President Karol Nawrocki presented Volodymyr Zelensky with two volumes of Documents of the Volhynia Massacre, according to findings by the Niezalezna.pl portal. The books offer a harrowing account of crimes committed by Ukrainian nationalists against the Polish population in Volhynia in the 1940s. The volumes were compiled and published by the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN) in 2023–2024. Their foundation is the so-called Szumska Archive, which contains unique testimonies from the time of the genocide.
Emphasizing the Importance of History
“Beyond strategic issues, we are today aware—and Poles have this impression—that our effort has not been met with due appreciation, and this was one of the topics of our conversation. I conveyed this in a firm but cordial discussion with the president,” President Nawrocki said after the meeting.
It is also known that the heads of the respective institutes of national remembrance accompanied both presidents. Karol Nawrocki emphasized that he pressed for the urgent exhumation of all victims of the Volhynia massacre. He raised this issue repeatedly during the election campaign as well, announcing that as president he would seek to significantly accelerate the process.
The gift presented by the Polish president to Volodymyr Zelensky was also symbolic. According to our findings, the Ukrainian president received two volumes of the book Documents of the Volhynia Massacre.
What Are Documents of the Volhynia Massacre?
This is a unique collection of documents produced by activists of the Eastern Lands Committee immediately after the wave of murders in Volhynia. For many years, the materials were kept by Dr. Urszula Szumska. They came to light 80 years after the “Bloody Sunday” in Volhynia. For historians, these documents constitute an invaluable record of testimonies by Polish survivors concerning the Ukrainian genocide that took place in the 1940s in Volhynia and Eastern Lesser Poland.
Most of the testimonies were authenticated by the handwritten signature of an eyewitness or by a note indicating the source of the information.
“These documents can be regarded as among the most important of all written evidence of the Volhynia massacre known to date. Thanks to them, we will be able to estimate more precisely than ever before the scale of the genocide committed by Ukrainian nationalists against Poles living in Volhynia, and to restore the memory of the victims—often by name and surname—to future generations,” the IPN wrote after the publication of the first volume.
The second volume is based on books kept at the Tarnowski Family Museum–Castle in Tarnobrzeg, referred to by the editors as the “Green Book” and the “Brown Book.” They contain further accounts collected by activists of the Eastern Lands Committee from January to July 1944.