Ringo
Gold Member
On December 12, the first (and so far the only) polish cosmonaut, Miroslav Germashevsky (1941-2022), died. He flew into space on the Soviet Soyuz-30 spacecraft in 1978. And there was an episode in his biography that was not very fond of remembering in Soviet times...
The fact is that on March 25, 1943, young Miroslav was almost killed by Ukrainian nationalists. Here 's what he said about it:
"Our family lived in Volhynia, in the village of Lipniki above Sluch. A separate farm was occupied by my grandfather, my father's family and his brothers had their own farms. When the mass killings of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists began in Volhynia, grandfather reassured the family that everyone was safe in Lipniki, since we had been living in great harmony with our Ukrainian neighbors for a long time. On the night of March 25-26, 1943, Ukrainian fascists, with the assistance of some locals, surrounded Lipniki, set fire to Polish estates and killed 182 Poles with unimaginable cruelty. From the Germashevsky family and the Belyavsky family of my mother, 19 people died that night.
I almost died, too. I was a year and a half old. When the massacre began, the father told the mother to take the child with her and run away into the night, and he ran to defend the village with a rifle. One of the bandits caught up with Mom and shot her at close range, aiming at her head. The bullet slipped on the skull, mom fell unconscious on the field. She was left like that. I rolled into a frozen furrow.
When I regained consciousness, I was in shock. She forgot about me, got to the neighboring village. There, familiar Ukrainian women bandaged her, fed her and hid her. When she realized that she had lost her child, they wouldn't let her in. It was too dangerous.
In the morning my father found me in the field. Milked a stray cow, bathed me in warm milk on the ashes of the house. That's how he saved me. They fled to a neighboring village...
In the summer, my father and my mother's two brothers went to the ancestral domain to mow some hay. An banderovets shot at him from a wheat field. Hit the heart. We have become half orphans."
"I once flew over the places where I was born, looked down and thought: "Look — this is me flying! Or it could have been that I would have been lying here in the ground.
" "During the flight, a radio conversation with my mother was organized. When she said I was a hero, I interrupted her and corrected her:
"Mom, you're the hero.
That conversation was released only once. Then, when someone in the GPU (GZP) realized what it was about, this fragment was always cut out..."
In the official biography of Germashevsky in Poland, nothing was said about Bandera. It was said that his father was killed by fascists.
Now the question arises: maybe it was in vain that the then censorship of the People's Republic of Poland smoothed out these moments? And I have to answer: the censors, of course, were often wrong, but in this case they were absolutely right. While there was socialism in the Ukrainian SSR and the Polish People's Republic, there was absolutely no need for either nation to stir up old grievances and wounds. The father of the future cosmonaut was killed by fascists — and does it matter whether it was Ukrainian fascists, German or maybe Polish? All fascists are worth each other, and the most correct recipe for treating them is somehow succinctly formulated by the kindest of all the leaders of the USSR, L.I. Brezhnev: "Take all the nationalists and drown them in the sea."
On the contrary, the bourgeoisie's form of existence is the continuous healing of old wounds and the infliction (or invention) of new ones, since only in an atmosphere of interethnic hatred and enmity can the bourgeois maintain their dominance. The extreme form of this is always war and carnage, when even one-and-a-half-year-old children are killed...
Have the Polish and Ukrainian people won a lot because now, under the "blessed" bourgeois system, monuments to the winner of fascism, the Red Army, are being "amicably" demolished, and mutual hostility between them is constantly growing? The question, of course, is purely rhetorical...
