Pomnik ofiar UPA, Wrocław

Two pylons frame a stylized crucified Christ: this is Pomnik ofiar UPA, a memorial built for Polish citizens murdered in the south-eastern borderlands between 1939 and 1947 by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army. It was unveiled on the twenty-fifth of September 1999. Take in the metal coats of arms set into its base.

They represent Lwów, Stanisławów, Łuck and Tarnopol, places bound to the communities remembered here. Within the monument’s crypts lies soil brought from graves in two thousand places where Polish civilians were murdered across Volhynia, Tarnopol, Lwów, Stanisławów, Lublin, Polesia, and the Rzeszów–Przemyśl region. Another plaque remembers Ukrainians who gave Poles shelter.

The memorial reaches back to a campaign of mass killing carried out by the UPA against Polish minorities from 1943 to 1945, which caused up to one hundred thousand Polish deaths. Its most intense months were July and August 1943, and women and children made up most of those killed. This compact structure makes memory physical: stone, metal, earth from distant graves, and a figure of suffering held between the pylons.