well as the local authorities. Some former members of the nationalist underground resistance indulged in looting, murder, and violence against peaceful Belarusians and Ukrainians living in Poland and in the border areas of Belarus and Ukraine.

"One of the bloody crimes was committed by Polish thugs in the early spring of 1945. On March 6, 1945, the village of Skopow, located 27 km west of Przemysl, was attacked by a detachment of the so-called 'People's Guard' (Ludowa Straż Bezpieczeństwa)," the FSB Public Relations Center said.

Declassified evidence

The FSB published letters from engineer Nikolay Demyanchik, the son of a priest, addressed to Patriarch Alexy, of Moscow and All Russia, and Metropolitan John, of Kiev and Galicia, describing the details of the murder of his family and other residents of the village of Skopow. On February 27, 1945, the Demyanchik family applied for resettlement to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (the territory of their village was to become part of Poland). But on his return from Przemysl, where Demyanchik had traveled to inquire about the details of their resettlement, he learned that his house was attacked by a group of Polish militias and civilians (about 30 people), who slaughtered all his relatives.

"My father, an 81-year-old sickly old man, a Uniate priest, was put into a bed where he was stabbed with a knife. He had his eyes gouged out. My sister Miroslava’s head looked like a bloody mask. All members of my family were literally floating on their own blood," Demyanchik wrote in his letters. Even the housekeeper was not spared, he said. That same evening, he added, the Poles killed six more peasants in his village.

"This was no random band that committed these murders, but a well-organized local militant Polish organization, in which the local Polish authorities - the Wojt and the militia from Dubiecko - took an active part, with the local Polish priest Zurawski being one of the ringleaders," Demyanchik testified.

Two weeks later, the Poles came back again and staged what can be likened to the "St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre: in our village they killed about 200 people - old men, women and children." The wife of a Red Army soldier Teklya Penzak was burned alive together with her two young children. Twenty-five minors whom their parents had been hiding in a shelter, were also put to death.

In his letters to the hierarchs, Demyanchik asked for support for his plea to then Soviet leader Joseph Stalin "to conduct an investigation into the Skopow carnage and to punish those responsible."

As the FSB Public Relations Office has said, after the letters were intercepted by military censors in the early summer of 1945, the chief of the 2nd (counterintelligence) department of Ukraine’s the NKGB (People’s Commissariat of State Security), Lieutenant-Colonel L. Medvedev, in a report to the NKGB of the USSR, said that "the atrocities and massacres of Ukrainians and Orthodox clergy in Poland had been confirmed by a number of our sources." The censors forwarded Demyanchik’s letters to the addressees.