Besides Polish women and old people, also infants and children were the victims of the Ukrainian nationalists in Volhynia. Accounts, memoirs, and documentation show that when confronted with mass murders, many children showed heroism and consciousness of mind, saving not only their own lives, but also their siblings and bystanders injured in the massacres.
The physical, mass liquidation of Poles by Ukrainian nationalists was carried out based on a secret directive issued in June 1943 by the chief of staff of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, Colonel Dmytr Klachkivsky. The directive states: “We should carry out a great action of liquidation of the Polish element. With the departure of the German troops, we should use this convenient moment to liquidate the entire male population aged 16 to 60. This battle we cannot lose, and the Polish forces must be weakened at all costs”. In practice, these, and other orders, which called for such killings, led to cruel massacres of children and women in 1943 and 1944. It is estimated that approximately 130,000 people were killed by Ukrainians, including about 60,000 in Volhynia. As many as 135 ways in which victims died have been documented. Death by bullet was the mildest of them.
In the face of the great tragedies of entire villages inhabited by Poles, Polish children, who more often than adults managed to escape the murderers, played a considerable role in rescuing their younger siblings and helping the wounded. Although they experienced harrowing scenes, some of them nevertheless retained their wits.
When a married couple of teachers were murdered in the village of Huszczyn in Kowel district (now Ukraine) in May 1943, their three children survived the murder. Their eldest son Zbigniew, aged 7, and his 3-year-old brother Andrzej rushed to Kowel to be rescued, walking 11km along the railway route leading to that village. Throughout the long and tiring walk, Zbigniew carried his youngest brother, who was an infant at the time. In Male Siedliszcze (Kostopol district), on the other hand, after the murderers had left, the Szczurowski daughters led their wounded mother out of the burning house into the fields, to hide there and dress her wounds. There were dozens of such situations. According to other accounts, the children also alerted police units made up of Poles about the killings, thus saving the surrounding villages, which received protection. Others, very bold kids returned from hiding to their villages after the murders and tried to pay their respects to the corpses of their relatives.
The mass children’s escapes from the Ukrainian nationalists to the west drew the attention of the Central Welfare Council. Thanks to it, and especially to the ethnographer Jadwiga Klimaszewska, a soldier in the Home Army, it was possible to organise an orphanage for them in Pieskowa Skała (near Kraków) in the General Government.