ИСТИНА

This presentation is based on the analysis of the memories of Ukrainian and Polish repatriates, oral conversations with them and their children. On August 16, 1945 the agreement on the Soviet-Polish state border was concluded. It basically followed the ethnographic principle. However, west of the border remained Ukrainian population, and east of the border Polish one. Both Ukrainians and Poles lived in these territories for a long time, they spoke the same language, they intermarried; their material culture was very similar. The distance between representatives of different denominations was also not too great: Catholics (Poles) and Greek Catholics (Ukrainians) were tolerant of each other, and could attend divine services both in the Greek Catholic and Catholic churches. The identity of the population, especially rural, was not clearly expressed. As the Polish historian Józef Chlebowczyk noted, it could vary from non-reflective ethnic indifference to the most acute manifestations of nationalist fanaticism. The question of ethnicity became extremely important during the war time. The fate of a person often depended on whether they were a Pole or a Ukrainian, and sometimes where they were born: in independent Poland or in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Liberation of western Ukraine and eastern Poland did not calm the borderland. The problem of national minorities was to be solved by resettlement (repatriation). On September 9, 1944 the agreement between the Council of People's Commissars of the Ukrainian SSR and the Polish Committee of National Liberation was signed. The repatriation ended in 1946. The presentation focuses on the question of what do the Ukrainians and the Poles who were “driven out” from their homeland remember and what do they try to forget?