The interview was recorded by the PILECKI INSTITUTE as part of the WITNESSES TO THE AGE project.
Welcome to the Witnesses to the Age channel. If you consider this material to be valuable, please click the THUMBS UP and watch other videos on our channel. SUBSCRIBE to help us grow the channel and share more fascinating stories with you. Leave a COMMENT below. If you know someone who would like to share their story with us, contact us at swiadkowieepoki@instytutpileckiego.pl
Our today’s interviewee:
Józefa Bryg (born 1938), a child survivor of the massacre in the village of Palikrowy near Tarnopol on 12 March 1944. She remembers her early childhood in Eastern Galicia in Poland’s Eastern Borderlands very fondly. The relations between Poles and Ukrainians were friendly at the time. Everything changed in the course of World War II: Ukrainian children were suddenly told not to play with their Polish peers, and the Ukrainians who had previously been friendly began to threaten their Polish neighbors. When Józefa Bryg was only several years old, on many occasions she heard grownups talk about horrific crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists. The culmination point came when the Ukrainian Insurgent Army carried out a massacre during the name day celebration held by a Pole who was well known locally. Józefa’s mother decided that a hideout in the basement no longer sufficed and she took her two children to a monastery in Podkamień, where a lot of Poles had already found refuge. Józefa’s mother believed in the information she heard that the Polish army had arrived in the area, so she decided to return with her children to Palikrowy. While they were on their way, it turned out this was a ruse and an entire unit of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army was close by. They asked a Ukrainian acquaintance for help and the woman pointed them to a hideout in a barn, but the family was discovered by the Ukrainian nationalists, who then rushed all of their Polish captives to a large meadow. They interrogated them and checked their documents in order to separate the Poles from the Ukrainians and the Jews. Then the Ukrainians shot a dozen or so Jews. To this day, Józefa Bryg can see their naked bodies that lay next to her family that entire day. The executions of Poles began in the evening. Józefa’s mother died instantly and collapsed onto her child. Józefa managed to survive, but the members of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army began walking around the meadow and killing off the wounded. Józefa saw with her own eyes that they shot her wounded father in the head from a close range. They wanted to shoot her as well, but she kept very still, so they believed she was already dead and decided not to waste a bullet. It turned out that Józefa’s brother Stasio survived as well. Their neighbor found the children and helped them get out of the meadow filled with dead bodies. They made their way to the river and Stasio helped Józefa get to the other side, where they were supposed to be safer.
Copyright by Instytut Solidarności i Męstwa im. Witolda Pileckiego.
Негізгі бет Blood everywhere: they killed the Jews first, then shot at us - Józefa Bryg p.1 Witnesses to the Age
Пікірлер: 300