Pomnik pomordowanych przez UPA, Kraków

Before you is the Monument to Those Murdered by the UPA, a memorial at Rakowicki Cemetery for Polish victims of the Volhynia massacres. Its shape is that of an open book: two slanting tablets are joined by a bronze casting of human figures. On the right-hand tablet, you can follow the outline of the southeastern borderlands of the Second Polish Republic, with selected towns marked within it.

Czesław Dźwigaj, a professor at Kraków’s Academy of Fine Arts, designed this memorial. Kraków’s city council approved its construction on the twenty-sixth of May 2004, following an initiative funded by the Józef Piłsudski National Memory Society in Kraków. The base’s message asks for remembrance rather than revenge and dedicates the monument to victims of genocide committed against Poles during the Second World War by the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.

The monument was unveiled on the seventeenth of September 2004. Its date linked the sixty-first anniversary of mass killings of Poles in the eastern borderland provinces with the seventy-sixth anniversary of the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland. It stands beside the cemetery’s southwestern wall, close to the Austrian military cemetery.