President-elect Karol Nawrocki addressed a letter to participants of the ceremony commemorating the victims of the Volhynia massacre. The letter was read at a symbolic location, beneath the monument in Domostawa. A significant declaration was made.
On July 11, 1943, when UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) units attacked nearly 100 Polish villages in Volhynia, it marked the peak of the Volhynia massacre. These events have gone down in history as the so-called “Bloody Sunday.” Eighty-two years later, on July 12, 2025, Polish victims of the Ukrainian genocide in Volhynia were commemorated at the Volhynia Massacre Monument in Domostawa.
President-elect Karol Nawrocki addressed a letter to the attendees of the event, which was read aloud by PhD Karol Polejowski, Deputy President of the Institute of National Remembrance (IPN). “Poland first, Poles first. Including those who are still waiting for a dignified burial in Ukraine,” the audience heard, and words met with resounding applause.
In his letter, Nawrocki recalled the figure of Zygmunt Jan Rumel, one of the victims of Ukrainian brutality. “Today, we gather at a unique monument to pay tribute to all the victims of this horrific crime against Poles,” Nawrocki wrote.
The IPN president and president-elect noted that preserving the memory of this crime had not been easy over the years and that it was primarily the borderland communities who ensured its remembrance. He expressed his gratitude to all those who made the monument in Domostawa a reality.
“Without grassroots initiative, without the talent of an outstanding Polish artist, and the courage of local government, this monument would not have come into being. But it is also important to highlight and I speak here as a representative of the IPN, the involvement of the Institute, which supported the construction of the monument,” he wrote, pointing out that the IPN had funded two informational plaques about the Volhynia massacre as part of the memorial.
Nawrocki assured: “We will not rest until we have found and given a dignified and honourable burial to the last of the nearly 120,000 Polish men and women brutally murdered between 1939 and 1947. We will not allow monuments to be built on Polish soil in honour of their executioners while thousands of our compatriots do not even have a symbolic wooden cross.”
The participants of the ceremony greeted Nawrocki’s declaration with a standing ovation.
“We now face the task of locating and giving a proper burial to those who were left in nameless pits of death. This will be my goal, regardless of the circumstances. A dignified burial for them is our duty,” the president-elect concluded.