Murderous tyrannies all

“Western Volhynia, less than thirty thousand square kilometers, inhabited by 1.5 million people, including 250,000 Poles, experienced in 1943 mass killings of Poles and a Polish-Ukrainian war. At the very least 15,000, and possibly many thousands more, Polish men, women, and children died at the hands of Ukrainian partisans and villagers in one of the most comprehensive cases of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in wartime eastern Europe. Many Poles survived only because they fled across the Buh River to the General Government. These events involved the only Ukrainian partisan force that presented itself as an alternative to Soviet and Nazi rule, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, or UPA.” – Karel C. Berkhoff,  in Harvest of Despair