Traitor
Page 24
The farmhouse belonged to a family named Kostyshyn. The daughter of the family had been Mrs. Kijek’s aide at the Medical Institute in Lwów. They put him in the kitchen, on the floor by the woodstove, and he saw the girl’s face when she was heating the water to sterilize her instruments—“This is Anna,” Mrs. Kijek told him, “Anna Kostyshyn”—and he met her eyes over the pot.
She didn’t say anything, so he didn’t either, but later they were alone in the kitchen, and she was taking off his shoe, cutting it away with a scalpel because his foot had swollen so.
“Not so lucky this time, were you?” she said. “It’s going to be a while before you walk again.”
And his tongue knotted up because he didn’t know whether she knew Solovey was dead.
Then it occurred to him that she could have heard it from Vitalik.
Then it occurred to him that she might think he had done it if she’d heard it from Vitalik.
She peeled away the shoe gingerly. Her callused red hands were warm and steady.
“Ruslan and Taras came through about two weeks ago,” she said quietly. “They told me what happened—as much as they knew to tell anyway.” She held his ankle under her hand and unwound Koval’s bandage. Without looking up, she said, “Is he dead?”
She didn’t know.
“He’s dead,” Tolya said.
“I was afraid—” she said, then stopped. She bit her lip. “You saw it?”
“Yes.”
“Quick?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“He shot himself. He was wounded. He shot himself so I would leave him—so I would make it away.”
She was silent for a moment, wiping the dried blood off his foot. Then she said, “I’m glad you were with him.”
She wiped her hands on her apron and reached for her bag.
“There’s still shrapnel in here. I’m not going to try to dig it out tonight—not in this light. I’ll dope you up so you can sleep.”
* * *
Now he was lying in a bed of blankets on the Kostyshyns’ kitchen floor, listening to the rustle of the rain on the thatched roof and the snap of the fire in the stove, comfortably warm and still and heavy headed, his eyes nearly shut, his legs stretched out and the ankle numbed and wrapped in new, clean gauze—and Lena was crouching beside him in the half-light, bending very close to his ear, whispering because she thought he was asleep: “I’ll be back for you, Comrade, all right?”
And he was going to tell her what he hadn’t been able to tell her on the kitchen step: that she was wrong, that it was his war the same as hers—the same as it was Anna’s and Koval’s, the same as it had been Solovey’s, and Comrade Lieutenant Spirin’s, and Aunt Olena’s, and Father Dmytro’s, just the same as it had been his mother’s and his father’s. Anyway, he had to stay because he had to show Anna where Vitalik’s squad had buried Solovey. He’d been thinking it through, and he was pretty sure he could find it if he could find the lake. He remembered the cut and the place in the streambed where the bank ran down.
But she was gone when he opened his eyes, and then he wasn’t sure whether she’d really been there at all.
LIST OF MILITARY AND PARAMILITARY FORCES
Gestapo—Geheime Staatspolizei, the Nazi secret police
Luftwaffe—the air force of Nazi Germany
Nachtigallen—Bataillon Ukrainische Gruppe Nachtigall (Ukrainian Battalion, Nightingale Group), a special-forces unit of the German army, comprised of Ukrainian volunteers
NKVD—Narodnyĭ Komissariat Vnutrennikh Del (People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs), the Soviet secret police from 1934 to 1946, eventually succeeded by the KGB
Polish Resistance—collective name for the armed forces of the Polish underground state that fought German and Soviet occupation in Poland
SS—Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadrons), originally Hitler’s bodyguard, expanded into an elite Nazi security force responsible for implementing racial policies
UPA—Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia (Ukrainian Insurgent Army), the military arm of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, fighting at various times against the Soviets, the Germans, and the Polish Resistance alike
Wehrmacht—the army of Nazi Germany
LIST OF CHARACTERS
FIRST UKRAINIAN FRONT OF THE SOVIET RED ARMY
NIKOLAI VATUTIN, commander (until his assassination by the UPA in February 1944)
FYODOR VOLKOV, commander of the Front’s NKVD rifle division
100th Rifle Division, 106th Rifle Corps, 60th Army
SOKOLOV, commander
SERGEI PETROV, political officer (zampolit)
MAKSYM RUDENKO, lieutenant
SPIRIN, lieutenant
NATALIYA KOVAL, junior sergeant, sniper
ANATOLIY “TOLYA” KOROLENKO, sniper
VASYA, YURA, and PETYA, soldiers
UKRAINIAN NATIONALISTS
ALEKSEY KOBRYN, nom de guerre SOLOVEY, elder son of jailed nationalist leader Yevhen Kobryn
MYKOLA KOBRYN, younger son of Yevhen Kobryn
Nachtigallen
ROMAN SHUKHEVYCH, commander
STRILKA, MARKO, ANDRIY, and VITALIK, soldiers
UPA
SOLOVEY, squad leader
VITALIK, squad leader
ANDRIY, TARAS, YAKIV, RUSLAN, and VALENTYN, soldiers
ANNA and IRYNA, Red Cross nurses
POLISH RESISTANCE
RENATA KIJEK, director of pediatrics at the State Medical Institute
ADRIAN KIJEK, Renata’s husband, professor of civil law at Lwów University
LENA KIJEK, daughter of Renata and Adrian, squad leader
JANEK, JERZY, KOSTEK, and RYś, soldiers
OTHERS
FATHERS STEPAN and DMYTRO, priests at the village church in Kuz’myn, Ukraine S.S.R.
FATHERS YOSYP and KLIMENT, priests at the Dormition Church in Lwów
OLENA, Tolya’s aunt
IVAN, Olena’s husband
JANINA, nurse at the State Medical Institute
ALTSHULER, pharmacist in Lwów
AUTHOR’S NOTE
In 1943 and 1944, as the Soviet Red Army pushed the German Wehrmacht slowly back westward, historic tensions between Ukrainians and Poles in the disputed regions of Galicia and Volhynia burst into brutal violence. The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists had cooperated with German leadership until the Germans imprisoned key OUN leaders shortly after the beginning of Operation Barbarossa—the invasion of the Soviet Union—in mid-1941, crushing OUN hopes for an independent Ukraine. Betrayed by their erstwhile allies, an OUN faction led by Stepan Bandera fielded its own paramilitary and partisan army, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (Ukrainska Povstanska Armiia, UPA), which carried out a systematic cleansing of the Galician and Volhynian Polish population. Tens of thousands of Poles—men, women, and children—died at the hands of the UPA, often horrifically. Regional elements of the Polish Resistance responded in kind by killing thousands of Ukrainians.
For clarity’s sake, I’ve referred to the military arm of the Ukrainian nationalist movement throughout as the UPA—an admittedly oversimplified composite of several different factions within the movement, and also an anachronism in Aleksey’s storyline, as the UPA didn’t officially exist until 1942. My main characters are all fictional, though some are composites of real people. The places are real, though some of the names have changed: Lwów is now L’viv, Ukraine, and Andriy’s Proskuriv is now Khmelnytskyy. Most of the major events mentioned really took place, and I’ve tried to follow the historical timeline as accurately as possible.
Some particulars: “Dekulakization,” the extermination of the land-owning peasant class—in actual practice, anybody who resisted the Soviets’ forced collectivization of farms—resulted in deportation or death for untold millions of peasants across the Soviet Union between 1929 and 1932. In Ukraine, the twin processes of dekulakization and collectivization produced a catastrophic famine that killed roughly four million people in 1932–
33. Some historians place the death toll much higher. Tolya knows it simply as “the famine”; history knows it as the Holodomor, genocide by hunger.
During the purges of the late 1930s, Soviet authorities targeted ethnic Poles living in the Soviet Union as enemies of the state. Owning a rosary could be taken as sufficient evidence of Polishness and was a punishable offense until Stalin relaxed the restrictions on religious practice during the Second World War. Whether the UPA made as direct a connection as I portray—with Solovey and Vitalik immediately identifying Tolya as Polish by the fact that he carries a rosary—is less certain, though not (I would contend) unreasonable. The UPA targeted Catholic priests and places of worship and were known to ferret out victims by forcing suspected Poles to pray in Ukrainian. There was, and is, a large Eastern rite Catholic community in and around Lwów, but as Tolya observes, praying the rosary isn’t a traditional element of Eastern rite worship.
The killing of the Polish university professors in Lwów took place over the first week of July 1941, with most of the executions taking place early in the morning of July 4. The extent to which Ukrainian nationalists were responsible for supplying names and addresses to the SS death squads, or even openly collaborating with them, remains a matter for debate—as does the extent of UPA involvement in atrocities against Jews. Most historians agree that the Nachtigall Battalion, the all-Ukrainian special-forces unit that marched into Lwów with the Germans in late June 1941, took part in the pogroms that followed; and many former members of the Nachtigall Battalion went on to join the UPA when it formed in 1942.
Not all Ukrainians agreed with the UPA’s campaign of ethnic cleansing, even within the UPA’s own ranks. Not all participated. Many actively resisted by sheltering their Polish neighbors, at the risk of their own lives. Historian Timothy Snyder estimates that the UPA killed as many of these “traitor” Ukrainians as it did Poles. Late-war and postwar collaborations between the remnants of the UPA and the Polish Resistance suggest that both groups had begun to regard their common enemy, the Soviet occupation force, as the primary threat. It was too little too late; both groups were effectively defunct by the 1950s.
The Warsaw Uprising, which took place between August and October 1944, was a heroic but doomed attempt by the Polish Resistance to liberate Warsaw with the expectation of receiving Soviet help; at the outset of the uprising, Soviet general Konstantin Rokossovsky’s First Belorussian Front was only about ten kilometers away from the city center. Rather than intervene to assist the badly outnumbered Resistance, however, the Red Army units sat out the action on the east bank of the Vistula River. Attempts by the western Allies—mainly Britain—to assist the Resistance through airdrops were actively hindered by the Soviets. British planes were prevented from landing on Soviet airfields, forced instead to make long-distance flights from bases in Italy. In several instances, the Soviets actually fired on British planes that strayed into Soviet airspace. While Soviet leadership argued at the time that Rokossovsky’s front was too badly worn down to provide effective support, the general consensus among historians is that Stalin deliberately allowed the uprising to fail.
* * *
There is a dearth of scholarly material in English on the UPA and the Polish-Ukrainian conflict in Galicia and Volhynia. Snyder’s is probably the most accessible. Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin provides an excellent broad overview of Eastern Europe under Nazi and Soviet occupation, while The Reconstruction of Nations: Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus, 1569–1999 deals particularly with wartime ethnic cleansings in Galicia and Volhynia. Stephen Rapawy’s The Culmination of Conflict: The Ukrainian-Polish Civil War and the Expulsion of Ukrainians After the Second World War delves into some of the root causes underlying Polish-Ukrainian tensions. Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe’s Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist; Fascism, Genocide, and Cult is an exhaustive and damning source on the history and ideology of the UPA—from a Polish perspective. Maria Savchyn Pyskir’s autobiography Thousands of Roads: A Memoir of a Young Woman’s Life in the Ukrainian Underground During and After World War II provides an interesting Ukrainian counterpoint.
Material on the Polish Resistance is more readily available. I’ve worked primarily from David G. Williamson’s The Polish Underground 1939–1947, an encyclopedic source on major campaigns undertaken by the Resistance throughout Poland.
For general information on the common soldier’s day-to-day experience in the Red Army, I’ve referred to Vasily Grossman (A Writer at War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941–1945) and Catherine Merridale (Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945). For the recreation of historical Lwów, I’ve relied heavily on Tarik Cyril Amar’s The Paradox of Ukrainian Lviv: A Borderland City Between Stalinists, Nazis, and Nationalists. I’ve also made extensive use of the outstanding resources at the Center for Urban History of East Central Europe’s website (lvivcenter.org) and the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine (encyclopediaofukraine.com). Any inaccuracies are my own.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Amanda McCrina was homeschooled through high school and graduated from the University of West Georgia with a BA in history and political science. For three years, she taught high school English and government at an international school in Madrid, Spain, and is now a bookseller in Franklin, Tennessee. She is the author of Traitor and the Blood Oath duology. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Historical Note
Map
I TOLYA
Thursday, July 27–Saturday, July 29, 1944
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
II ALEKSEY
Friday, June 27–Saturday, June 28, 1941
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
III TOLYA
Saturday, July 29–Sunday, August 6, 1944
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
IV ALEKSEY
Sunday, June 29–Thursday, July 3, 1941
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
V TOLYA
Sunday, August 6–Sunday, August 13, 1944
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
VI ALEKSEY
Friday, July 4, 1941
Chapter 37
VII TOLYA
Sunday, August 13, 1944
Chapter 38
List of Military and Paramilitary Forces
List of Characters
Author’s Note
About the Author
Copyright
Farrar Straus Giroux Books for Young Readers
120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271
Text copyright © 2020 by Amanda McCrina
Maps copyright © 2020 by Gene Thorpe, Cartographic Concepts, Inc.
All rights reserved
First hardc
over edition, 2020
eBook edition, August 2020
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eISBN 9780374313548