Scattered: The Forced Relocation of Poland’s Ukrainians after World War II

Epilogue: The “Compensation”

141 More than fifty years after Operation Vistula, Hania began to hear talk about how Ukrainians in Poland could apply to the courts to reclaim ownership of the property from which their families had been evicted. Hania, already in her midsixties, was visiting a friend in Zielona Góra after church one Sunday when he told her about an article in the latest edition of the Ukrainian-language newspaper Nasze Slowo. The article described a man who in 1999 legally requested the repeal of the decision that had permitted the government to confiscate his grandmother’s land in the Lemko region. Hania knew of the man, Stefan Hładyk, from community events like the Òemkowska Watra festival. Mr. Hładyk’s legal case pointed out that on July 27, 1949, the Communists governing Poland had passed a decree transferring all the property in southeastern Poland that was not in private use into the hands of the state, thereby depriving the relocated Ukrainian population of all rights to their former territory. Based on this decree, the Polish government confiscated eleven hectares of land that had belonged to Mr. Hładyk’s grandmother Maria. Mr. Hładyk asked that the authorities repeal this postwar decision, meaning that he, as Maria’s descendant, could rightfully recover his family’s land. At first, Poland’s Ministry of Agriculture accommodated his request. Then a Polish governmental agency known as the State Forests, which managed the country’s wooded areas and officially owned the seven and a half hectares of Maria’s land consisting of forest, appealed the ministerial decision. Poland’s Supreme Administrative Court was reviewing the matter, but in the meantime Hładyk’s case encouraged other victims of Operation Vistula to take Epilogue The “Compensation” Epilogue 142 action. Hania decided that she was going to try to recover her family’s former land in Smerekowiec as well. Hania felt she was the only person left from her immediate family who could demand compensation from the Polish government. Her father, Seman, despite his desire to return to the Lemko region, died in Troska in April 1964. Hania sent her siblings a telegram informing them of their father’s death. Seman passed away almost three years after Hania’s sister, Melania, and brother-in-law, Dmytro, immigrated with their children to the United States and a little more than a year after Hania got married to another Lemko living in Troska, Szymon Lozyniak, Dmytro’s nephew, as fate would have it. Melania was the one who suggested Szymon as a possible match for Hania just before leaving Poland. Hania’s mother, Maria, remained in Troska for another decade or so along with the family’s loyal farmhand, Wasyl, whom Hania always remembered entertaining her as a little girl by drawing pictures of goats on the endless pieces of paper that she brought him. After Hania and her husband built a new house in Ko˙zuchów, though, Maria moved in with them, and Wasyl moved into an old age home until they both finally passed away. Hania sent a telegram to her siblings again in January 1979, this time about their mother’s death. One by one, the inhabitants of Troska found better living conditions elsewhere until, eventually, the village became deserted. The local state-run collective farms removed all the bricks from the remaining houses in order to build homes for their workers in other towns, Hania heard. As the grass grew wild over the foundations of the former houses in Troska, hardly any sign remained that anyone, German, Ukrainian, or otherwise, ever lived there. Hania’s older brother, Petro, had also passed away just months earlier, in November 1999, in Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine. He and his wife, Olya, only returned to the Lemko region for the first time the year that Seman died, bringing along their two girls. Olya walked from Krynica to Tylicz with her daughters so that they could see the long path she had taken daily to the Ukrainian teachers’ seminary. However, when they reached the edge of the garden that used to belong to her family, Olya’s feet would not take her any farther, and she started to sob until a kind neighbor— a Lemko woman married to a Pole who had not had to relocate—took them all inside. Whereas Olya now found the Lemko region too Epilogue 143 heartbreaking and never came back again...